St. Louis, Missouri: Good Moon Rising

Some cities live by the day; other by night.  Shedding the cloudburst colour of their daylight façade they take on new meaning, new focus, in crimson sunsets and softly enveloping darkness, caressing and promoting a nocturnal nuance, a moonlit majesty.  St. Louis, Missouri, surprises and delights while the world around it sleeps, arising out of the industrial grit of its waking hours to form patterns of red and yellow taillights, twinkling stars moving from staging post to meeting point, breathing in the city’s juxtaposition between its cold heart of darkness and its awoken witching hour soul.  This good moon rising, this silhouetted siren of love and life, hopes and fears, a glance and a whisper, brings the night of St. Louis in to an ethereal glow of happiness ahead.

Delmar Loopy

Arriving in St. Louis, Dean and I had little idea that the next two days would be amongst our most adventurous, interesting and exciting so far in America.  Our main impression of St. Louis upon checking in to the Moonrise Hotel in the Delmar Loop area of the city was that this was a weird and wonderful town without necessarily being the most thrilling place in America. 

What was clear almost immediately was the city’s propensity for wackiness, its ability to pastiche and humourise everyday norms, from hospitality through to exhibitions and museums.  Our hotel was a case in point, so dubbed the ‘Moonrise Hotel’ because of the manager’s obsession with our lunar satellite, and therefore decked out with moon-based photography, paraphernalia and artefacts.  This was less ‘boutique’ and more ‘niche’, with a number of bizarre features that enforced on Dean and I the fact that this was no ordinary town and no normal accommodation.  Certainly I have not heard of any other hotels that boast ownership of the world’s largest man-made moon.

In our room a guidebook to the hotel detailed the various amenities available, including the concierge service, known as the ‘Manager of Desires’ at the Moonrise.  I have never before experienced the services of a Manager of Desire, let alone phoned through to reception and asked to speak to my own personal and dedicate desires specialist.  While in some ways a gimmick, in others the idiosyncrasies of the hotel illustrate a broader sensibility of St. Louis; that this was a town with an important and influential history but, equally, a strong sense of humour, of uniqueness, of independence.  The Moonrise Hotel, with its Manager of Desires and a machine in each bedroom that played out on loud speakers a choice of supposedly relaxing sounds and noises, including heartbeats, falling rain and the din of the jungle, was one of a number of examples from our stay in the city.

The hotel itself sits on the edge of the Delmar Loop, which is both a district and a street in St. Louis and close by to Forest Park (the largest municipal green space in America) and both Washington and St. Louis universities.  The Loop proudly reminds its visitors that it is officially recognised as one of the top ten best streets in the United States, a fact that was borne out the following evening when Dean and I began what would become a seriously heavy night out there.  The area itself is populated with bars and restaurants, independent outlets and boutique shops, split across a wide boulevard signposted with flashing neon and a bustling intensity befitting its position and status as a cultural and recreational heaven set amidst the student populations of two big universities.

Go West

After a good night’s sleep Dean and I headed towards the Mississippi river, which less snakes and more thrusts its way through downtown St. Louis.  By this stage in its epic journey across the continent, the Mississippi is wide and forceful, latching on to industrial ports and spanned by steel and iron bridges of metal meshed with asphalt.  St. Louis is a hard working, blue-collar town, its industrial heart beating its way from the agriculture of the Midwest to the south beyond, straddling regions and cultures with its northern grit and southern charm, flowing like the Mississippi itself from every street corner, every building and every passer-by.  This is a purposeful part of the United States, a land of expeditious exploration and discovery, both a staging post to uncharted terrain and a venue of vision in its own right, a half-way house and a settling zone in equal measure.

Adjacent to the banks of the river is the area of Laclede’s Landing, itself running parallel to the business district of St. Louis, with its international corporations and gleaming towers.  Laclede’s Landing sprung up over the past decade after the Mayor of St. Louis received funding to develop the old waterside warehouses of the original port of St. Louis and turn it in to a new district offering food and drinks and other amenities.  As a result the area boasts restaurants and bars that sit inside the port’s former storage centres, large stockrooms and depots with high ceilings and broad windows, accessible down narrow, cobbled streets that offer an almost European vista.

After a quick brunch in one of the establishments lining the main thoroughfare in Laclede’s Landing, we headed towards the most famous of all St. Louis attractions: the gateway arch and accompanying museum of westward expansion.  To reach this curving, towering spiral of stone and significance, and its basement museum, we walked along the Mississippi itself and then up in to the Jefferson Expansion Memorial park. 

In the context of the gateway arch and its associated exhibit, both the river and the pioneering policies of Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and referred in the name of the park, are important and relevant.  In the early nineteenth century, after claiming independence from Great Britain, the United States needed to access and profit from the vast array of natural resources that surrounded the newly freed colonies of the east coast.  Slowly, but impressively, America coursed westwards, expanding over the horizon to establish new outposts and settlements, gathering new states and heartlands to add to those already firmly within the union, discovered, harnessed and at times purchased using a combination of currency, character and sheer courage. 

Thomas Jefferson was a president dedicated to consolidating what the United States already had, aware as he was of the dangers lurking from complacency and territorial weakness.  To survive, to ensure that the original thirteen colonies’ experiment with self-determination, with government by the people, for the people and of the people, would grow in stature and worth, power and popularity, America needed a ruthless policy of expansionism: not foreign, not brazenly in spite of the sovereignty of others, but nevertheless robust and hearty in equal measure.

Jefferson promoted such values through a combination of presidential orders and proclamations, at times sending willing explorers out in to the unkempt wilds of unexplored lands armed only with a missive to forge ever onwards; at others bartering and negotiating with other world and regional powers to acquire ownership of and stakes in the promise of the bountiful beyond. 

Jefferson trusted in both the appeal and potential of America.  If any president best illustrates the concept of American exceptionalism, its can-do culture of constantly looking for what is next, what is over the horizon, then it is Thomas Jefferson, for this is a president that, other social issues aside, helps represent the America that so many outsiders fall in love with: its strength of character amidst hardship, its steadfast and fervent commitment to exploration and enthusiasm, daring to dream and contribute to the timeline of freedom and liberty, truth and light, drive and determination that are the hallmarks of the creation, growth and future of this bewildering, bewitching and beautiful land.

Political opinion aside, America’s current commander-in-chief, President Obama, has himself had much to say on the concept of American idealism.  Himself the unlikeliest of presidents, Obama has positioned himself as the modern Jefferson, the human incarnation of the promise of progress, of this country’s ability to reinvent and reinvigorate, to take the lessons of the past and apply to them to a better future, to use America’s pioneering spirit, its frontier tradition, to look beyond petty partisanship and instead concentrate on the work at hand, the rebuilding of this nation’s confidence and courage, acknowledging the work of the founding fathers, the hands that built America, the teeming masses yearning to breathe in this fresh, green beast of the new world and, slowly, ever so slowly, learn once again to reclaim that American creed of discovery and brotherhood, to bend the arc of history once more toward the hope of a better day.

St. Louis, then, exists as the critical mass, the crucial stop-gap, in America’s chronicles of discovery.  It was the last town before the landforms of the continent careered in to view for the first westward settlers, the original pioneers of what would eventually become modern America.  This town, on the banks of the river system that would exist as the explorers’ life and blood supply, grew and prospered as travellers arrived to set up bases before heading in to the vast unknown of uncultivated union, and was often the first port of civilisation for those returning from the west.  Within and around its metropolitan zone St. Louis saw rapid development in the nineteenth century: gold traders and agricultural companies, cotton producers and railway suppliers, as roads, tracks and boats converged on the urban core of the town.  St. Louis became, and remains, the gateway, the entrance to America’s unplanted, untilled western territories.

In this way, the Gateway Arch, standing just less than 200 metres tall on the banks of the Mississippi, represents more than just impressive architecture, more than just a tourist attraction.  This is an impressive and imposing structure of marvel, a curving, caressing centrepiece of contemporary cool, underpinned by a nostalgic symbolism, itself the very definition of America: ahead, out of the bold and wistful concepts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, fashions and flows a nation.  Its deliberate arched structure characterises the city’s position as a gateway, an access, a portal to the romance of America: pioneering motifs of folkloric frontiers.  The view from the top, of rivers and roads, fields and forests, skylines and cityscapes, of the steady certainty of the east and the wishes of the west, is at once immediate and inspiring, a rare combination of symbols and specifics: evidence of principles unseen and the substance of what is hoped for.

City Museum

Impressed with and inspired by our visit to the Gateway Arch, Dean and I set our Chevrolet’s satellite navigation system for another popular St. Louis landmark: the City Museum.  We were told to expect surprises, to look out for weird and wonderful exhibitions of random architectural feats and artistic apparitions.  We found instead a new rival to the Moonrise Hotel’s kooky idiosyncrasies, for the City Museum was less an acclaimed institute of learning and discovery, and more of a dramatic, colourful, bombastic, temple of turmoil, a layer of lunacy,

Whether or not you agree that the City Museum does indeed contain works of art will no doubt be determined by your own views and presuppositions on what art truly means and what it can fairly and appropriately constitute.  To Dean and I, this whacky world of weirdness was purely random, purely entertaining, and helped to reinforce the overwhelming view that St. Louis thrives on its reputation for being somewhat peculiar, that it embraces its deliberate difference if not through its history then certainly via its contemporary concepts and institutions.

A major element of the museum are its tunnels and caves, accessible across all floors of the building, and leading to an array of walkways and corridors, each containing strange and beautiful images and icons of modern America.  These potholes and crevices are meant to be suitable for all visitors but the reality is that many are not large enough for averagely sized Brits, let alone the large number of metabolically challenged Americans.  Dean and I struggled to edge our way through, or climb our way up, most of these structures, eventually resorting to normal stairs to find our way to other parts of the museum.

One floor housed an old, dusty, out of tune and utterly wonderful piano, with keys that would stick down and the foot pedals removed, but it was impossible to resist an impromptu gig for the assembled tourists and bemused locals.  Dean and I serenaded our audience through a number of songs, including rousing renditions of Let It Be, Don’t Look Back In Anger, Man In The Mirror and The Scientist.  This is the beauty of such a strange and seductive city, that it is possible for two English boys to sit down at an out of tune piano in a borderline psychopathic museum and play successful renditions of mainly British chart hits to unsuspecting yet no less appreciative Japanese tourists.

Elsewhere the City Museum continued to delight and deceive the eyes, with rooms dedicated to arts and crafts, gymnastics, a human-sized hamster wheel, a donut emporium, a storytelling centre, a series of vaults that lead in a circle back to the original starting point, a passage of rooms mocking infamous scenes of American culture, including a diner, a garage and a vintage clothes shop, as well as a slides that led from room to room, floor to floor, and existential crisis to existential crisis: a weird and wonderful world of random chaos and bonhomie.

Moonrise

As much as St. Louis sounds like an amenable daytime destination, its true power arises at night, after the sun has set and the city is shrouded in a magic mystery that awakes and ignites the soul.  This is the beating heart of the nocturnal nuance that is St. Louis, as the cityscape takes on new meaning, new focus in the long shadows of a magic hour sunset.  Slowly, as the earth spins and lurches away from the warmth of the sun, a neon haze appears, punctuated by revolving glitterballs and centred spotlights, each inviting and illuminating, shedding light in the encroaching darkness of the night ahead.

After dark, the Delmar Loop rightly earns its position in one of the top ten streets in America.  The main thoroughfare pulses and throbs with teeming humanity, party-goers and passers-by starting or ending their night in one of the area’s many bars and restaurants.  There is an atmosphere of prodigality, of warmth and candour, sociable streams of students sampling the scene.  Chief amongst such lunar luminosity is Three Kings, a new bar and restaurant with excellent ribs and friendly staff.  Dean and I happily chatted with the waiters and waitresses while taking on whiskey and beer and enjoying the positive energy and busy vibe of the joint. 

Unsure of where to go to next, we were told to check out an establishment called Bar Louie, in the Central West End district, and close to the Delmar Loop.  It was here, suitably removed by now from any lasting remnants of sobriety, that our evening changed to dramatically.  It began at the bar, as Dean and I queued to buy a drink.  Momentarily distracted by the haphazard yet beguiling movement of a dark-haired hen party participant, I moved away from Dean for all but the briefest of seconds.  When I returned Dean was accompanied by a gentleman wearing a very similar shirt demanding to know where Dean was from.  Alex, for this was who the gentleman was, welcomed us to the bar, and seemed intrigued by the presence of two boys from London.  This attracted further attention and we were soon joined at the bar by others in Alex’s social scene, including Dave and Joanna, who would later be pivotal to our story.

As Dean and I spoke and answered more questions, our accents instigated further glances, further inquiries, further offers of a drink.  At this point, fuelled by our enjoyment of both the rapid consumption of alcohol and our new-found status of objects of intrigue for the assembled masses of the bar, Dean and I lost all control of the evening and so began a spiral of drinking and dancing, talking and texting, feeling and flirting, that would last well in to the following morning. 

The girl from the hen party, or Batchelerette Party as some in the States call it, perhaps interested in what the commotion was about, purposefully and impressively imposed herself on the situation, demanding that I sign a white handkerchief for her friend, who was to be getting married.  The handkerchief, she explained, would hopefully contain the names of all of the men the bride-to-be could have chatted to that night had she not been engaged.  Although I was not sure what the ultimate point of the handkerchief signing really was, I duly obliged, which resulted in the bridesmaid cheering our British boldness.  This, in turn, was picked up on by others including a girl who had a rather fantastic full name, albeit known here simply as Libby, who had been dancing nearby.

These are the seminal moments of random roadtripping, the sort of unexplained, unplanned flashes of sheer and random joy and mayhem.  Dean and I would often talk of trying to instigate a night of meaning, a night worthy of happy memories.  The reality, however, is such feelings and moments cannot be artificially shaped out of a mere longing for the epic, the sublime, the surreal.  The best occasions arise out of accidence and circumstance, out of serendipitous suspensions of the standard form. 

So it was, then, that half an hour after first meeting the lovely Libby, and other new friends like Joanna, Alex and Dave, we found ourselves in the back of Dave’s car en-route to our third club of the evening, known as Tulane’s.  Dave was a congenial and willing host, kindly and considerately taking us from Bar Louie to Tulane’s and extending a hand of friendship to these two travel-weary souls.  This was classic American hospitality, of working hard to welcome two strangers to the exigencies of St. Louis on a Friday night, of bothering to take the time and make the effort to support new guests and help them feel at home.  For this, Dean and I are forever grateful to the many fantastic individuals we met that night in St. Louis.  Dave, and his partner in chaperoning crime, Joanna, deserve very particular thanks for helping Dean and I enjoy one of our best ever nights in America.

Back at Tulane’s, the club was busy and sticky with merging and meshing people, a sweaty, boozy cocktail of beats and bass, teeming with life and laughter that would travel over the chords and riffs of songs and rise in a cacophonic crescendo of conversation during the small gaps in between.

By this time, already well past 2.00am, Dean and I were in our element, enjoying getting to know our new friends and thriving on the disco hits on the dance-floor.  Through my conversations with Libby I was able to engage with a similarly minded individual and enjoy her company as the night progressed.  What appeared to have been the ending of an exhausting day of touring the inspiring and significant cultural attractions of St. Louis turned in to a twenty-hour blitz of accents and adventures, of beer, women and music, of new friends and sore heads, played out to a soundtrack of glances and looks, pauses and gestures, breakneck tunes and sinking shots, under the pearly white light of the man in the moon.

Sunrise

The following morning was actually a continuation of the end of the night before.  We did not arrive back at the Moonrise Hotel until after 5.00am, before finally settling in to some semblance of sleep as the sun rose higher above the city as the morning wore on.  Exhausted and parched, Dean and I emerged blinking in to clear blue skies with foggy heads, still dumbfounded by the twenty-fours that had just passed, with all of the previous day’s views and news, education and dehydration, singing and dancing, playing out in a continuous and hazy loop in our delicate, shattered minds.

Yet the road cares little for the weary explorer.  The open expanses between the country’s cities require attention and skill.  So it was that, with a long drive to neighbouring Arkansas to come, Dean and I had little choice to but press on, to continue undiminished to the next step in the adventure, armed this time with real, tangible memories of a city that promised much and delivered, of a day that taught and intrigued, and a night that amused and delighted.  St. Louis, Missouri, became the gateway not just to America’s mythical passion for the great unknown but for our own development, our own comprehension not just of our most recent stopping point, but of the people behind the places we visit, the faces and voices that give colour and vibrancy and truth to our pursuit of the real America.  Important facts and feelings, then, as we sped away from this moonlit paradise.

We journeyed on to Arkansas armed with such sentiment and stopped just once: to give a lift back home to one of our new St. Louis acquaintances. 

~~~

"Libby"

Blue sky rising from a manufactured moon,

Two nights in St Louis ending earlier than soon,

While glitter balls spin to a disco beat and tune. 

Finding out connections from a smile behind a mask,

Gazing ever westwards by a gateway and an arch,

Fighting for more moonlight to make an extra second last.

Where the eastern promise ends and the western dream begins,

Casting Magic Hour shadows from coffee cups and gin,

This pretty Mississippi through the chaos and the din.

Robert 'Sammy' Samuelson 

St Louis, Missouri - 11 February 2012