Along the Mississippi, part I

Pontchartrain Park. All photos courtesy the author.

I went to New Orleans last week for a site visit to see Joe Baker, Executive Director of the Longue Vue House and Gardens . We're working on connecting our places, and we spent time driving around the city after looking at every nook and cranny of Longue Vue (fabulous mansion, too bad about the plants killed by the freak frost!)

The founders of Longue Vue, Edith and Edgar Stern, were socially engaged civil rights leaders who, in addition to creating Longue Vue, built Pontchartrain Park, one of (if not the) first middle class African American sub-divisions in the country. This area was also devastated by levee breaches caused by Katrina, but the destruction was not reported in the way it was in the Lower Ninth Ward. (Perhaps there is something more nefarious, undermining about the word "ward?) The city is in a state of enormous flux--but we all know about this from the reporting that has happened since Katrina.

















We were also lucky to tour the new arts area of St. Claude to see galleries The Front, Trouser House, KK Projects, Antenna and Barrister's Gallery. Most are non-profit and speak to the revitalization artists can bring to place.

Above is an image across from KK Project's main space--the white house was the site of Mel Chin's safe house from Prospect I, now being dismantled to make way for more projects and an urban garden out back.

The houses in this neighborhood look worse than those of Pontchartrain Park--due to devastation of the man-made kind, not nature! Many of these places seem to be ruins--but it is often hard to tell if they are degrading or coming alive, as in most urban areas. Where are the Sterns of this day and age?






















Before we got on our plane back to STL we were sipping a glass of wine and enjoying a shrimp boil at Amy Graham and her partner Macon's place over-looking the Mississippi.

I'll be back.

Sculpture as the Symbolic Heart of a City

St. Louis Arch, February 6, 2010. All pictures courtesy the author unless otherwise noted.

Sculpture is the symbolic heart of St. Louis. Not architecture, as we've come to expect with urban "starchitecture" of the past decade.

At the edge of St. Louis is the Gateway Arch, a truly exquisite structure that soars above your head like an arrow to heaven.

Unfortunately, too many city buildings crowd the Arch to its west. Very sad that city leaders allowed architectural ambition to sully this gorgeous sculpture.

Just to the east of the Arch, down below, back on land, is a rather dismal parking lot ($4 rather than $10 in the covered city lot). I've never parked within lapping distance of a major river before.




















Images of the great flood of 1993 kept coming to me--what if the river rose just a few feet? My ride would be on a sight-seeing tour downstream before I knew it!

















The Museum of Westward Expansion, inside the Arch's "shoes", was chaotic Saturday. The huge line was not for the educational films on the building of the arch nor for the film on Lewis & Clark's voyage to the West coast.

No, everyone was in line to take a five-passenger elevator to the top of the Arch, where you can peer out at the surrounding landscape from itty-bitty windows. (I am just claustrophobic enough to leave that trip to others--and I've gotta prise my car from the maws of the river!)

I don't quarrel with the commercialization of this historic site, though I may question some of the narratives explored through the concentric half-circles of display materials in the Museum.















Image of Carl Milles fountain outside Union Station, St. Louis. © Sharron Archibald

To fulfill the promise of the Arch as a symbolic heart of St. Louis, a group of business people are working with the National Park Service to re-imagine this space. The primary goal is to move tourists more effectively between the casinos and the Arch. This new waterfront will then truly be linked to the Gateway "spine" of sculpture that includes the new City Garden (full of sculpture), the Richard Serra "Twain" piece (sculpture), hop over the courthouse and cascade through the fountains, crowned with the sculptures "The Wedding of the Waters" by Carl Milles, outside of Union Station, above.






















Henry Weber, The Captain's Return, 2006

Once the reconfiguration of the waterfront is completed, surely more people will see this sculpture in honor of the return of Lewis & Clark to St. Louis. [Note: the dog is not a Labrador, as I first thought, but Clark's Newfoundland who made the trip with the Corps of Discovery.]

The nation is on the cusp of a major ideological shift--in our understanding of our financial capacity and through our now-unbreakable bond with markets elsewhere--and the symbolic Arch complex has the chance to re-interpret our nation-building past in light of our nation-building future. Let the myths of western conquest and expansion be reconfigured; St. Louis can play an interesting role in this reinterpretation.

Our urban landscape, in great need of reparation and stitching back together, can represent the next phase of our American identity via sculpture.