Photographs by Jess Dewes & Ashley Heifner
Tucson is the color of sand. Boulder is its mountains’ smoky purple. And St. Louis is remarkably green. Everywhere you look, there are trees, in part because everywhere you look, there are parks. More than 3,000 acres of park space spruces up the city, from postage stamps (Soulard’s Aboussie Park consists of four-tenths of an acre) to lavish sweeps (Forest Park covers nearly 1,300 acres). That’s not even counting Tower Grove Park; although a city showpiece, it isn’t part of the St. Louis park system.
The history of St. Louis parks is a long one. The first three (Gravois, Laclede and Mount Pleasant) were created from former city commons in 1812; the latest (Poelker Park) came into the system in 1986. In between, some of the most magnificent examples of public acreage in the country were designed into the St. Louis landscape.
It is impossible to ignore Forest Park—larger than New York’s Central Park, site of the legendary (at least, in local minds) World’s Fair of 1904 and focal point of the renaissance of the city parks.
Not that long ago, conventional wisdom, abetted by a bit of deserved bad publicity, held that the park was an unsafe environment for visitors—especially those who strayed from the relative safety provided by the masses congregating at the Zoo, Muny, Art Museum and Missouri History Museum. The park’s infrastructure had declined or crumbled. Packs of feral dogs roamed. A well-publicized Washington University thesis on gay cruising in the men’s rooms had resulted in the padlocking of “comfort stations” throughout the park—which, in turn, created its own less-than-salubrious problem. The park looked and felt shabby.
“Spiffed up” does not even begin to describe its transformation. The Grand Lagoon again lives up to its name. The chain of murky lagoons (the former route of the once-pristine River des Peres) is now being reconnected as a living water system replete with marshlands. The former boathouse is now The Boathouse—not only a place to rent boats but also a destination of choice for lakeside bonfires and dining. Bike trails, running trails, bridle trails and bridal sites abound (the park now hosts hundreds of weddings a year). Redrawn traffic patterns are making the park more user-friendly, and real-estate values for the condos and houses that border the park are skyrocketing.
Forest Park is now St. Louis’ favorite shared playground, a common space for dog-walking, Sunday naps and romantic boat rides, softball and cricket, biking and hiking, picnics and family reunions, art, science, history and theater, ethnic festivals and religious ceremonies. It is as central to St. Louis as Central Park is to Manhattan. If that sounds like overkill, try envisioning the city without it.
If Forest Park were the only park here, St. Louis, in comparison to far too many other cities, would still be blessed. As it is, Forest Park is only the most prominent—and any number of people will tell you they much prefer Tower Grove Park. It is one of only five municipal parks designated as national historic landmarks, and it is a premier example of a 19th-century urban park landscape.
Forest Park is all turn-of-the-last-century glitz and better for it—but Tower Grove Park is a prime example of an earlier, more European era, when people went to the park to see and be seen. St. Louis’ first “driving park,” its stone gutters are hand-cut, and its roads were built wide enough to accommodate two carriages as they passed each other. Today a Clydesdale, Jimmy Joe, draws carriages through the park, following drives that are quite obviously carriage paths gone contemporary.
Tower Grove is a park in which to promenade, picnic on the lawn and play croquet or corkball. There are what may be the only public grass courts in the central United States, and art students spend hours sketching the stone ruins (remnants of the former Lindell Hotel), fountain and lily ponds. Botanists study the foliage—Henry Shaw imported more than 8,000 trees and shrubs, and they now shelter startling numbers of migrating warblers and thrushes. The park’s Victorian bandstands and pavilions are not only intact, but also maintained in their original whimsical colors.
When Henry Shaw gave Tower Grove Park to the city, he tied a few raffia strings: A separate board of commissioners would run the park, and the city would hold it for park purposes only and pay the annual expenses to maintain it.
“We make an appeal every year, and the city has made an earnest effort to do what it can,” says park director John Karel. “And guess what, it’s not enough to bring the park up to a condition of excellence. Forest Park has discovered that, all the parks have discovered that. We’ve had the flexibility, through the board of commissioners, to develop grant and philanthropic support.”
In the late 1990s, Tower Grove Park raised $1 million to renovate The Palm House, the oldest standing greenhouse west of the Mississippi River (rededicated in 1998 as the Piper Palm House in honor of its major benefactors).
Carondelet Park would never be mistaken for a Victorian promenade. Almost 180 acres of rolling hills, lakes and sinkholes, the third-largest park in the city is a landscaped image of an undeveloped South St. Louis. A sinkhole is a collapsed cavern, and South St. Louis is built atop a network of limestone caves; one of the more notorious ones serves all too often as a drain for the lake in Benton Park. (This topography is exactly what made South St. Louis so attractive in the days before air conditioning, when brewers stored their beer in the chilly caves.)
Originally a Spanish land grant, Carondelet Park was once owned by the Lyle family, Southern sympathizers during the Civil War. Their mansion sits in the park, awaiting a use worthy of its history. Carondelet became a public park in 1875, along with O’Fallon Park, after St. Louisans in north and south St. Louis voiced their outrage over a half-day surrey ride to the proposed Forest Park.
Edging Carondelet Park on Holly Hills from Grand north to Leona is a row of 1920s minimansions, one of St. Louis’ hidden real-estate surprises. The more formal areas of the park, the 1898 bandstand that hosts summer concerts and the 1908 boathouse, add a grace note to the surrounding neighborhood. Then there are those sinkholes, little miracles of nature that, in warm weather, are kid-friendly in the extreme and, in rainy weather, double as temporary wetlands.
Across from Beaumont High School sits what’s long been known as “Fairgrounds Park” (the Park Service steadfastly tries to subtract that “s” and restore what it insists—despite the park’s own sign—is the historically accurate name, “Fairground Park”).
A hospital during the Civil War, the site was once a true fairground. In the 1850s, a group of St. Louisans paid Col. John O’Fallon for 50 acres at the northwest corner of Grand Avenue and the Natural Bridge Plank Road and built what was then the largest amphitheater in the country. As many as 100,000 crowded into its tiered seating on special occasions.
The park grew to 129 acres, the fairs drew attention all over the country, and soon there arose a mechanical hall and an agricultural hall, a floral hall and a Gothic fine arts hall—not to mention a wire gallinarium (the Chicken Palace) for displaying poultry. Next came a grandstand, jockey club and racecourse where some of the fastest, most beautiful horses in the country raced.
Fairground Park was purchased by the city in 1908 and turned into a park that, at one point, hosted a small zoo with a monkey house, bear pits, a carnivore house, an aviary, lake, a swimming pool and a grotto.
Today, Fairground Park is the North Side’s answer to Tower Grove Park—minus the landscaping vision of Henry Shaw. Fairground is a promenade that doesn’t promenade, a flat expanse planted without any apparent grand design and a park in which the one-way streets all seem to lead park-goers directly out of the park. Its one major structure, the remnant of a long-ago bear pit, has a castlelike façade at the corner of Grand and Natural Bridge, but the back side faces a storage lot for service vehicles.
All this is a shame, because one can easily see what Fairground Park once was and, with attention, could be again.
O’Fallon Park is the fifth of the city’s large historic parks. Once the country estate of Col. John O’Fallon, the land was sold to the city by his children in 1875. O’Fallon himself had been dead for a decade, and the four-story, 50-room mansion he’d built atop the highest hill, Athlone, was damaged that year by fire.
Easily the wildest of the city’s parks, O’Fallon sits on Mississippi River bluffs and offers a startling view of the industrialized river. The bluffs themselves have been the repository of arrowheads for generations of St. Louis children, and it takes little imagination to know why St. Louis’ original settlers chose this spot to sit for hours on end, carving arrowheads.
The formalized section of O’Fallon Park, with a boathouse and a lake stocked for fishing, covers relatively few of its 126 acres. A 40-foot observation tower once provided a perfect perspective on the river but has been removed, and 40 acres of athletic fields were lost to I-70. O’Fallon Park’s western section is totally undeveloped and is simply chained off at the end of a road that leads nowhere. This has to be the last bit of undeveloped real estate in the city.
For those who have never explored the area surrounding O’Fallon Park, plenty of surprises lie in store. O’Fallon Park is bordered by what were once extremely expensive homes, and the quality of their construction has allowed many of them to survive a lengthy economic decline. Today, the housing stock is in a state similar to that of the Central West End before its revival—and the O’Fallon houses are in far better shape than those of Lafayette Park before its renaissance. The convent that’s home to the Pink Sisters faces the park, and a home listed on the National Register is a block away. An entire neighborhood is awaiting a nudge toward major revitalization.
Beginning with the park itself.
The history of St. Louis parks may be a proud one, but it is also a sad one. In the early 1900s, St. Louis acquired 16 more parks and playgrounds. The wealthy but democratic new parks director, Philip Scanlan, removed the “Keep off the grass” signs, put in baseball diamonds and tennis courts and turned the city’s parks over to the people with a flourish. But just a few decades later, as public transport gave way to highways, both the city and the Missouri Department of Transportation viewed the parks as greenspace ripe for paving. Forest Park, O’Fallon Park, Carondelet Park and Compton Hill Reservoir Park all suddenly hosted interstate highways on what had been park land.
Forest Park, everyone’s choice as the gem of the city park system, lost land to Highway 40, the Forest Park Expressway, a rerouted stretch of Kingshighway, the Barnes Hospital parking garage and a private building on Oakland, and may well be on its way to losing the rest of its panhandle to Barnes-Jewish expansion. That’s enough compromised park land to create a whole new park.
Tower Grove Park avoided having a north-south thoroughfare divide it, thanks only to the conditions set by Henry Shaw, who was either extremely prescient or had lawyers who were. Park director Karel thinks it’s time to pay attention to the parks that weren’t so lucky. “St. Louis has a sleeping giant in its park assets,” he says. “This city is rich in parks, and parks are proven catalysts for economic stimulus, neighborhood revitalization, general renewal of the fabric of urban life.”
They are if they look good.
Gary Bess, the city’s director of parks, recreation and forestry, offers a stunningly simple explanation of his division’s maintenance woes: “The last time the city passed a bond issue dedicated to the park systems was in 1955.” A half-century without sufficient funding takes an obvious toll. In those 50 years, only one initiative has addressed the problem: a half-cent sales tax (17 percent of which was earmarked for the parks for capital improvements) passed during Mayor Freeman Bosley Jr.’s administration.
Enter the City Parks Alliance. An out-growth of a citizens’-advocacy push to save and revitalize New York’s Central Park, the alliance unites city parks departments and individual advocacy groups with the goal of revitalizing city parks across the nation. The prime local example is Forest Park Forever.
“The conventional wisdom is that urban parks tend to be large and in disrepair,”explains Forest Park Forever’s former executive director, Jim Mann, adding that the alliance’s public/private partnership may be “the only way large urban park systems can come back.” Mann believes that the time is ripe for a renaissance of other city parks. “There is so much going on at the moment, it’s time to capitalize on the possibilities,” he says. “I’d hate, as a community, to miss that rare opportunity.”
