Illustration by Danny Elchert
“We tried to enjoy the Clayton Art Fair,” yammered the fellow behind us in line at the market to someone on his cell phone, “but the people!” The condescension in his voice was palpable. “It was all ‘How do you like my new boob job?’ and ‘You’ve lost so much weight!’ We couldn’t take it anymore. We ended up going to the Loop and hanging out.”
“Yeah, right,” we thought, “where it was ‘How do you like my new piercing?’ and ‘George Bush is Satan.’”
We see a difference. We just don’t see much of a distinction. In fact, come to think of it, here’s some breaking news for that part of the population of St. Louis city who are just happily—no, make that smugly—convinced that they are, by the very nature of their ZIP codes, more sensitive, artistic, creative, moral, socially aware, aesthetically inclined and, above all, hip than those poor souls confined to the distant reaches of the county: You’re not.
Pardon us, but we don’t see a whole lot of distinction between county events like the art fair in Clayton and the doings in the Loop or in Soulard or in any other part of the city. In fact, we don’t see a whole hell of a lot of difference between the city and county, period. Yes, we’re aware that to some St. Louisans, it’s roughly approximate to the schism that sundered the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. Maybe we don’t see it because we are not native to the area. To us, the divide between city and county has always seemed a bit blurry at best. To wit: Most of the Loop is claimed by the city’s denizens, who tout it as a kicky and trendy sort of nightly Haight-Ashbury, a Greenwich Village West—but most of the Loop is in University City.
This urban dismissal of the suburban bourgeoisie is, to be sure, not confined to St. Louis. It’s practically a cottage industry in New York City. But in St. Louis, the Suburb Sneer has been raised to practically a lifestyle. The soi-disant boho chic. The Townies. Recently two threads were running simultaneously on a website forum discussing local eating and restaurants, and both reached the same foregone conclusion: The only attribute more scorn-worthy than a West Countian’s choice of address is his appetite. When a writer complained about the drunken loutishness that’s plagued downtown’s Strassenfest for decades, the responding sneer from a city resident was as prickly as it was irrelevant: “Maybe you’d be more comfortable in your safe little white-bread neighborhood out in the county.” Oh, we get it. Drinking yourself into a slobbering mess, belching obscenities and taking a whiz on the corner mailbox are, downtown at least, somehow cool.
In another thread, the demise of the beloved Flaco’s Tacos was dissected. Rumor’s long had it that the multiple Flaco’s closed because the owners got tired of the grind or had financial difficulties, but no: On the forum we find the truth, and, no surprise, it’s the fault of those fiendishly bland West Countians. Since Flaco’s had opened a restaurant in Maryland Heights a couple of years before all of the locations closed, its downfall came, the writer insisted, because “people in the county just can’t appreciate anything authentic” and “are happier with their Applebee’s and T.G.I. Fridays.” Another added, “No authentic restaurant’s going to make it in white-bread country.”
Are you beginning to see a theme here? We see two, actually: (1) Townies don’t care for white bread, and (2) Townies don’t have much of a clue about what St. Louis County is really like.
To be fair, the bigotry travels both ways along Highway 40. We know residents of the county who get nervous traveling east of Lindbergh and who haven’t been inside the limits of the city except for ball games since Harry Caray was calling them. They imagine everything east of Kingshighway to be a kind of latter-day Barbary Coast–meets–Hell’s Kitchen where 8-year-olds openly peddle crack on the curbside, life expectancy is measured in hours and carjackings are so routine, they’re regarded as a kind of obligatory one-way valet service. That sort of provincialism is common everywhere. What’s so shocking, however, and so much more prevalent in the St. Louis environs, is the overweening arrogance of city dwellers who continually express contempt for the county and everything and everyone in it.
The whole image of St. Louis County as a “white bread” enclave is hopelessly out of date, if ever it was accurate. In Maryland Heights, the almost quintessential suburb where we live, we have our share of white bread. On our block alone (within walking distance of that late Flaco’s, which was, not incidentally, constantly stuffed like a burrito with customers) we also have challah right across the street. And Kenyan maandazi a couple of doors down. And Chinese bao and Taiwanese yu-tiao and Indian naan (the neighborhood fields two sides for cricket matches all summer long at a nearby grade school). Townies trot out the “diversity” of the city as if it were a precious and endangered species swimming only in their local waters, as if, past the westward shores of Forest Park, a monocultural human sea bobs with Republican, country-clubbing, BMW-piloting, Starbucks-quaffing Muffys and Biffs, exclusively conceived through the missionary position, swaddled at birth in up-collared polo shirts and dedicated without exception to the proposition of the Goodness of All Things (especially bread) White.
For all their alleged diversity, city dwellers’ explanation for why the city has been dominated by one political party since Dixie Upright was batting .250 for the Browns is, shall we say, less than compelling. It would be informative for them to pick a county school at random and pay a visit. The Parkway School District looms as a veritable enclave of white-bread aristocracy in their urban swamp-fever imaginations—but have you been to a Parkway school-orchestra concert recently? We overheard five different languages being spoken in the audience—and maybe six; we can’t tell the difference between Laotian and Cambodian.
Townies have a justifiable pride in the reemergence of many parts of St. Louis city. They practically wet themselves with excitement at the evening crowds along Washington Avenue. We’re happy for them. Nobody wants to see any part of a great city such as St. Louis looking as abandoned as a Miami restaurant 30 minutes after the end of the early-bird specials. Point out, however, that among those crowds one sees lots of twenty- and thirtysomethings and not a lot of older people and even fewer children, and you should prepare for a hectoring the likes of which has not been aired since Ricky caught Lucy trying to sneak into
the Copacabana.
“No kids? What about City Museum! Huh? Have you ever even been there?” Yes, we have—many times. We’d have gone, even if we didn’t enjoy it, just to shut them up about the place. Talk to a townie for longer than it takes to ask directions to Crown Candy Kitchen, and you will hear about City Museum. City Museum is to Townies what the commies were to the John Birch Society. They can talk about the City Museum for an hour at least—and they’re right: It’s a great place. So is the new climbing wall at Faust Park, and so are the miles of wandering hickory-bordered trails at Queeny, and the open-air sculpture at Laumeier. Sure, the Dog Museum is an embarrassment to the county, just as it would be to any place in Christendom. This just in, however: The city’s Bowling Hall of Fame has not been named one of the crowning achievements of Western civilization.
Dip your toes in the social pools of the county, and you will hit bottom long before your ankle is wet. Finding shallow people west of Lindbergh is not difficult. They are everywhere. They can be annoying and tiresome—annoying and tiresome in exactly the same way as the crowds in any bar or eatery along Washington Street can be, with their pretentious, hipper-than-thou posturing and their almost frantic efforts at demonstrating just how sophisticated and urbane they are. If being around annoying and tiresome people were an impediment to our social life, we’d be barricaded in the Howard Hughes Suite, using Kleenex boxes for slippers and subsisting on irradiated Reese’s Pieces. It isn’t. It doesn’t stop us from enjoying life in the county or city, from visiting restaurants and appreciating the food and drink in both places—and, frankly, we don’t think it’s asking too much of the Townies to adopt the same attitude.
That’s why we’re founding Adopt-a-Townie. Do you have friends, relatives or co-workers who get jittery when they’re out of the shadow of the Arch, who aren’t entirely sure they filmed the “Ned Beatty bonds with the hillbillies” scene from Deliverance on locale in the backwaters of rural Ballwin but prefer not going there, just in case? Take them under your wing. Arrange to meet them in their natural habitat, where they feel safe, in one of those chi-chi bars with an unpronounceable name. By being careful and patient, you can eventually coax them out into the wilds of Bridgeton or Hazelwood or even all the way out to Ellisville, to places such as Priyaa, the fabulous Indian eatery, or to one of the happy little taquerias in St. Ann or Bridgeton. And who knows? Eventually, maybe you can even take your adopted townie to La Bonne Bouchée in Des Peres and show him or her what white bread in the county is really all about.
