Urban planners are trying to cultivate the artists, writers and musicians who could restore St. Louis’ glory. But the muse can’t be forced.
By Tom Schlafly
St. Louis native T.S. Eliot wrote, in The Dry Salvages, “I think that the river is a strong brown god.” A few lines later, still referring to the river, he went on to say, “His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom.” The river to which Eliot was referring was the Mississippi, on whose banks the nursery of his infancy was located. Yet Eliot, like many other creative people, moved away from St. Louis as a young adult and never lived here again.
Now that urban planners have identified the so-called creative class as a desirable component of a city’s population, the challenge is how to attract, nurture and cultivate poets, artists, musicians and other innovative thinkers. The problem is that creativity can’t be created by way of intelligent design in the offices of urban planners. Eliot described his strong brown god as “sullen, untamed and intractable.” The same could be said of creativity, which is often the product of spontaneous combustion. It can be encouraged and supported, but it’s hard to manage and control. As we were reminded in 1993, the Mississippi has a will of its own that periodically makes it impossible to contain or channel. Creativity can be just as independent and unpredictable.
That having been said, to paraphrase Mark Twain (another creative genius who moved away from his childhood home on the banks of the Mississippi), reports of the death of creativity in St. Louis are greatly exaggerated. Dave Aholt and Maria Schlafly (yes, we’re related; she’s my niece) are two talented young musicians flourishing in St. Louis. Both were born in the 1970s; both had lots of other options when they chose where to live; both have day jobs at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. Maria plays the violin with the St. Louis Philharmonic Orchestra, and Dave is a jazz pianist. Their musical disciplines represent two aspects of creativity: Classical music is carefully orchestrated; jazz is extemporaneous. The nature of a symphony demands that every musician follow the score with exacting precision. Jazz musicians display their virtuosity in unscripted performances.
Creating a habitat for the creative class requires both the careful orchestration of a symphony and the improvisation of jazz ... a combination that has also been crucial to the survival and growth of Schlafly Beer over the past 14 years. Yes, we had to start out with a business plan. Had we not had one, banks would have been even more reluctant to lend us money. But we also had to make a lot of impromptu decisions that led us in directions never even considered in our various business plans. In candor, I must admit that some of the accomplishments for which we have received the most credit were inadvertent and unintended.
When we bought a derelict building at 2100 Locust in July 1991, we selected it largely because it was affordable. The building had been vacant since 1969, when Swift Printing Co. had moved out, and savvy real-estate people were positive that there was no future in the neighborhood. We wanted nothing more or less than a place to brew and sell beer, and this building suited our purposes. The prospect of creating a loft district in the western part of downtown St. Louis wasn’t even a blip on our radar screen.
Now, less than two blocks away, residential lofts of 900 square feet are selling at prices higher than what we paid for our 40,000-square-foot building and an adjoining parking lot. Because we were there before the lofts and some other nearby developments, we get credit in some quarters for leading the revival. But neighborhood revitalization was never what we set out to accomplish.
Our experience in Maplewood, 10 years later, was similar. In 2001 we bought a former grocery store that had been vacant for eight years. We did so primarily because it met our technical needs for a brewery (e.g. a lot of square footage on the ground floor, loading docks, high ceilings). We did not have in mind the goal of reviving downtown Maplewood, yet when we finally opened in 2003, we saw that Maplewood was suddenly becoming “hot,” in the parlance of real estate gurus, with shops and restaurants opening all around us.
Through almost total serendipity, the neighborhoods around the Tap Room on Locust and the Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood have been embraced by members of the creative class. Many of them patronize our restaurants and contribute to the ambience that attracts others like them. Nevertheless, even though we had an early presence in two neighborhoods that later attracted the creative class and even though both of our restaurants seem to appeal to members of this class, I would hesitate to base a business model on what we did. A business plan based on improvisation and happenstance is an oxymoron.
St. Louis needs to welcome creativity, encourage it and support it. If we try to create and manage creativity, we’ll end up stifling it. In The Dry Salvages, Eliot wrote, “The river is within us.” The strong brown god of creativity is within us as St. Louisans. We shouldn’t make the mistake of attempting to control it. We should simply stay out of the way and let it flow.
Tom Schlafly is a lawyer with Blackwell Sanders Peper Martin and the majority owner and co-founder of Schlafly Beer. He and his wife, Ulrike, a native of Cologne, live in the Central West End.
