Photograph by Frank Di Piazza
I enter my car knowing I won’t be getting out—neither to explore the places I pass, nor to talk with the people who live there. This is a journey of behind-the-wheel, impressionistic observations and reflections—a reading of what was, what is and what’s soon to be on Route 100, from downtown St. Louis all the way through the end of St. Louis County
1st Street
Route 100 begins as Chouteau Avenue, named for Auguste Chouteau, who oversaw the building of this city in 1764. The sign says it starts just east of Broadway, the first major St. Louis street parallel to the Mississippi, but the road really starts at a flood wall covered in spray paint from a graffiti artists’ convention. Gas-masked gremlins parachute through a black sky toward bubbly, nearly indecipherable words. A grinning Uncle Sam puts a revolver to his temple. Another gremlin walks out of a door onto a curving stairway to nowhere. The Mill Creek pumping station looms above this apocalyptic panorama.
I look north toward landmarks like the Eads Bridge and the Gateway Arch, then head west, past 1st Street, past 2nd Street, in an area that seems to belong in the smoggy 19th century. I roll by the Eat-Rite diner and Ralston-Purina’s sprawling office complex. On my left is subsidized housing—first the relatively new Les Chateaux, built on the former site of the Darst-Webbe high-rises, then the older Clinton-Peabody project. Kids play on the railings in front of its two-story apartment buildings.
I’m tempted to share the graffiti artists’ vision and see this stretch of the road as a bombed-out landscape, a path to nowhere. There are surely plenty of boarded-up old buildings and overgrown urban prairies, vacant lots that used to be prime real estate. Many of the cars parked here will likely be heading out to the suburbs come quitting time. Yet many people make their homes here—in Clinton-Peabody and in the Les Chateaux complex, which looks much more habitable than Darst-Webbe ever did. Signs advertise lofts soon to be available, a law firm moving into an old home and new restaurants as well. The more industrial companies in this area aren’t welcoming or flashy, but they have endured here and do business still.
Wrecking & Salvage
On the corner of Chouteau and Vandeventer is Bellon’s Market, a deli and pizzeria connected to Bellon’s Wrecking and Salvage, an appropriate gateway to this stretch of road where wreck and salvage seem counterpoised.
At Vandeventer, Route 100 becomes Manchester, its name for another 30 miles. This thoroughfare used to be called Fox Creek Road, but became Manchester in the early 19th century because it led to a town of that same name in St. Louis County. So says the St. Louis Public Library’s online St. Louis Street Index, which also notes that “the name Manchester, because of its association with Manchester, England, always suggested commercial and industrial prosperity to those who adopted it in America.”
Indeed, this section of Manchester used to be a bustling main street, judging by storefronts that come right up to the street, ornate doorways and windows made for shopping, many of which are now boarded up, some painted with faded murals that depict establishments that have largely left this area—art gallery, pastry shop, florist. On the other hand, this stretch shows the beginnings of renewed activity, with a proliferation of night spots reminiscent of South Grand and the Delmar Loop. There are trendy restaurants, a potter’s workshop, a sturdy new Family Health Care Center and a series of bars that swarm with young people on Friday and Saturday nights.
At Kingshighway is the area’s most noticeable addition—the McCormack House at Forest Park Southeast, a residence for the elderly. In front of it is a grassy expanse with a gazebo. It used to be a wasteland of dust and gravel and broken glass, site of two torn-down gas stations, but now the Saint Louis Science Center has turned it into “Science Corner,” where youth perform outdoor science-based experiments. Tall stalks send blooms into the city air.
Topos
As Belden Lane notes in his book Landscapes of the Sacred, two words expressed the ancient Greeks’ view of place: topos, used in reference to common places, unremarkable, unhallowed, unloved; and chora, used in reference to sacred places, special places, places rich in association and meaning for the human beings who lived and worked there.
This stretch of Manchester—its final segment inside the city, between Kingshighway and McCausland—seems never to have been chora, never intended for community, but always for the industrial, the utilitarian, the commercial.
Even the gestures at frivolity and wit on this stretch seem bizarre. The grim, windowless Crown Foods building (formerly Red Barn Meat and Deli) looks uninhabited but is painted to resemble a red barn with white trim, an odd attempt at bucolic cheer on this very urban thoroughfare. The faded turquoise warehouse of the Ace Metal Company features on its side an enormous playing card. Railroad tracks run right next to the road, and between the road and the distant highway are yards full of raw materials—metal and piles of sandy minerals unidentifiable to the layman.
Main Street
The municipality of Maplewood features a main street area more active than the one near Vandeventer. This mixed-use, eclectic district begins near the Schlafly Bottleworks and extends to the elegant Monarch restaurant, and it offers a variety of shops, diners and other services.
Elsewhere around the metro area, developers seem to like what Maplewood and the city have got in stretches like this one, so they’re building their own, from scratch. These developments, which remind me of movie sets or Disney World, are known as “lifestyle centers.” There’s one in Brentwood, across from the Galleria, and developers are building faux-urban main streets out in exurbs like Fairview Heights and St. Charles. After years of moving away from the older urban areas and favoring enclosed malls or big-box stores, developers and the people they build for have rediscovered the appeal of stores that open out onto the street.
Maplewood’s business district, however, is the real thing, though its northern side is gone: Opposite the storefronts and apartments is a good old strip mall anchored by a Shop ’n Save with an expansive parking lot.
Palimpsest
Palimpsest: a manuscript written over a partly erased older manuscript in such a way that the old words can be read beneath the new.
This must have been the first generation of strip malls, just past Hanley, well into St. Louis County now; the shops’ designs seem primitive to the contemporary eye. Yet amidst this clearly aged development, one senses that new developers wait, ready always for the chance to jump into this prime retail position. Some of the older strip malls have been retrofitted with new façades, and the huge Market at McKnight complex is going up fast. Within the same buildings that once held chain restaurants, new independent places now take root—Nachomama’s Tex-Mex in an old Popeye’s, El Indio Mexican Restaurant in a defunct Pizza Hut.
Manchester is a retail palimpsest—with business establishments erased and replaced but sometimes still visible beneath their present incarnations. Near Sappington they’re putting a Caito’s Sicilian Restaurant and Pizzeria into the old SuperSmokers that was once an Einstein Bros. Bagels.
Share the Road
In the suburb of Warson Woods, I can see houses behind the trees that now line one side of the street, and I’ve crossed fully into the retail world. No more metal companies or materials management. Now it’s luxury car dealerships and financial planners, golf accessories and furniture.
All along this road, yellow signs urge motorists to “Share the Road” with bicyclists. In St. Louis this summer, there do seem to be more people riding bikes on the roads than I remember in years past. On Route 100 I’ve seen cyclists downtown by the flood wall, and I’ve seen them out in Ballwin at 8:30 p.m. Maybe they’re heading to one of St. Louis’ new and expanded bike trails, but the bikers who venture onto the major thoroughfares seem to be tempting fate by trusting that those of us with cars, SUVs and delivery trucks will actually share this road as directed.
I imagine Manchester as an asphalt river—the flow of traffic like that of water, fed by the tributaries of smaller roads, sustaining economic life along its banks, allowing for transportation and the movement of goods, offering the promise of movement and escape.
Shoppingtown
At Ballas Road is Westfield Shoppingtown, its luxurious renovation financed a few years back by a tax scheme that declared this mall blighted, though it was still doing business in the middle of a wealthy area. The palimpsest is at work here as well: The Australian company that owns the mall has recently given up control of it to CBL and Associates Properties, a firm from Chattanooga, Tenn., which is also behind a number of those lifestyle centers going up around town.
I approach Interstate 270, the Outer Belt, the highway that at one time probably marked the outer reaches of the metro area but now signals only the end of the inner-ring suburbs. As it crosses 270, Manchester splits in two and begins to feel like a highway itself. Between the split streams of the road is an island called Des Peres Pointe, with a palatial Southwest Bank and an office building that looks like a seat of government.
A road sign identifies this stretch as the Lewis and Clark Trail, or a car-friendly approximation thereof, as deemed by the State of Missouri. This stab at historical connection seems absurd, given how freshly minted and ahistorical this place strives to appear. It’s not only the mall—this whole street has become Westfield Shoppingtown. The rehabbed buildings and new businesses in St. Louis city are certainly encouraging, but as monetary investments they pale in comparison to the explosions of capital out west.
Another main street area begins just past Highway 141. Again, storefronts come up to the street, and the buildings look older—but rural. A street sign directs sightseers to the Bacon Log Cabin, a historical site and another reminder that this area is not brand-new urban sprawl, but another palimpsest—the old Manchester, the road’s namesake, one of several small towns that have been washed over, appropriated by the megalopolis, transformed by the westward march (some would say flight) of residential and business development.
Chuck E. Cheese’s. Blockbuster Video. Family Martial Arts. A big American flag.
How many Imo’s Pizza franchises are there on Manchester? Five. How many Schnucks stores? Five. Walgreens? Six.
Those numbers are tallied from the phone book. When you’re actually driving on Route 100, these places, and others, seem to recur with the looped frequency of the background in a Looney Tunes chase scene.
Town Center
A break in the retail storm. For the first time in miles there’s green land, and on both sides of the road. After Manchester intersects with Old State and Strecker Roads, it becomes again a divided highway with grass in between and trees on both sides. This is Wildwood, population 32,884. Tips of big houses poke up behind trees. At other times the houses come right up to the highway. There’s a huge commercial development alongside the road. The name on the sign says “Wildwood Town Center.”
Will this be the true town center in 20 years? I recall the view from Interstate 70 as it enters St. Charles County—miles of undifferentiated box stores and chain restaurants—and imagine that landscape superimposed on these grassy fields. A few miles later Route 100 becomes a rural two-lane highway, and it really feels like the country: There are trailer homes, horses grazing, rolls of hay, and even Stovall’s Dance Hall and Saloon, which looks like an old-fashioned roadhouse. At the same time, the encroachment of development is palpable. Signs offer land for sale everywhere. They’re building “Estate Homes from the 400s,” and the Eagle’s View community promises “two distinct villages.”
For my purposes here, Route 100 ends at Interstate 44, near the old Diamonds Restaurant, a former destination for those who wanted to take a long Sunday drive into the hinterlands.
These won’t be hinterlands for long.
Chora
I began this two-hour journey with a series of questions: Can a road contain a story, encapsulate the history of the region through which it passes? Can the buildings alongside a major road provide a linear narrative of a place?
From one perspective, Manchester’s narrative offers bleak themes: geographical divisions between rich and poor; the industrial economy of the past and the service economy of the present; the westward movement of money (although the last decade has seen notable movement the other way); the churning of open spaces into generic landscapes of commercial and residential sameness. When I think of my own life, however, I realize that there is certainly more to the story.
In 1998, shortly after Christmas, my now-wife and I stood in my dad and stepmom’s unfinished house in West County and announced our engagement to my family. Outside, snow fell furiously. Inside, my dad, brother, sister and uncle, who had come by to see the progress being made on the house, congratulated and hugged us. On a whim, we drove over to Manchester, less than a mile away, to celebrate with lunch at White Castle. Afterward, my wife and I drove I-44 back to where I was living in the city. The snow had transformed the highway into something treacherous, foreign and beautiful. Every time I drive by that White Castle, I think of that day.
Manchester Road is not merely a place where livelihoods are made; it is also a place where lives are lived. The places along this road often seem drained of mystery, wonder and particularity, but on top of this undistinguished palimpsest, people—from downtown to Wildwood and beyond—inscribe their own unique stories, stories that can’t be read while rolling by.
