Last summer, attorney Will Scharf was sitting in Dewey’s Pizza on Delmar Boulevard, watching sports on TV. He’d lived in St. Louis for exactly one day. And he didn’t realize it, but he was about to undergo a rite of passage.
“I’m sitting next to some guy,” Scharf remembers, “and I sort of strike up a conversation. We introduce ourselves, and the guy’s like, ‘So where’d you go to high school?’”
Scharf, who moved here from Boston, was totally perplexed by the question; he’d never heard anything like it. He chuckles, remembering how he finally shrugged and said to the guy, “Well, I could tell you…but it probably wouldn’t mean anything.”
That question often confuses people new to St. Louis. If they stay long enough, they discover the “high-school question” is a cross between Emily Post and black ops: a way of asking about touchy subjects like class, religion, and politics without really asking. But it only works if you’re from St. Louis. And the obsession with high school can extend to keeping that social circle formed at 15…for life. Which makes it hard for folks from Los Angeles, Boston, or even Kansas City to break into St. Louis socially.
“It’s very simple,” says Christina McHugh, co-founder of St. Louis Transplants. “The barbecue is full. It’s not that they’re rude; it’s not that they’re not open-minded. It’s just that they have their family and their friends here, so their social network is full.”
As a St. Louis native who left and returned to a city that she didn’t know anymore, McHugh understands what newcomers are going through. When Transplants co-founder Anthony Bartlett moved back to St. Louis from D.C. in 2003, he also had a hard time transitioning. He believes natives are often more adrift than pure transplants. “They come back and they’re in new neighborhoods,” he says, “and there’s all this new stuff that’s sprung up since they’ve been gone.”
So McHugh and Bartlett founded St. Louis Transplants in 2010 to give nonnatives (“Transplants”) and returning natives (“Replants”) a way to socialize and network—and to break down the perception that St. Louis is a socially impenetrable city. Each month, the group holds Greenhouse Gatherings ranging from happy hours to Cardinals game-watching parties to concerts. People wear name tags; the point is to walk up, shake hands, and start talking—with the goal of forming friendships. “I like to say it was built a cocktail at a time,” says McHugh.
While the organization does aim to revitalize St. Louis—much like Fuel for the City, Metropolis St. Louis, and LOVEtheLOU—it doesn’t focus on young professionals or St. Louis city. Meetings are hosted everywhere, from West County to downtown. Some members, like Scharf—who just stumbled onto Transplants’ website last fall and blindly showed up for a Cardinals event—are young and new to the city. Others are in their fifties or sixties and recently moved home to care for an aging parent. Greenhouse Gatherings also attract a lot of locals interested in expanding that metaphorical barbecue beyond their high-school circle. One woman, a widow, came because her husband had died six months earlier; he was her best friend.
“She didn’t have anyone to go with,” McHugh remembers. “And she was shaking, because she hadn’t been out in so long, and she was so nervous. By the end of the night, she’d had some cocktails, and everyone was talking to her, and she came up to me and said, ‘I’ll be back.’”
Demi Bekele, one of Transplants’ first members, moved to St. Louis with her husband from Richmond, Va., as part of the Wachovia–A.G. Edwards merger in 2008. As a management consultant who works from home, she found herself spending a lot of time with her 2-year-old; she had only been able to establish some tenuous social networks with other wives from Richmond and a few mothers at her son’s school. The friend who made a difference, though, was Christina McHugh—before she co-founded Transplants. “There was an instant friendship,” Bekele says. “I used her as a resource for everything. If I wanted to go get my hair done, where do I go? For the cleaners, or the health club? She was my resource.”
Bekele was at the first Transplants meeting, which only 20 people attended. A year and a half later, membership is more than 2,000, and Bekele has a circle of people she can call for advice or ask out for coffee.
When Bartlett and McHugh first re-searched the reasons why transplants stay or leave, they found that human-to-human contact—like the mentorship McHugh provided to Bekele—makes all the difference. The majority of the people who stayed in St. Louis said they’d been lucky enough to find a local willing to take them under their wing.
“Christina and I were like, ‘Why are we waiting for them to get lucky?’” Bartlett says. “‘We can do this now. We know people who can bring them into the fold and show them the ropes. The locals are sweethearts; they want to help. They just don’t know how to find
the transplants.”
They also discovered that most other relocation resources in St. Louis were real-estate firms—whose main incentive is to sell houses. This is one of the reasons McHugh and Bartlett founded Acclimate, a consulting firm that helps companies retain out-of-state hires by providing them with personalized information about churches, neighborhoods, schools, cultural institutions, and the like.
“No one is focused on keeping them here socially,” McHugh says. “No one is incentivized to take them to a party and introduce them to people. And until we do, I don’t think St. Louis will change. Now, it’s ‘Who pays for it?’ ‘Who’s in charge of making this happen?’ It’ll go, but it will take a little while. The people at the very top are not yet aware of the ground-level conversations.”
Retaining transplants is not just about preventing a population hemorrhage, Bartlett believes; transplants help natives see their city with new eyes and value it for what it is—not Chicago, not New York, but a city that is lovable as itself, a city with beautiful architecture, old trees, a slower pace.
“They’re like born-agains,” Bartlett says with a grin. “They become these voracious supporters, almost because they’ve lived in a box, because they’ve paid $14 for a beer, because they’ve never had a yard before. And if you’re coming from a smaller community, if you want a big city but you don’t want it to be totally overwhelming, St. Louis is perfect.
“I mean, I’m overwhelmed in Chicago and New York. It’s so stimulating, and there’s so much, and I don’t want 50,000 options. You know, three is fine for me. But I still need to know what they are. So there’s not 10 amazing corned beef sandwiches; there’s two,” Bartlett says. “But I know where they are!”
For more information, visit stltransplants.com.
