Rendering courtesy of Stephen Stimson Associates and the HOK Planning Group
In the years before air conditioning, families slept on breezy Government Hill. After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, St. Louisans met there to mourn. After 9/11, we did the same.
Is it any surprise that last summer, when the city and Forest Park Forever unveiled a renovation plan that cut a sharp-angled Z across that gentle slope, the public turned hostile?
That terraced Z echoed landscapes in Italy and the ancient world—but it looked to its critics like “a glorified wheelchair ramp,” “the mark of Zorro on a hillside,” “little more than a giant zigzag.” “This strikes me as way too trendy and unlikely to wear well over time,” read one post on UrbanReviewSTL.com. “My scholarly and unsophisticated response to the proposed design is ‘Ick,’” rejoined another.
And so “the design kind of changed back a bit,” says Bill Reininger, park-operations manager. A tall, gentle guy who’s a certified arborist, he confesses to missing a few elements from the first plan—“the terraces were kind of neat”—but says planners now realize that what the public wanted was “more of a restoration than a renovation.” Back came the symmetrical grand stairways. Back came the central vista and definite garden rooms. The accessible path would still cut diagonally across the slopes, but it would be hidden by plantings and broken by two plateau areas.
The public smiled and nodded. This was more like it.
Government Hill is at the center of Forest Park, yet for the past 30 years people have partied in the pavilion atop the hill and rowed Post-Dispatch Lake at its base without much enjoying the hill between them. The concrete steps had crumbled, the reflecting pool had cracked and the landscaping was a ragtag band of volunteer trees.
This spring, all that begins to change.
Practical improvements start with an irrigation system, electrical outlets concealed all over the hill and a larger electrical panel so you won’t have to bring your own generator to throw a big party. The city will create a sense of arrival with a widened drive straight off Hampton, a second roundabout, signage, plantings and more parking.
Aesthetic improvements start with the topography: The hill will be resculpted into two gentle slopes and two plateaus. A grand staircase on either side will lead up to garden rooms enclosed by shrubbery. The Beaux-Arts formalism of the original landscaping, designed by George Kessler around 1911, will be loosened: Instead of looking down on low, uniform plantings, visitors will find themselves surrounded by tall, graceful grasses and flowering trees. Landscape architect Steve Stimson, working with the HOK Planning Group, has called for perennials to be planted in ribbons across the hill, echoing its horizontal bands of incline and plateau, so you’ll see different flowers when you climb the hill than when you descend.
Colors will change by season: Spring’s delicate white blossoms—hawthorn, white redbud and dwarf fothergilla—will give way to rippling grasses, rows of ruby-throated daylilies and black-eyed Susans, flowering red buckeye and silver linden. Fall will bring the crimson of Japanese stewartia and downy serviceberry and the golds of lacebark elm and Kentucky coffee tree; winter’s bright-red hawthorn berries will glow against the dark-green Serbian spruce.
The brides—for the brides must be considered—will have hundreds of carefully orchestrated locations for photo ops.
The most urgent question: Will the fountain still have colored lights? Yes, it will—and they’ll be more vibrant than ever, thanks to programmable LED technology controlled from an underground vault. “We will be able to set it to the same rhythm and motions as the old one,” Reininger promises, still in crowd-soothing mode, “but we will also be able to change it.”
The pavilion, built as a refreshment stand in 1910 with World’s Fair profits, was the first significant restoration in the park, and Government Hill—its critics quieted—will be the last.
What to expect:
- An even brighter rainbow of light from the LED-illuminated, computer-programmed fountain
- Cascades and reflecting pool
- Garden rooms
- Electricity for parties
- Gentle wheelchair- and stroller-friendly paths
- Landscaped parking area
- Symmetrical grand stairways
