Photograph by Scott Rovak
Steven Fitzpatrick Smith is wearing one of his trademark bowling shirts, his trademark straw hat and gray slacks held up by a belt with a big scorpion encased in the buckle. It came from a shop on the east end of Cherokee Street, where old antique stores mix with new Latin American bodegas and artists’ studios. If you’re the kind of person who would sport an enormous scorpion near your bellybutton, you know Cherokee Street.
We’re walking south on Grand to “the best Vietnamese in town,” according to Smith, a small, unassuming place called Banh Mi So 1. We have just dropped off “the company car,” a maroon Chevy Caprice, at the South Grand Detail Clinic. Auto aficionados get their cars cleaned there, inside and out. “Twelve bucks,” Smith tells me enthusiastically. “You can’t beat it.” Smith is in possession of the Caprice, a Cadillac Eldorado and a Bill Blass Special Edition Lincoln Continental Mark V—“goddamn big cars,” to echo the late poet Robert Creeley.
(A month or so after my lunch with Smith, in a cost-saving move, he downsizes his fleet with the sale of the Lincoln. Immediately thereafter, he’s thinking about what car he’ll own next.) We’re talking about history. Smith has been reading James Neal Primm’s Lion of the Valley, the essential single-volume narrative of this city born on the banks of the Mississippi. Smith has been discovering where he fits into the historical perspective of a frontier town on the edge of western expansion. “This is the crazy place you would hit before you went West,” Smith says, and the saloon “was part of the social fabric.”
This isn’t quite the perception of St. Louis that crazier places have of us or even the image we have of ourselves. Isn’t St. Louis the sleepy, hangdog, tentative town that barely speaks up for itself? A town that looks back more than 100 years to its glory days rather than ahead to the future? A town that really is more of a town than a city and because of that always will choose stasis over change, no matter how distressed it is?
Smith sees an alternative St. Louis, one that vies for attention with its unambitious twin. He looks at the history of a town of “people setting up tents along the river and making a life,” and he emulates that spirit and acknowledges it around him. “To me, here,” he says, with all the conviction of a regional commerce booster, “there is actually a tremendous amount of opportunity that people don’t realize. I’ve done a lot of hard work, but whatever success I’ve had is because there’s so much opportunity: to own a restaurant at 32, to walk into any place and get access. I’ve walked into Mayor Slay’s office. I brought in kids from my gym.” Imagine, he says, trying to pull off such hubris at Mayor Richard Daly’s Chicago City Hall. St. Louis’ small town–ness helps, Smith observes.
I’ve heard this kind of talk before, and if you’ve lived in St. Louis awhile, you’ve heard it, too. My more cynical self looks at a dilapidated, unkempt brick apartment building—a view of poverty that is as true today as it ever was. I think of the loft boom downtown, the high-rises going up in the Central West End, the real-estate balloon—and I wonder when it is all going to fall. Where are the jobs to perpetuate this economy? Where is the capital to sustain it? And is Smith—dapper and boyishly handsome, his rake’s charm softened by gentle eyes—really such a rube?
Then we walk into the home of the best Vietnamese in town, a small, tidy restaurant where the proprietor remembers Smith and how he wants his sandwich made and brings me a Tsingtao and wishes us well in his heavily accented English-in-progress. And I think of the resurrection of South Grand, propelled by the influx of refugees from Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa—people who came here and practically pitched tents to start new lives. And I look up from my notepad at Steven Fitzpatrick Smith, seated before me, who, with a combination of guile and smarts and hard work and grace and wit and style, has managed to create one of the more appealing saloons in the city, the Royale, a place that is already part of the social fabric of St. Louis, a place where interesting conversations take place among interesting people, a 21stcentury Kingshighway salon, if you will, where cynicism is swept into the corners, held away by the light and laughter and mildly intoxicated optimism. And I think about possibilities.
* * *
Just what makes the Royale so appealing? When I first took my wife there, she was smitten, and now, when I hem and haw about where to go for dinner and drinks, I know she is in her Royale default mode.
While I’m at the bar, waiting for Smith to take me off to South Grand in the Caprice, as bartender Allison prepares me a cup of coffee in a French press, I try to assess the qualities of Smith’s place. The Royale has a retro feel, but not as a fashion statement or a marketing ploy. Much of the artwork on the walls is by the terrific local collage artist Caroline Huth. She also designed the food and drink menus, which look like old science textbooks or Scientific American covers or cigar-box lids. Huth’s designs touch on nostalgia without being cute or quaint. Rather, she examines a style that, back when we lived with it, we hadn’t really noticed that there was any style to it. Now we do.
That style is part of the Royale, but Smith’s “public house,” as he refers to it, also possesses a rough-hewn, democratic character. Above the bar and to the side, high on the walls, are black-and-white photos of icons: JFK, RFK, MLK, W.E.B. DuBois, Nelson Mandela, Harriet Tubman, Mel Carnahan, Dorothy Day, Abe Lincoln. Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, leaps in one photo, the skyline in the background made small by his gigantic charisma.
The bar is a beauty: Art Deco, made of blond wood and glass. Smith worked with a local carpenter to design the tall church pews that serve as booths. Smith’s employees are distinctive in their own right: A bartender sports a pink mohawk; a waitress is the image of Midwestern wholesomeness. A youngster working in the kitchen boasts a nail through his lip. I try to pay Allison for the coffee, and she waves me off.
The food is upper-echelon bar food: a fantastic brisket taco with enchantingly spiced black beans on the side; burgers (including a $10 Kobe-beef burger); and in the summer,
pork tenderloin and flatiron steak from the patio grill. The drink menu offers wonderfully mixed concoctions named for St. Louis wards. The 10th Ward is represented by the Queen of the Hill, made of pear juice and sparkling wine; the 19th Ward is represented by the Midtowner, a Manhattan, which the drink menu recommends because “it loosens the tongue and softens the heart.”
A public house needs to be admired for its public. I always see writers and artists, musicians and DJs at the Royale. Small clouds of hipsters appear together and, by their arrival, designate the place a scene. Patrons’ cars are adorned with bumper stickers praising KDHX and Vintage Vinyl and live music and Kerry/Edwards. In the bar I see a mix of young and old. I see a woman take a seat with a book and a beer. A local music critic is writing on a laptop. At night, when the music is spinning, the place is loud with talk and good vibes.
When my wife and I come in for dinner, Smith usually comes over, maybe dressed in his Our Lady of Guadalupe shirt. He shakes my hand. He doffs his hat and bows to my wife. Then he tells us a story.
* * *
I ask Smith about style—the straw hat, the colorful shirts, the goddamn big cars (the Royale gets its name from one such car from his past, a Delta 88 Royale), but the question leaves him a bit flummoxed. He tells me he used to always wear a Cubs cap (he was born in Chicago, in the suburb of Oak Park, where Hemingway grew up and Frank Lloyd Wright built houses). But back when he was delivering “This Is St. Louis,” the award-winning series of PSAs he produced, to TV stations around town, the cap became awkward: “I always had to take it off like I was a 12-year-old.” So he tossed away childish things and went to Levine’s, the downtown haberdashery, and bought the hat. He describes the Royale as “timeless, but not old-timey, somewhat hip but not overly hip.” He’s not sure what to call it. “I rely on other people to help me with this.”
Yet he gravitates toward a Runyon-esque ethos. He took up boxing a decade ago and, when he got tired of fighting in tournaments, “started doing the backyard thing.” The backyard thing has become something of a local legend, with “Hoosier weight” bouts held at various South City locales.
Smith started his own gym, Panda Gym, in a nondescript building on North Broadway just a few doors down from Smoki O’s barbecue. It’s a place with its own style, too—straight out of the derelict gyms of Million Dollar Baby or Rocky or Fat City or Golden Boy or a hundred other celluloid depictions of the sweet science.
(As of this writing, Smith has folded the Panda, which was too much of a drain on his wallet, and for the time being offers a gym for experienced adults on the South Side—that is, until he opens a new Panda Gym on Cherokee.)
One Saturday afternoon I watch Smith work with two teenagers. He sets them in front of the heavy bag. “I want to see you jab,” he tells them. The young men make stiff attempts at the standard punch. Smith crouches facing the bag, his shoulders dipping and feinting. “Take a little step,” he suggests, showing them, and his left hand flicks out and lands solidly on the bag.
The youngsters try again, taking heavy swipes at the bobbing bag. “A jab is not a power punch,” Smith informs them. “Imagine there’s a fly and you’re trying to grab it.”
Smith takes up the chore of mopping the floor and calls out to the young men: “Jab, jab, double-jab. One, two. One, two, three, four.”
He watches them awhile and sees them growing frustrated. “You’re working too hard,” he tells them. “I want you to breathe.”
* * *
Big cars, straw hats, bowling shirts, boxing—who knows how anyone is attracted to what becomes a part of him? Early on, nefarious characters showed Smith the way.
“I started working when I was 11,” Smith tells me in the cool environs of Banh Mi So 1. He started selling newspapers. He started carrying a knife to cut the strings wrapped around the stacks of newsprint. Then he got a switchblade, because a switchblade has a cool efficiency and takes you to another level, so you’re no longer just a kid cutting string with a pocketknife.
“I loved selling newspapers,” he says, the thrill still in his voice. “This independent delivery guy would go driving around with a .38 under his seat. He would drive up and slow down to pick me up, and I would jump on.” There was no real reason that they did it this way, other than why not throw an element of skill and chance and foolhardiness into the everyday humdrum of going to work? “I worked with him until I was 17. That sort of affected me.”
The parents who watched over their son’s development—with a mixture of fascination, pride and anxiety, I suspect—are his partners in the Royale. “My father was in banking,”
Smith tells me. “He would do well and then not really well.” Early on, Smith acquired the ability to adapt to the situation at hand. He mentions his grandmother, who moved to St. Louis, too: “She raised my mother as a single mom, and she raised me also. She tried to refine me. I was very boyish. I stole stuff. I liked putting firecrackers into things and blowing them up.”
He tells me of breaking into some of the great old abandoned buildings of St. Louis, heading out into the late night with friends armed with crowbars and flashlights and waders, just for thrills and to catch eyefuls of the city’s former glories.
Switchblades, explosives, breaking and entering—maybe it is through acts of transgression that we discover who we are and who we are not, what we want and what we don’t want. And maybe those who never cross any boundaries at all fail to discover themselves.
Smith gives informal tours of the city in one of his goddamn big cars. You’re sure to see landmarks such as Gus’ Pretzels on the tour, and you’re sure to visit North St. Louis. He had been on just such a tour the night before, taking some visitors from a law-librarian convention to places such as Club Elite and Red Bones Den and dancing until 3 a.m.
“North St. Louis has a lot of places owned by the same people 15 to 20 years,” he says admiringly. “They still have to hustle. Red Bones opened before I was born. The owner came into my place—we all like to look at what each other’s doing—he came in and bought the house a round. I’ve only seen that in cowboy movies.”
South Side, North Side, Cherokee Street—old St. Louis, not the suburban grid or the downtown warehouses transformed into swank lofts—is the old soil, where the history still lives, where a St. Louis of swagger and risk and desperation and joy awaits revival.
