When I first moved to St. Louis, downtown was still pretty quiet (I went to work at the Sverdrup, nee PET Building, which is now condos!). Following on the success of Chicago's "Cows on Parade," St. Louis had initiated something called "The People Project," where fiberglass human figures were distributed to local artists, who then painted and installed them around the metro area. There was one in front of the Sverdrup, a sky-blue person clad in clouds. I was a bit perplexed by the thing, at first -- which I suppose could be a goal of public art, to shake us out of our workaday consciousness.
So I like this somehwat goofball idea, hatched by London's mayor, to leave 31 pianos all over his city, with the idea that people should just sit down and play. And in the delightfully monnikered Russian city of Perm, they are using Soviet-era missile silos as a backdrop for modern dance performances.
What struck me about this Perm story was that this quote could almost be describing St. Louis:
"This city has a very beautiful aura, and the sky is incredible here, the river must create this amazing sense of air here,” said Novaya Drama’s founder, Eduard Boyakov, who plans to devote half his time to Perm over the next several years. “On the other hand there is the urbanistic, incredibly powerful energy of these factories here, the military complex, all these tanks and howitzers and cannons.”
Well, okay, we don't have the howitzers and cannons -- but you see what I mean. If Russian aluminum magnates can see fit to support large-scale arts development in an old Soviet military outpost, albeit one with one million citizens, what's stopping St. Louis from becoming "the Berlin of the Midwest?"
Let's read a little further, where a prominent Russian writer gives his opinion of what's wrong with Moscow:
“Moscow is losing the attributes of a city and is a megapolis where people earn money during the day and spend it feverishly at night,” said Vladimir Sorokin, Russia’s most famous contemporary writer, in Perm for a reading. He refuses to give them in Moscow. “People there are arrogant and irritable. Here in Perm audiences are absolutely healthy. They are like the Moscow public of the 1970s.”
It seems like most American cities decided at some point that their highest goal should be growth -- an engine of making and spending money. Like Moscow. New York, historically the creative capital of the U.S., has in recent years become a place where stockbrokers, not artists, rule. And to hear people talk, it's become a poorer place in spirit, even as rents still stay in the sky, recession be damned.
The beautiful thing about the pianos in London is that the mayor is saying, here, I am supplying the tools, but I invite the citizens to make music, and I won't tell you what to play. Who knows what songs will get played? Or who will hear them? It takes some brass (not literally, though who knows; maybe a roving Rom band will stop to play near one of these pianos) to give up control like that. And here, I think, is the crux of the problem for St. Louis, when it comes to bringing the city back to life via arts initatives.
They can't really be intiatives, for one thing. I think about Gaslight Square a lot in relation to these problems. We had an arts and entertainment district that lured folks in from New Orleans, the west coast and even New York; what made it thrive was that it was a little bit chaotic, and there was no city planner involved. It became what it became organically, and would not have been so special had it not been the product of collaboration among a wide swath of folks who were just having fun and noodling around with architecture and music and art and food.
When it took off, of course, developers came in to make a buck, rather than to contribute to the district itself (i.e., the idiots who put in the go-go bars); and according to some folks who were there, Cervantes' administration was mad because they didn't get a cut of the action as far as planning it out and skimming the cream off the top. The story goes that the city set out to destroy the district by calling attention to the crime there (there were some racist undertones here as well; the nearby black neighborhoods were scapegoated) so that they could reestablish an entertainment district at Laclede's Landing --- one that THEY would have control of, down to the drywall screws. We can all see how well that went.
Jeanne Treavor, who started her career in Gaslight, once told me it was "our own little Camelot." I almost cried when she told me that. She said that in Gaslight Square, St. Louis' color lines went away; people came together and just had a good time. The music brought them together. If I wish anything for this city, it's for us to raise our consciousness enough to realize that we will never again be a world-class city until we stop trading precious things like this for thirty pieces of silver. --Stefene Russell
