Photo courtesy of Renegade STL
Huzzah for the city: Amanda Clark with a group of city tourists on a Renegade STL tour.
As part of Urban Planning: Art and the City 1967–2017, the centerpiece of CAM's summer exhibits, the museum has figured out the perfect way of giving us a deeper understanding of this large, complex, eclectic show. Renegade STL, which specializes in offbeat, deep-dive city tours, has curated a series of outings for the museum which have run throughout the summer. This weekend, they'll head north to the New Urbanist New Town Development; then, on August 12, they'll finish up with a walking tour of Old North St. Louis.
We spoke to Renegade STL founder Amanda Clark about what to expect—and why New Town actually has quite a strong historical tie to some of the oldest neighborhoods in St. Louis City.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
New Town is quite a haul from CAM. I'm curious what people will be looking at along the way. How will it differ from the tour I saw, the North-South tour, where there was a lot of stopping at street lights and pointing out bits of architectural history? Is there anything for you guys to even talk about between point A and point B?
We'll start talking right from the beginning of this tour, too. We'll leave CAM and take Delmar to Kingshighway. As we drive through a part of town that had a lot of density and urban core, and then we're going to pass by streetcar tracks, and talk about what life was like, and then we'll cross over to Page. Then to the Rock Road, where we start to see less and less density. We do find some little examples of streetcar tracks, and we'll talk about why a certain road exists in different communities, but we really start to see suburban sprawl start. We're treating it like a geology strata. We follow the development of the suburb all the way to New Town.
I've been to New Town maybe once, so I have a faint, foggy memory of what you pass on the way there, and what surrounds it. The Mills is somewhere nearby if I remember right?
So we will be passing Northwest Plaza and The Mills. We'll be talking about malls, and how they are becoming obsolete, and what role they played as city centers as the suburbs grew and grew. It's just like 120 years ago when streetcar lines would cross and there would be a little retail center. The mall is the same thing—you have bus exchanges there, you have train lines. But the mall as a city center is an obsolete idea now.
Photo courtesy of Renegade STL
Inside the bus during a Renegade STL tour.
What's even still out at The Mills?
It's closed. Seeing The Mills, and then seeing New Town—they really go well together. You're building something suburban in an impractical place.
We ran stories about New Town when it was, well, slightly newer. Now that it's not-so-new New Town, I'm curious about how things are going out there. What are you guys going to talk about and see?
New Town is unique compared to the developments around it, in that it's called a traditional neighborhood development. Versus it just being here's Whispering Hills, with a bunch of houses, a traditional neighborhood development is the development of a complete neighborhood or town using town planning principles. So that includes having a city center, having resources, like a little bookstore, and all the things that people need in a community. That is a form of New Urbanism, and the people that did New Town also did a very famous planned community called Seaside, in Florida. If you go to their website, it says that their firm is recognized as a leader of New Urbanism, an international movement to seek to end suburban sprawl. But as we all know, New Town is a bubble town, on a floodplain, in the middle of nowhere. That doesn't really work to end suburban sprawl or urban disinvestment.
There's no contextualism; the architecture doesn't refer to anything. It's very generic and they have all these rules and regulations that most neighborhoods would not have like you're not allowed to have molded plastic furniture. Things like that. But it's an interesting connection to St. Louis history because when the private places started emerging in the 19th century, they had a minimum cost covenant. They were able to control things—you can't build this giant mansion unless it's a minimum of $7000. So you can draw this comparison to that.
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I have talked to people who live out there who love it. It seems like there are people who feel extremely happy to be there—for the right people, it works.
Everyone I've met, we've interviewed people who live there, they all love it. Most of them are very upfront about yes, we know this is weird, but we love living here. We love that we can do all these different things—there's this self-awareness that I don't find in people who live in traditional subdivisions or suburbs. There's a sense of identity to living there. We try not to be judgy. We've made some jokes in our marketing because everyone has this perception of it being strange, but we hope to turn that on its head, just like we turn perceptions of other neighborhoods on their head. People do love living there, and people do have a sense of community there.
Are you guys going to actually stop in New Town, and say, visit the bookstore, or walk around the neighborhood?
We may get out—we're still working that part out. Since we are taking Page and the Rock Road out there, we're very dependant on the rhythm of the red lights. If we hit every single red light, we'll have less time in New Town than we would if we don't hit them all, and get there quickly. We'll be very flexible on our way out there. Then we'll take the Interstate back in. We'll see Old Town St. Charles as a reference as well. We want to make the point that St. Charles itself is not a suburb of St. Louis. There's this misconception that it is nothing but suburban sprawl, but it was founded around the same time as St. Louis and has historical significance. So we'll compare the two things.
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As an aside, can you talk very briefly about what happens when the tour stops at traffic lights? When I went on the North-South tour, you guys would take advantage of those stops and lecture about the historical significance of whatever street we were stopped on—it was almost like improv. You really have to have a pretty wide, deep knowledge of a city to be able to deliver an impromptu lecture about any random street corner.
It's something we enjoy doing—it fits well with our style, because we are so conversational, and it's give-and-take, there's no script. It does lend itself well when we're at a red light, or if traffic gets diverted, we're able to quickly change the subject or relate to the people on the tour bus. We also have a thing we call "Jacked-up History," and if the red light is particularly long, we will start spewing out completely random history facts about St. Louis. People really love that. We really love doing it, too. We try to one-up each other and just have a good time.
Can you touch on the last tour as well, the Old North tour?
I'll be leading that tour on my own. It's a tour that we give pretty regularly. It's a walking tour, and we don't go very deep into the neighborhood. We are respectful that it is a neighborhood where people live, and it is a challenging tour because of the perceptions of the neighborhood, and the complexities of it. It's a tour where we have to be very careful to be respectful...we stick to the history, and we really hope people at the end walk away with a sense that wow, this is an incredibly historical significant neighborhood, including many generations of St. Louisans. And we also talk about the role it played in the growth of the city.
We start by Crown Candy—that's required, I think! [Laughs.] Then we head down the street that runs right alongside it, Fourteenth, and head north up into the neighborhood, go down Hebert, and work our way back up past the Bath House and the pasta factory. Then we head over to the senior housing.
Photo courtesy of Renegade STL
St. Louis, meet St. Louis. A Renegade STL tour on Art Hill.
And with the Bath House, I'm guessing you talk about how a lot of folks didn't have indoor plumbing till the '60s.
Yes, that Bath House was in use through the 1960s. It makes a really great point of how that neighborhood lagged behind other neighborhoods in having plumbing, and that the city provided for its citizens like that. People love the Bath House.
Since this a tour Renegade's done before, what feedback do you get from folks who take the tour?
It's always very positive. We've had everyone from the We Stories group to little kids. A lot of school groups, some Ph.D. candidates from UMSL. We've always had a very positive response, and people always ask really good questions. One time I gave a tour to a woman who is a writer and she was from Boston and she was going to be writing a book about St. Louis and really wanted to understand these neighborhoods and their contexts.
Just to finish up, can you talk a bit about Renegade, and give people a little bit of background on who you are, and why you do this?
I've been doing Renegade for four years. It started out just as my own business venture. I quickly realized there was a monopoly on tours in town, mostly older men, retired professors, a much older generation. And they're wonderful. But as I was getting hired for private tours I realized that there was a niche for a different voice and something that was more contextual and not scripted. That grew. I took on a few extra tour guides, and about two years ago we got lucky and had an intern [Elizabeth Eikman] from SLU join us, and she's now my full-time business partner. It's just been this amazing ride, of doing what you love, and people loving it.
Anything else?
We are about to announce a new Whole Damn City tour. It's going to be a big deal. It's going to be called "Meet Your Maker." It's a whole Damn CIty Tour about industry and manufacturing. We're coming up with new programming and new tours. And we're constantly doing private tours. People are very interested in St. Louis history!
