Photograph courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
The Pageant and Masque of Saint Louis was an enormous birthday cake, with burning-hot tin stage lights instead of candles, for a city turning 150. The Parks Department built a 520-foot-wide stage on the Grand Basin at Art Hill, anchored with pilings, that stretched halfway across the lake to mimic a city on a river. The cast was a corps of 7,500 amateurs, including, according to its committees’ postpageant report, “swimmers, canoeists, wrestlers and tumblers”; horsemen from local riding clubs; choral-club members; and humble so-and-sos who filled out enrollment cards at the library.
St. Louis Float & Scenic Company contributed set pieces, including hinged trees that transformed into the old fort, Laclede House, and the Missouri Hotel. There were mounds constructed from lumber and painted canvas (the biggest one was on rollers), and during the Masque—the story was more of a figment—fishnet curtains woven with leaves and vines parted to reveal a painted backdrop of a ruined Mayan temple. The Cahokians (played, it should be noted, by white actors) wore loincloths woven on hand looms, dyed with clay and berries in the pageant workshop; petticoats were rented from Famous-Barr. Of course, neither actor nor observer can endure a three-hour production without access to, erm, facilities. And this may have been the Parks Department’s most genius construction: six tents of 2- by 6-foot compartments, equipped with galvanized buckets. When you realize this was the prototypical Porta-Potty—and the Pageant and Masque, the precursor of all modern summer festivals—it makes the World’s Fair ice-cream cone seem almost slouchy by comparison.
