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Photograph by Chris Naffziger
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It was never very hard to tell what was on Bob Cassilly’s mind. Speaking to a Riverfront Times reporter back in the late 1990s while desperately trying to save the Arena from its impending implosion, he spoke bluntly of city leaders’ past attempts to revitalize St. Louis with failed projects such as St. Louis Centre or St. Louis Marketplace:
“Everything they touch turns to shit.”
Cassilly was speaking from the position of authority. He and his then wife Gail had already transformed a largely worthless, abandoned shoe factory right off of Washington Avenue into the now iconic City Museum, bringing up property values and real estate taxes along for the ride. One can imagine the frustration Cassilly felt; he already had found a winning formula for revitalizing aging landmarks, and he now watched the Arena collapse into a pile of rubble, for the worst possible replacement, a suburban style office park, “with a banality which exists everywhere else,” he told the RFT.
Sixteen years later, his son, Max Cassilly, sees his late father’s words all the more relevant as leaders discuss the building of yet another football stadium on the Near North Riverfront. But this time it’s personal for Max; the footprint of the new stadium sits directly on top of the last commissioned work completed by the Cassilly Crew before the sculptor’s death in 2011. The new stadium renderings released by HOK on September 1, 2015 clearly show Cassilly’s work will not remain in the new plan, but be replaced with an empty plaza.
The author sat down with Max and Kurt Knickmeyer, one of Cassilly’s longtime collaborators to discuss the construction of that project, which is now generally referred to as Rootwad Park. Tucked up against the flood wall and the old Laclede Power Station (not to be confused with the Ashley Street Power Plant further to the south which will be spared in the stadium plan), Cassilly envisioned the park and his sculptures to fit in with the terrain and pre-existing conditions of the site; the North Riverfront Trail snakes through the park, allowing bicyclists to experience the park as they ride through it.
As was often the case, Knickmeyer explains that Cassilly would use whatever material happened to be around at the time. For the large circular pieces of metal that create the caterpillar that creeps through the park, Cassilly used the discarded ends of cement mixers that he had found at Cementland, his magnum opus on Riverview Boulevard. Also, around the time, as Washington Avenue was being torn up and resurfaced, the crew harvested the old metal cross ties that formed the streetcar tracks near the City Museum; those pieces of steel would then become the “hair” on the caterpillar’s back. In addition, they also incorporated random pieces of stone found on site in the lots around the floodwall. The large brick pavers that covered the streets of St. Louis feature on the back of one of the turtles.
While years have now passed since the project, Knickmeyer still remembers a couple of anecdotes of working in the waning months of 2008 in the confines of the North Riverfront. At one point, Ricky Fortner, who was also working on the site, had left his truck full of his tools running while he turned away for a few minutes. When he returned, his truck had been stolen. Meanwhile, due to the low humidity, a static electric charge was building up on the gunite hose, causing an electrical discharge that would shock the worker holding the nozzle spraying the concrete for the sculptures. But overall, it was a good experience, and what was supposed to be a much larger project never realized.
Responding to the question of the feasibility of saving his late friend’s creation from demolition, Knickmeyer shows some frustration:
“I mean, there’s the river, the interstate, the power plant and all of these other things that affect the design and placement of the stadium. I don’t know why [Rootwad Park] can’t affect the design in a positive way. Why can’t it be incorporated into the stadium?”
This author finds some poetic irony in that Cassilly, one of the greatest critics of large publicly funded projects, had already beaten City Hall in the quest to improve the Near North Riverfront. As is so common in this city, real change has come not from the government, but instead from thousands of individuals working together or often alone to make St. Louis a better place. There is something also depressing that Cassilly’s words from 1999 could easily describe the current stadium fiasco in 2015. But Max sees his father’s advice in a more positive light; waxing philosophic, he proudly muses, “From the grave, my dad is still correct.”
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via e-mail at naffziger@gmail.com.
Both HOK and Giovanna Cassilly were contacted for comments on this story, but neither one had responded to queries by publication time.
