This is not your father’s tour of the city, says Amanda Clark. Renegade Tours STL, her new venture, aims to shake us out of the complacency with which we wander the region, to share unusual and cool stories about our past, and to offer a more lively vibe than other, more staid urban tours.
Clark, a former co-presenter of the lamented The Saint Louis Ten storytelling events (inspired, in turn, by NYC’s The Moth) that thoroughly livened up this town not long ago, has turned her acumen for history and architecture into a cottage industry.
Along with cohorts including Chris Naffziger of “disappearing-architecture” site St. Louis Patina, Clark offers tours of various neighborhoods that consciously avoid the typical fare.
For instance, her “Don’t Knock It Till You Walk It” series alights on the unlikely bedroom burg of Webster Groves this weekend, with a focus on “great residential architecture…the history of a St. Louis neighborhood through the eyes of the people who left the noise and pollution of a booming, turn of the century city for the wide open spaces of the country…trains, cholera, Native Americans...and [Webster residents from] Jonathan Franzen to Harry Caray, with a couple of Pulitzer Prize winners and even a supermodel thrown in for good measure.”
Renegade’s “Notorious St. Louis” tour explored the remnants of the Gilded Age, with a focus on crime and corruption of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. “We were one of the first American cities to legalize prostitution in the 1870s,” Clark says. “We had red-light districts and a hospital just for prostitutes.” The “Notorious” tour also featured mansions of both the crumbling and preserved varieties, remnants of the 1904 World’s Fair, and a look at the reshaping of the built environment resulting from some scary tornadoes.
Renegade’s “Love of the Lou” tour was a Valentine’s Day affair that offered a “romantic walk in the dark Downtown, starting at Citygarden, with a stop at the Old Courthouse to discuss the love between Dred Scott and his wife Harriet,” Clark says.
Upcoming tours include the aptly named “Beer: It’s What We Do” (May 11), a walking tour of the former sites of the Anheuser-Busch, Falstaff, Lemp, and Cherokee breweries and mansions. Clark says her team is also working on an Old North tour, as well as a tour of Lafayette Square led by a woman who will describe the neighborhood haunts and what it was like to grow up there as the rehabbing craze blew up in the ’70s and ’80s.
Clark, who has led the popular Metropolis Downtown Architectural Walking Tours, says that one of the things that makes Renegade different is that she is more concerned about the stories and human interactions behind the buildings on the tours than a pedantic rundown of dates.
Renegade’s tours usually last about three miles and two hours, and cost about $15.
