South City’s new calisthenics pocket park owes its existence to an only-in-St. Louis combination: A faith-based organization with free space to offer. A rising star artist with a passion for exercise. And a regional agency that provides funding for the arts—and was willing to expand its definition of “art” to include an artist-designed calisthenics park.
The park, which opened last weekend, is part of a triple lot of grassy land next to the former Melvin Theater, at Chippewa and Pennsylvania streets. First opened in 1914, for the past three years the historic one-screen movie house has been the Melvin Theater Community Center, which offers arts programming and community support to Gravois Park. Its founder is David Godbout, a pastor ordained by the Assemblies of God denomination, but who says much of the neighborhood just calls him “Mr. Melvin.”
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The artist Basil Kincaid, who lives nearby, started thinking that the grassy lot might be a great spot to share his love of calisthenics. Now, it’s not every day that an artist goes all in on calisthenics, but Kincaid is not like other artists. When he was chosen for the 2024 Great Rivers Biennial, which gives three up-and-coming artists a museum exhibit at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, he made large-scale patchwork quilts to display on its walls. Another installation in Los Angeles sheathed an airplane in quilts, with textiles sourced from both St. Louis and Ghana.
For Kincaid, there was just one problem with making textiles his medium: Quilts are heavy.
“As I was developing the quilts, and as the quilts got larger, I noticed that I needed more physical strength just to make my art,” he says.
As Kincaid tells it, his interest in working with textiles coincided with some big life changes. After years of what he calls “self-destructive” behavior, around 2016 he began channeling his energy into exercise. “I just started with just the basics, you know, like push-ups and squats,” he recalls. “I couldn’t even squat all the way down.” But he kept at it, and in time he got stronger and felt better.
“I don’t view it as a chore anymore,” he says. “It’s something that brings me peace and brings me a deeper connection to myself and to my artwork. I feel like it’s helped me become more creative and more thoughtful and more patient.”
At the same time, Kincaid’s work was increasingly attracting an audience beyond St. Louis (a profile on NBC’s Today offers some indication of just how in demand he’d become). And he couldn’t help but notice that other cities had spaces that seemed to be missing in his hometown—or at least in South City, where he’s lived since 2011.
“I noticed how in other cities there were more outdoor opportunities for people to train, and how in those spaces people were more interactive with each other,” he says. “Like, a curious person might give pointers to a new person, and everybody was cheering each other on, which I noticed was very different from the gym, where everybody’s got their headphones on and kind of in their own world.”
When he approached Godbout about using a portion of the Melvin’s outdoor lot for a new calisthenics-focused fitness area, Godbout was all in. “Our hope had been, and our work has been, to make that corner come alive as much as possible,” he explains, with cookouts and other community-focused events.
A few years ago, the center built a basketball half-court, and the reaction from the neighborhood suggested a real hunger for more places for outdoor recreation. “I think our building could fall down tomorrow and some people might be sad, but if we close down the basketball court, I would be run out of town,” Godbout jokes. The center had also tried to build an exercise area, but Godbout describes it as very DIY—and he was thrilled with Kincaid’s suggestion that he could come up with funding to bring in the professionals.
Those professionals ended up being KOMPAN, a Danish company that constructs playgrounds and outdoor fitness spaces all over the world. The company let Kincaid take the lead on design, then worked to execute his vision.
The last remaining hurdle was the funding. Kincaid declines to share exactly how much the calisthenics project cost, but says he was able to get support from the Regional Arts Commission, which funnels hotel tax dollars to public art and local artists, to cover roughly half of the project’s cost. He then contributed his own money and brought donors on board to cover the remaining cost.
In the beginning, “I was a little bit skeptical just because of the scope of what we were talking about and the costs involved,” Godbout admits. But once Kincaid pulled together the funding, it led to further investment, with the Melvin Theater Community Center accelerating plans to fix the sidewalks on that corner, which he says had long been unsightly.
“We wanted the neighborhood to know that we care—and beyond the fact that we care, the fact that they deserve this, as much as any community,” he says. “So let’s go the extra mile to do it right.”
He adds, “Just one piece fell in place after another, and it worked out really well.”
Kincaid concurs. He remembers a calisthenics area in Tilles Park, near where he grew up in Rock Hill. But it’s nowhere near as nice as what he’s helped to bring to Gravois Park.
“There’s nothing servicing people that live in the heart of the city, and definitely nothing on the Southside,” he says. “I feel like it’s filling a gap.”
