Illustration by Vidhya Nagarajan
In 1983, St. Louis was facing the ignominy of losing more population than any other city in America, but then it was saved.
We got to host the Miss Universe Pageant. The city was able to “flaunt all its charms before a worldwide audience of 600 million viewers,” according to the Associated Press. As a result, it became the world’s top tourist attraction and grew to its current status as “America’s largest and most beloved and admired city.”
Or something like that.
Pardon my nostalgia, but arguing against wasting local tourism funds on this ridiculous thing was one of the first issues we cut our teeth on in the early years of The Riverfront Times. I had just come off a two-year stint as a member of the Missouri Tourism Commission, and I just couldn’t believe that the St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission would do something as stupid as hand $300,000 or more of its scarce funds to this second-rate event on the false pretense that it would somehow put us on the map—even if we broke even on the investment, which we surely did not. We railed against the whole deal at the RFT, making many important people in St. Louis mad at us for the rest of time.
None of that matters now any more than the Miss Universe Pageant mattered then, which was not at all. But to me, Miss Universe has remained through the years the ultimate metaphor for a collective psychological flaw that continues to plague civic decision-making: We’re terribly insecure—and, I’d argue, needlessly so—with regard to what the rest of the world thinks of us. And from that insecurity flows a truly distorted sense of who we are and what we can and cannot be.
Most recently, on Labor Day, we had a chance to hark back to our Miss Universe achievement when 75,000 people didn’t jam the Gateway Mall and didn’t net the city $1.5 million in fees and taxes at a weekend of enormous concerts that didn’t happen. And if it felt familiar, it was because very similar noncrowds failed to generate equally impressive sums of nonfees and nontaxes at a splendid series of nonconcerts that didn’t happen on Memorial Day.
These nonevents were the product of an agreement borne of the same insecurity that helped St. Louis dominate the world with the Miss Universe Pageant. In an action that truly deserves a wing in the Hayseed Hall of Fame, your city government last year entered into an exclusive 10- to 20-year agreement with the ICM Partners talent agency of Los Angeles—by golly, the Los Angeles, the one that’s got that there Hollywood!—because the agency promised our mayor that it could produce “world-class outdoor high-quality music festivals” just like Lollapalooza in Chicago.
There’s nothing like a little Chicago envy to move us to do something idiotic. Is it worth noting that the largest net migration of any city’s residents to St. Louis came from Chicago, according to recent census data?
Undeterred by the detail that ICM had never produced a single such event here—and blissfully unmindful of the eerie similarities to The Music Man’s Harold Hill—the city granted the agency its demanded exclusivity, essentially running off an untold number of legitimate, popular, actual festivals and events. (Taste of St. Louis comes to mind.) And then, of course, nothing happened.
But not having a couple of festivals isn’t the problem here. The problem is that St. Louis is strangely uncomfortable in its own skin. Consider the words of former Ward 7 Alderwoman Phyllis Young, who sponsored the ICM bill.
“It would put us on the music map for our country,” she said.
Really? Was the former alderwoman not aware that St. Louis’ blues scene is among the most respected in the nation; that the father of rock ’n’ roll lives right here; that LouFest was already bringing in such major acts as Outkast, The Avett Brothers, and Wilco?
Rather than celebrate the fact that St. Louis can pride itself on being a wonderful place to live and raise a family—and rather than focus on serious problems such as crime, racism, and economic injustice that plague us all as a region—we expend far too much of our civic energy on aspirational nonsense.
This collective lack of self-confidence colors two of the most spirited issues facing St. Louis: the apparently imminent loss of NFL football and an ongoing tug of war between the ride-sharing service known as Uber and the Metropolitan Taxicab Commission.
In both instances, people concerned with losing the NFL or not getting Uber have a similar refrain: “We can’t be a big-league city without them!”
If the Rams leave and we don’t get another team, we’re done. We’re finished. We’re a ghost town. If we don’t have Uber, we’ll die of being terminally unhip. We’ll never see another convention. We won’t even see another hipster.
There’s much consequence to looking at the world through such apprehensive eyes. People panic. They make false assumptions about what might happen if we move too slowly, so we effectively call off debate before it begins.
The current stadium issue is a classic. Reasonable people might differ about the importance of an NFL team to a city like St. Louis or the economic soundness of providing public subsidy for a billionaire’s stadium or even a more complex question such as whether the region can effectively support three pro-sports franchises.
But operating on the assumption that our major-league bona fides would be summarily revoked by all of America should the NFL again abandon St. Louis, the powers that be in the political class have decreed that it just cannot be allowed to happen. The end justifies the means because it’s an article of faith that losing a football team would be a terrible disaster.
As a Rams fan and supporter, I hate the thought of the team leaving, but a wide range of economic studies (and local experts) would support a conclusion that the NFL’s departure would have no serious long-term economic effect on St. Louis. Indeed, one person who seems to concede this reality is none other than Mayor Francis Slay, among the most ardent advocates of corporate welfare for a new stadium.
“I’m not going to sit here and say that we can prove that money going into this—that we’re going to get out, in dollars and cents, what we’re putting into it,” Slay told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “But I do think it’s a good investment in the city and its future... People like NFL football. They want a team that they can support, whether they go to the games or not. It has a lot to do with big-city pride.”
In the same vein, many have argued that St. Louis simply cannot afford to remain one of the only large cities in the U.S. without full Uber service. Again, the phrase “major league” has been invoked repeatedly. That’s nonsense. And it’s certainly not a reason to vilify any politician or government agency resisting Uber’s horrific demand that its drivers be exempted from Missouri’s reasonable requirement that taxi drivers submit fingerprints for a basic FBI background check. (And if you transport strangers from point A to point B for a dollar amount based on time and distance, I say you’re a taxi driver, no matter how hip you are.)
It seems pretty clear that Uber will eventually use its political clout and resources to buy its way into the St. Louis market, largely on its own terms, just as it has in cities all over the world. But there’s no need to sacrifice public safety because of an unconfident fear that we’ll seem uncool to the rest of the world while we stand up to the demands of multibillion-dollar “ride-sharing” enterprises.
St. Louis needs to stop worrying about what everyone else thinks of us. We need to take pride in our great cultural institutions and restaurants and educational institutions and neighborhoods and all of the other assets that make ours a fine city and region. We need to take care of business at home.
Besides, we’ve got a better image around the globe than you might think. You might want to know that 1983 marked the first time a Miss New Zealand won the crown of Miss Universe. They’re still buzzing about us 8,000 miles away.
