The “Valley”

by Trisha Peplinski Harvey

The Valley. Fer sure. (Daylife.com)

Most people, when thinking of the Valley, think of California and people who say “Like totally awesome!”  However, St. Louis has their own Valley, and yes, some of the people there might say the same phrase.

Off the beautiful Highway 40 is the Chesterfield Valley and the shopping center called Chesterfield Commons.  This shopping center and general area is known simply as the Valley by locals.  The Chesterfield Commons is the longest outdoor shopping strip in America — over a mile long, located right off Highway 40 at Boone’s Crossing.  You wouldn’t expect anything less from the people of Chesterfield.  They like to go above all others.

The Valley has lots of shopping from major chains like Target, Wal-Mart, and PetsMart to smaller specialty stores like Fleet Feet (hey, I’m a runner) and even  a vacuum store.  There are tons of restaurants from fast food like Lions Choice to more expensive like The Old Spaghetti Factory.

Bike riders in the Valley (Daylife.com)

You can also catch a movie, play softball, go ice-skating, adopt a pet or even go to a bounce place.  Even if you do not want to do any of those activities, you can ride your bike or walk the path.  It’s in the flood plain, so it is a very flat area.

Back in the Flood of 1993, the Valley was completely flooded.  There was no shopping center, but a couple of restaurants and stores and, of course, the softball field and pumpkin patch.  When they were building the shopping center, a lot of people thought it was stupid because it was just going to flood again.  After the flood, higher levees were built.

The Valley is a one-stop shop for all your family needs.  If you need help finding it, ask anyone in Chesterfield where the Valley is, and they can tell you many different ways on how to get there.

So come on down to the place of the perfect and gorgeous people of Chesterfield and shop and eat with the masses.  Once you go to the Valley, you will always want to come back.

Trisha Peplinski Harvey resides in Houston, Texas, but her hometown is like totally Chesterfield.  She always shops and eats at the Valley and has gone to the bounce house.  She even once had a summer job in the Valley.

St. Patrick’s Day

by Mary Poletti

2008 St. Patrick's Day Parade in downtown St. Louis.

Among the many things St. Louisans like are their heritage, parades, and drinking. Anything that combines these three is particularly special to us. So naturally, St. Patrick’s Day is a banner day in the Gateway City.

Many outsiders don’t realize that, at last count, 8.6 percent of St. Louis residents were descended from Irish heritage, though it certainly makes sense in light of St. Louis’ very strong Catholic tradition. So intertwined are Irish and Catholics that the famous regulation against eating meat on Fridays during Lent is lifted whenever St. Patrick’s Day falls on a Friday. There was much gnashing of teeth when the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day fell during the penitent period of Holy Week, the run-up to Easter, two years ago. But anyway… Unofficially speaking, the highest concentration of Irish St. Louisans is in Dogtown, the informally designated City neighborhood that lies immediately south of Forest Park (comprising parts of Clayton/Tamm, Franz Park, and Ellendale). The Irish Catholic lay organization Ancient Order of Hibernians (think Knights of Columbus, but just for Irish guys) has a chapter based in Dogtown parish St. James the Greater, and Irish flags and shamrocks decorate this area year-round. You can imagine how nuts these folks go for St. Patrick’s Day — and it’s infectious.

2008 St. Patrick's Day parade in downtown St. Louis.

For St. Louisans, nothing quite captures the mood and spirit of a significant holiday like a bunch of people marching down the street in outlandish costumes, performing choreographed dances, playing various instruments, and throwing candy and beads at other people lining the street with alcoholic beverages. Yes, the parade is a beloved tradition on many St. Louis holidays. Many St. Louisans love parades enough to put on at least two for a given holiday, and St. Patrick’s Day is one of those holidays special enough to occasion two parades. The St. Louis parade, organized by the Metropolitan St. Patrick’s Day Parade Committee, is typically held downtown on the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day and includes a 5K run. The main event in many partiers’ eyes, however, is not this affair often ranked among the country’s top St. Patrick’s Day parades, but rather the Hibernians-sponsored parade down Tamm Avenue in Dogtown on St. Patrick’s Day proper and the Irish Festival that follows it. Anything else is child’s play. Take off work for a parade? Sure…

2008 St. Patrick's Day Parade in downtown St. Louis.

More than an excuse to have a parade, St. Louisans love an excuse to drink. Our fair city recently made lists of the drunkest and craziest towns in America — and was offended not to be ranked higher on the drunk list. We were once the beer-brewing capital of America, and one of the biggest beer companies in the world still brews here. Drinking is not only a part of St. Louis’s heritage, it’s in our blood (and indeed, sometimes booze constitutes a higher-than-desirable percentage of our blood). So any holiday whose celebration traditionally centers on drinking is going to be a beloved one for us. Not that we typically NEED an excuse to drink, mind you, but on St. Patrick’s Day we’re permitted and even encouraged to do so. Recognizing the shitshow that a heavily Irish neighborhood like Dogtown is bound to become on St. Patrick’s Day, the Hibernians don’t place excessive restrictions on their parade and festival attendees: No glass containers, try to keep your coolers out of one another’s way, don’t drink and drive, and keep it family-friendly. These regulations meet with varied success, but a good time is had by all, to be sure.

St. Louisans love St. Patrick’s Day because it affords them an opportunity to embrace their heritage — not just their ethnic heritage, but their longstanding tradition of being able to throw one heck of a party. Sure, Boston is known for its gigantic Irish population and its Celtic-flavored punk bands, but it’s hard to justify traveling that far for one day. And sure, the rivers run green in Chicago, but who cares about those uppity Cubbies fans anyway…

Mary Poletti is a journalist and graduate student in Columbia, Mo., a native of Belleville, Ill., and a former resident of Maplewood and the City’s North Hampton neighborhood. She doesn’t have a drop of Irish blood, but she’ll see you in Dogtown tomorrow.

John Goodman

by Trisha Peplinski Harvey

John Goodman (Fox News)

As stated in an earlier post, John Goodman is from St. Louis.  The world knows him from his role in Roseanne.  However, before he was Dan Conner he was just another St. Louisian.

John was born in Affton in 1952. He attended Affton High School, where he played football. With his football scholarship, he attended Southwest Missouri State University (SMS) in Springfield. That school is now called Missouri State University. He pledged Sigma Phi Epsilon but did not get initiated until after he was a star. In fact, in the ’90s, he would go back to SMS and party with his fraternity friends.  I have seen pictures of this from some of my sister’s friends’ Facebook pages, as she attended SMS in the ’90s. Anyway, he suffered a football injury and decided to become an actor, leaving Missouri in 1975.

St. Louis is proud to have an Emmy award-winning actor (Guest Star in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) in our arsenal. He is also a Golden Globe winner for his work on Roseanne. Plus in 1997 he received a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame, which we all know is way more important than the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Gooman is not afraid to jump the borders between movies and TV and will take on so many different roles from comedies, dramas to even children films. Americans love him as Dan Conner because he was an average working-class guy. He comes off as a real guy and not superficial, but maybe that is because he comes from a real, hardworking family from middle America.

I do not really pay attention when I am at the fabulous Lambert airport, but apparently his voice is on one of the automated messages.

Now I love movies and TV and basically anything in that category, so to end my post about John Goodman, I am going to say which is my favorite work he has done.  It is hard to choose because he has been in 72 films and countless shows, but I am a girl, so I am picking Coyote Ugly.

John Goodman & Piper Perabo in Coyote Ugly (Touchstone Pictures via IMDB.com)

In Coyote Ugly, he plays a concerned dad from New Jersey just wanting the best for his daughter.  He raised her without a mom and is very worried when he finds out where she is working.  John plays a father figure really well.  He is a father, but also, his own dad died when he was a toddler.  He is just very believable.

So here’s to you, John Goodman.  You might not live in St. Louis anymore, but St. Louis will always be proud to be your hometown.

Trisha Peplinski Harvey is living in Texas with her husband and two dogs but still calls St. Louis home.  She has never met John Goodman, but she has been on the SMS campus quite a few times.

Being scared of “the East Side”

by Angela Poletti

The East St. Louis riverfront (STLToday.com)

The East Side. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

The grass-fed yuppies from the County, the swaggering City people, and the country-fried outstate rural folk can all agree on one thing, if only one thing: do not underestimate the power of the East Side. Nine times out of 10, simply mentioning the East Side to a seasoned St. Louisan elicits a strong visceral response: maybe wide eyes, maybe a knowing smirk, and probably an interesting anecdote or two.

The East Side is the Golgotha of the Midwest, with which St. Louis is stuck in a violently abusive love-hate relationship. It is a no-man’s land where it’s always high noon at the O.K. Corral and the dueling pistols are semi-automatics scrounged off the black market. St. Louisans need only see the headlines in the local paper or hear the top stories on the local news to feel the rage emanating from the  streets that criss-cross East St. Louis like a spiderweb waiting for another victim. Bloodthirsty gangs, crooked politicians, grotesque industrial contamination  — you name it. The East Side is more Gotham City than Gotham City itself.

Though its modern face is made ugly with the scars of urban decay, East St. Louis was once a beautiful and successful boom town, with a rich history and countless talents that either came from or landed there at some point (Miles Davis, Josephine Baker, and Ike and Tina just to name a few). Its population topped out in the ’50s with just over 82,000 citizens. It was a heavily industrialized city whose economy was initially strengthened but ultimately weakened by world war. This in turn helps to explain exactly how a city can go from Pleasantville to nut-stompingly blighted in just a few short decades. Deindustrialization and unreconciled racial tensions marked the beginning of the end for East St. Louis, and the subsequent failures of the government officials elected to help fix the city were just nails in the coffin as the city became buried in crime, pollution, and corruption.

Nowadays, the East Side is a barren wasteland of vice, though it’s not totally isolated from the greater metro area; many St. Louisans drop into East St. Louis for the strip clubs and 24-hour bars, which are in the less-dangerous areas — they are the Limbo to the Inferno that is the East Side. For those brave souls balls-out enough to make the trek there, they are greeted by a veritable cornucopia of strung-out, gat-wielding warrioresses of the night and around-the-clock libations, all against the illustrious backdrop of a dying urbania. It is St. Louis’s dark secret, and our thriving metropolis would not be complete without it.

Angela Poletti is an administrative assistant for the Riverfront Times and a native of St. Louis. She lives on the city side of Richmond Heights, and is a committed vegan and organic lifestyle advocate. Of course she’s scared of the East Side.

The City Museum

by Kurt J. Pankau

“It’s that building over there, with the bus on the roof.”

The City Museum (Wikipedia - GNU Free Document License)

Nestled in Washington Avenue Loft District, hidden behind a deplorably boring name, you can find one of the hidden gems of St. Louis: The City Museum.

The Museum was/is the brain-child of artist Bob Cassilly who bought an old shoe factory and turned it into a surreal/industrial funhouse chock-full of interactive attractions — a place that is virtually impossible to describe without slashes and semi-colons and em-dashes. There is no rhyme or reason to the building and its layout; there is, however, a giant praying mantis on the roof next to the ferris wheel.

Now you will pray to MEEEE!!!!!!

And there are slides.  And I don’t mean slide-projector slides or vacation slides; I’m talking about physical ride-from-the-third-story-down-to-the-ground slides, the largest of which is ten stories and deposits you next to a Wurlitzer pipe organ. There are caves; there’s a bank vault; there’s a wall made out of empty Coke bottles. There are giant sculptures of fish that you can crawl around in.  Out front you’ll find MonstroCity, a metal network of caged paths that connect towers, catwalks, a tree house, two airplanes (side note: you haven’t lived until you’ve climbed off the wing of an airplane through a metal cage two stories above a parking lot), more slides, and two ball pits. That’s right, two ball-pits.

If awesomeness were measured in ball-pits, The City Museum scores a 2.

Don’t be fooled by the kid’s stuff (did I mention slides?) — The City Museum is a fun for anyone who likes to run and jump and climb, and you’ll find a surprising number of adults in and on the attractions. The Museum hosts numerous wedding receptions every year and if you absolutely have to get some culture in you, you can find actual museum exhibits inside if you look hard enough.  You can also visit the log cabin that was owned by Daniel Boone’s son (where they serve alcohol). Alternately, there is a kids-only section indoors that includes a rideable train. And for the more Bohemian types, there’s a vintage clothing store.

Bohemian types enjoying the City Museum. Also, slides.

The City Museum draws over half a million visitors yearly, many of them locals.  They keep coming back because of the freshness, the fun, the humor, and the singular uniqueness.  And they bring their friends, because the City Museum is the kind of thing that really has to be experienced to be believed.

Regular admission is $12 per person (plus $5 for roof access–and believe me, you want roof access).  This may seem steep-ish for a “Museum” or a family weekend outing, but there’s lots to do so go early and plan to stay for a while. Group rates are available, check their hours before you go. For more information, their home on the web is conveniently located at www.citymuseum.org.

Kurt J. Pankau is a professional programmer and amateur musician.  He lives with his wife in Creve Coeur where they have two staircases but, alas, no slides.  His band and his blog should be avoided at all costs.

“Up in the Air”

by Mary Poletti

Remember how we said St. Louisans especially like shout-outs to St. Louis from homegrown celebrities? Well, St. Louisans will take them pretty much anywhere we can get them. And that’s why St. Louisans like — no, LOVE — the Oscar-nominated 2009 film Up in the Air, great swaths of which were filmed in our fair hometown. The St. Louis media was all over this film like a cheap suit before filming even started. Sure, other great movies had been filmed in St. Louis — Planes, Trains and Automobiles featured some scenes at Lambert Field, and hello, Meet Me in St. Louis? — but had any of them starred GEORGE FREAKIN’ CLOONEY? And had any of them cast legions of St. Louisans as extras? And had any of them treated St. Louis as their own personal soundstage without actually mostly taking place in St. Louis? Not in this generation, bubba.

Hey, that's OUR airport! And...and that's George Clooney! (Paramount Pictures via TheInsider.com)

So we rubbernecked in our own streets during filming, hoping to catch a glimpse of Clooney, and we waited with bated breath for Jason Reitman’s inadvertent love letter to our fair city to drop. And when it did, we hurried into theaters, oohing and aahing over the gratuitous shots of St. Louis — the ones we had anticipated like Lambert (which gets a serious shout-out in the film) and the Cheshire Inn, but also the unexpected ones like Mansion House Apartments, the Renaissance, Affton High School, Lafayette Square, a little Methodist church in Maplewood…the list goes on. (In fact, the Post-Dispatch visualized the whole list.)

And when Up in the Air succeeded, critically and financially, and began to generate Oscar and Golden Globes buzz, we were euphoric — and disappointed when it failed to follow through on most of the buzz. Much of the day-after coverage of the Golden Globes and now the Oscars in the St. Louis media has led with something to the effect of “Avatar and The Hurt Locker score big; Up in the Air does not.” We were INVESTED this year, man. Compared to the rest of the field, Up in the Air never really had a shot at the Oscars. Not when Best Picture was the duel of the director-exes between Avatar and The Hurt Locker; not when Jeff Bridges and Mo’Nique had Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress sewn up (Clooney said he’d even voted for Bridges himself); not when Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire was pretty much guaranteed Best Adapted Screenplay, perhaps as a consolation prize for losing out on Best Picture and Best Actress. But in St. Louisans’ minds, Up in the Air just had to score big. It just had to. It already had with us.

For in our hearts and minds, St. Louis is the real winner with Up in the Air‘s Oscar buzz. We get to feel a little better about the city we love, which obviously many others have now seen and loved too, even if it’s disguised as a host of other cities. A friend who was gunning for Avatar for Best Picture scoffed earlier that Precious was poverty porn; when Up in the Air came up in the same conversation, I responded that it qualified as St. Louis porn. And we wouldn’t want it any other way. Congratulations on your achievement, Reitman and Clooney and friends, and thanks for bringing us along for the ride.

Mary Poletti is a journalist and graduate student in Columbia, Mo., a native of Belleville, Ill., and a former resident of Maplewood and the City’s North Hampton neighborhood. She lived a block away from that little Methodist church in Maplewood, and her sister lives within walking distance of the Cheshire Inn. Neither one ever saw George Clooney.

Celebrities from St. Louis

by Mary Poletti

Perhaps nothing validates the existence of St. Louis as much as the famous people who hail from the area. You’d be hard pressed to find another town larger than, oh, I don’t know, Jefferson City that so values its famous native sons and daughters, no matter how trivial their fame or tangential their connection to the Gateway City.

St. Louis Walk of Fame (magazinUSA.com)

No one will deny the cultural contributions of some of St. Louis’ most famous products: Tennessee Williams, Joseph Pulitzer, Chuck Berry, Miles Davis, and more. In the lower tiers of celebrity, though, we are all too quick to claim and honor our own. When I was a kid, a high-profile billboard on Highway 40, the one in front of the old Pumping Station G gasometer on Newstead, advertised the classic sitcom Roseanne with a grinning picture of John Goodman and the words “The Big Man from LA (Lower Affton).” Still more recently, there’s The Office‘s Pam Beesly, Nerinx Hall and Truman State grad Jenna Fischer, the female lead on a show beloved or possibly lamented by millions for popularizing ubiquities like “That’s what she said” (my trivia team would have no collective identity if it weren’t for that one). Don’t think for a minute that there’s a St. Louis rock fan who doesn’t still, on some level, mourn the breakup of The Urge (why else do you think so many people still go to former frontman Steve Ewing’s shows?) or tune into Christian music just to hear Jars of Clay, who got their start down the road at Greenville College. And not even Wild Wild West could diminish St. Louis’ love for Kevin Kline. Much.

We’re especially inclined to love people who show their love for St. Louis. A little later in my life, there was, of course, Nelly, and my first view of him, an iconic split-second shot from below of him rapping with the unmistakable silver curve of the Arch splitting the blue sky above his head. St. Louis’ love for Nelly and other Gateway City rappers like Chingy and Murphy Lee, I’d argue, is based on their willingness to shout his pride for St. Louis from the rooftops, the same way 2Pac did for southern California or Jay-Z does for New York. Look, guys! We can be a big-shot hip-hop city, too! There’s also good old Uncle Tupelo, precursor to Wilco, who have a common denominator in Belleville, Ill., native Jeff Tweedy; Wilco’s repertoire includes tunes like “Casino Queen,” Laclede’s Landing tribute “Heavy Metal Drummer,” and my personal favorite, the Belleville lament “Sky Blue Sky.” The highly prized St. Louis shout-outs aren’t limited to music, either. Kitschy art mainstay Mary Engelbreit, the visual art equivalent of a Vera Bradley bag, is loved nowhere as much as she is in her native St. Louis (my high school volleyball coach once pointed out her house on the bus ride to an away match in Ladue) because she creates so much art about St. Louis and for causes like the St. Louis Public Library. Spielberg spouse Kate Capshaw, in her one notable movie role as Indiana Jones’ female foil in Temple of Doom, gives a shout-out to Missouri at the end of the movie. And in a remarkable wink to her hometown, Karen Allen, who pretty much hasn’t aged since Raiders of the Lost Ark, played the female lead in a 1987 film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, which is set in St. Louis. Well, actually, even though my dad swears she’s from Webster Groves, Karen Allen is from Carrollton, Ill., which is a solid 50 miles north of St. Louis, but whatever — it’s close enough for most St. Louisans to claim her.

St. Louis’ love of sports merges perfectly with the city’s love of its own to enshrine its native athletes as minor gods. I’m looking at you, various mid-20th-century Cardinals and Browns. You, too, Mizzou football standout and Philadelphia Eagles rookie Jeremy Maclin. The first glimpse of a Maclin Eagles jersey in Missouri set many hearts aflutter: Make us proud, our dear Kirkwoodian!

Oh, and God forbid a St. Louisan should show up on a reality TV show. The first Bachelorette was the jilted Trista, whom my Chesterfield-reared college roommate swears her sister knew in high school. And if Kansas City is still gripped by David Cook fever two years after his win (I’m not kidding — the Examiner, the community paper of record in the eastern suburbs of Kansas City, still had a David Cook section on its Web site when I profiled the paper for a media management class last semester), can you imagine what St. Louis would have done if Cardinals great Ozzie Smith’s son, Nikko Smith, had won American Idol?

It’s not just about the Walk of Fame in U City. It’s not just about cheering for a St. Louis shout-out in pop culture. It’s about knowing that people who grew up in the same place we did, who at one time called home the same place we called home, got out there and made some kind of cultural contribution. Um, such as it may have been.

Mary Poletti is a journalist and graduate student in Columbia, Mo., a native of Belleville, Ill., and a former resident of Maplewood and the City’s North Hampton neighborhood. She wishes St. Louis would have shown a little more loyalty to Stir.