NOT A CATHEDRAL

But rather a train station, or it used to be one. Now it’s the barrel vault ceiling of the St. Louis Union Station Hotel, where we are spending the night before our early train to Chicago. There is a light show in the lobby every evening. I’ll add some more detail during our ride on Friday.                        

FOUR BASIC FOOD GROUPS

Low on material so a bit of filler. This is part of the facade of a restaurant called The Soda Fountain at St. Louis Union Station. My grand kids go wild about the over-the-top ice cream desserts. But if you want a Manhattan instead of a side of fries, you're good. Want a shot of rum in your sundae? They got you covered.

LOTS of photo ops coming up here. Mrs. C and I are going to the annual orchid show at the botanical garden today. Our surprisingly big Mardi Gras parade is Saturday. As always, I'll be there.              

THE ELLIE AND AUDREY SHOW, PART 2

Low on material, so why not bring back my impossibly cute granddaughters. Audrey, on the left, and Ellie were riding the big Ferris wheel at Union Station. Ellie has her indispensable cloth lambies.         

ALIEN LIFE FORMS

Lighting courtesy of the St. Louis Aquarium. This is a photo stop every time I take the kids through but the colors are always different.                

PILE ON

Our aquarium's inhabitants are not limited to fish. Anything approximately wet is within its scope. I don't know what species of turtle these are but they they seem to equally like company and a heat lamp.              

STEAMPUNK SUBMARINE

St. Louis Union Station has had an aquarium since its last redevelopment. It's not on the scale of, say, New York or Chicago, but the kids like it.  The entry area is full of LED screens which, at least at the moment, are made to look like a scene from 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.                  

FEARLESS AUDREY

 

Granddaughter Audrey, 8, concedes nothing to her father, Andy, when it comes to adventurousness. She is zooming down the zip line with arms outstretched, having no need to hold the cable. After this run she did it again.        

ZIP

One of the overpriced but fun attractions at Union Station is what they call the ropes course. You strap and buckle into a harness, click into a overhead guide channel, and off you go, up to three levels above the floor.

Ellie has been just dying to do this. She is too big for the kiddie course but not big enough for the main event without an adult. Neither of her parents have been comfortable with the heights. My creaky spine and joints are of no use. Son Andy, flying through the zip line section, was the perfect guide. We don't know how he got his athletic ability. Certainly not from his parents.           

STL DPB BACK HOME - THE ELLIE AND AUDREY SHOW

Back in The Lou. Son Andy and granddaughter Audrey came down from Michigan for the weekend. Ellie, 10, and Audrey, 8, couldn't be closer. We spent much of Sunday at St. Louis Union Station. It hasn't had trains for years. These days it is a nice hotel and entertainment center. After some fun that we will come to later, we had lunch at at a place simply called The Soda Fountain. It has bad diner food and outrageous desserts (some with alcohol, if that's of interest). The two girls could barely finish this between them.             

A DIVINE VIEW OF MINI GOLF

Ellie wanted to play the mini golf course at Union Station. I have no talent for golf or any other athletic endeavor but is was easy to play along with her. What I really liked, though, was looking down on the players from on high while we were on the wheel. Could I cause someone's ball to tilt a tiny bit into a trap?          

MORE FROM UP THERE

Another photo from the top of the St. Louis Wheel. What was the train shed of Union Station is in the foreground. The building with the pitched roof and tower was the head house of the station, now a fancy hotel. If you look closely you can see our second, antique Ferris wheel, just to the left of a radio/TV broadcast tower. It's mounted on the roof of the City Museum.               

EYE FAKE

I've posted pictures of the right/south side of this building before (e.g., https://tinyurl.com/dvp3r6vh) but not so much the west side. This photo, taken from the top of our Ferris wheel, shows a building that started out as a shoe warehouse (we used to make more shoes than anybody) and later became vacant. It was rehabbed into a combination of a hotel and condos. The trompe l'oeil facade was part of the rehab project and has held up well.            

EVERYBODY HAS A WHEEL

It seems like just about every city has a Ferris wheel these days. We actually have two and you can see one from the other, but the second is an antique and much smaller, https://tinyurl.com/29vvsbpy. I've seen some very long lines here but it was remarkably uncrowded on the day I took Ellie to Union Station. Got some good shots from up high, which I'll come to.               

HOUSEKEEPING

Our aquarium is not up there in the rankings for size and scope. There is one main tank with lots of species, along with several smaller containers. Ellie and I spotted these divers who had what looked like a vacuum and scrub brushes. She wanted to know what they were doing. A staff member told us they were cleaning food debris and fish poop. It's a tough job but someone has to do it.                  

BFFs

BFF is an acronym that my granddaughter and children her age use for Best Friends Forever. It may be aspirational but it's a sweet sentiment. Now that school is out for the summer, when her mom has to work and she is at our house it sometimes falls to me to keep her occupied. On Thursday, she and I went to St. Louis Union Station, once one of the great railway junctions of America. That went kaput, of course, but it has been redeveloped into a fancy hotel and a large, overpriced, entertainment center catering to families.  

The first thing she wanted to do was the aquarium. Not huge but fun for kids of her age. She was fascinated by these very friendly turtles who perhaps intended to be BFFs.              

HE FLOATS THROUGH THE AIR WITH THE GREATEST OF EASE

Going through some other recent folders until I can get back out on the street.  Besides  the aquarium, Union Station has a ropes course/zip line/aerial challenge feature.It's scary but perfectly safe. People are suspended  in a strong harness, shown here, connected by a heavy cable to an overhead track. You couldn't fall if you tried. All comers are welcome, even if you are not as lithe as the daring young man on the flying trapeze.                                                

WE FINALLY GET TO THE AQUARIUM

A century ago our main railway station was one of the great junctions of North America. We all know what happened to passenger rail service with the coming of the automobile and airlines. Union Station was a work of magnificent urban architecture, something like a fantasy German castle. The last train left in 1978 and the place went dark.

There have been a couple of attempts to repurpose it. The headhouse became a gorgeous hotel, which endures. The area out toward the train shed was turned into a dining and shopping venue. It failed after the novelty wore off. Now it is full of unusual entertainments and doing well. There is a grand Ferris wheel, seen here before. I won't mention all the other attractions but the main one is an aquarium, something St. Louis never had. It's about three years old and we had not visited. Reviews were mixed: not that big, overpriced (that's for sure).

Ellie and I went yesterday because the kid needed something to do. There were many children's activities. It was great for a seven year old and her photographer grandfather. Maybe not so much for adults by themselves.                

The More I Think About It . . .

Late post today. We were out last night at opening night of our Shakespeare In The Park festival. Great production of Henry IV (they're doing Henry V, too) but it was so cold that we left at intermission. When we got home I started to prepare this but fell asleep over my laptop. It gets harder to keep the batteries charged, doesn't it? 

This is more of the light show in Union Station. The good news is that it's likely to pull people in and spend some money. The shopping/dining area under the train shed adjacent to the main building has been a flop. Not enough traffic. it was never enough to be a destination. Most of the original tenants left and what remains is tawdry. The display on the barrel vault might help.

On the other hand, it wrecks the grandeur of the space. If you look at the link in yesterday's post, you see something nearly perfect. The red chairs and elegant club-head lamps are gone. The new seating is gray. There is a column at each end of the hall holding light projectors. They often block the view of the ends of the barrel vault, so beautiful in their symmetry. For comparison, think about the effect of such a show in other grand interior spaces, like the dome of the U. S. Capitol or inside the spiral of the Guggenheim Museum.

So money and mass taste win again, but without the money the building would never have been restored in the first place.
                               

Light Show

Take a look at this post about Union Station from three years ago. Just a stunning space. The hotel got a new owner a couple of years ago that made another large investment in the property. The Great Hall has been redecorated - not for the better IMHO - with a big, unexpected addition. For 4 or 5 minutes at every hour a light show is projected onto the barrel vault. It was somewhere between spectacular and cheesy. I admit to being fascinated but afterward if felt very inappropriate to the dignified grandeur of the room.

I'll be running with this a little further. You can form your own opinion.

     

Allegory

We move inside Union Station. It was the world's largest and busiest passenger rail station when it opened in 1894. (Not any more! Ever been to Sinjuku in Tokyo?) This stained glass window is over the main street entrance. It is an allegory of the American railways with San Francisco on the laft, New York on the right and St. Louis in the middle. 

The Great Hall has been transformed in a recent renovation (not that it was bad before). More about that tomorrow.

I got some time to walk around downtown Indy at lunchtime today and I was impressed. Modern, attractive and with many facilities. It's the center of Indiana state government and that seems to provide a steady economic anchor.