The Pavillions Of Tower Grove Park

Tower Grove Park has eleven (I think) pavilions for the public's use. Families and groups can reserve them for any kind of get together. Many of them were built during the 1870's. They all have different designs.

This is the start of what I hope will be a series of posts about each of them. The Chinese Pavilion is a bit of a fantasy but not all that different from the style we saw years ago at the Summer Palace outside of Beijing.                 

My Favorite Park

If you visit here you will see all kinds of publicity about Forest Park. It's one of the city's gems, site of the 1904 World's Fair, bigger than Central Park in New York and home of the zoo, art museum, history museum and Muni Opera, which stages outdoor performances of Broadway shows through the summer.  But the one I love the most is to the southeast.

Tower Grove Park is still pretty big, 289 acres (1.17 km²), but it is so quiet, so peaceful. No golf courses and rugby games like in Forest Park.  Except for a couple of festivals held there, it's never crowded.  Visitors can walk a mile and a half from one end to the other through the beautiful old trees. If that is too far, you can sit and rest. No trouble finding a seat.           

Goin' To Kansas City

Amtrak, our national passenger railroad network, runs just a line or two over from the MetroLink platform seen yesterday. It's westbound, so it's going to Kansas City. 

Amtrak, like our local transit system, leaves something to be desired. We can take it from here to Chicago or Kansas City but it's really slow. The network is better in the northeast between Washington and Boston but that's where population is most concentrated. Amtrak can't hold a candle to the trains in Europe or Japan (Japan's transportation system is incomparable) but we just don't have the population density. Too many big, empty spaces. With air service, why would you want to take a train from, say, here to Denver or San Francisco to Seattle?

How I've loved the TGV and the Shinkansen. But here we drive or fly.                

In Need Of Direction

Below the fancy new bus stop seen yesterday, down by the railroad tracks, a family waits for the MetroLink train. The only sign they need will be on the front of the train, stating how far into the Illinois suburbs the next train goes.

Many of us could use a sign. It's just so hard figuring out where to direct yourself on your own.

Our transit system leaves something to be desired. The light rail system is in a squiggly Y shape. We could use several more lines but no one has the will or the money. There are some rush hour commuters but, for the most part, poor people use public transit and everyone else drives. For me to take the system to work, I'd have to drive 10 minutes to a park and ride lot for the train. The whole trip would take two to three times as long as using my car. Mrs. C and I like public transit. I was riding the NY subway alone by 12 and we use transit everywhere in the world we can (the Paris and Tokyo metros are marvels). Just not a very good option here.                           

Grand

STL has had a simple light rail system for a number of years. The tracks were put on existing railroad rights of way when possible to save money. In the city center, they were put on the edge of a big rail yard running under Grand Boulevard, a major north-south artery through the city.

Some time later the city tore down and replaced the viaduct on Grand over the tracks. A fancy bus-rail interchange was built, with the buses upstairs on the bridge. Down below tomorrow.
                       

Salman Rushdie In St. Louis

The first of Salman Rushdie's novels to get attention, Midnight's Children, didn't catch me. When it was published in 1981 to enormous acclaim, I had one and five year old children and a growing law practice. When The Satanic Verses was published seven years later, everyone heard about the fatwā calling for Rushdie's death issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran. I bought a copy of the book and was completely sucked in.

By that time I had only a passing acquaintance with magical realism through the work of Gabriel García Márquez. As I started reading The Satanic Verses I was astonished by the victim of a high-altitude airliner bombing floating safely to earth, arriving without a bruise in Ellowen Deeowen. It  took me the longest time to understand that. Sound it out, slowly.

I became a Rushdie fan for life and have read almost all his books. On June 11, our glorious Opera Theatre of St. Louis will present the world premier of a work based on Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, a tale of love, betrayal and revenge. We've been subscribers for at least 35 years. As an out-of-town newspaper review said a couple of years ago, if you want to see the future of opera, go to St. Louis. Rushdie, the composer Jack Pirla and Opera Theatre's general director Timothy O'Leary discussed the work yesterday at The Sheldon Concert Hall. What an afternoon. Rushdie has gotten older, balder and broader of beam but you couldn't miss the discussion about whether 50 shades of something could be turned into an opera.  

Mrs. C and I will be at opening night.

Chill

 

People hanging out in and around the Grand Lagoon in Forest Park on a freakishly warm winter day. The area is so big you can't cover it all in a photo except with an aerial shot (like this). We earthbound photographers have to go for details.                                         

Hey, Salman Rushdie is in town. Opera Theatre of Saint Louis is doing a stage version of Shalimar The Clown this spring. He will be speaking about it this afternoon and we have tickets. I'm a big Rushdie fan and I think I've read all his novels, currently on his most recent, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty Eight Days (which is to say, a thousand and one nights). Hope they allow photographs.