28. The Lindell Hotel

In Tower Grove, there are stones set up to look like ruins. They are. But they aren't from there. They're from the Lindell Hotel, which burned or was destroyed somehow, and remains of the hotel were trucked to Tower Grove and set up along a pool. With a fountain. And ducks.



It's strange how odd things become everyday when they become home. When we came here to take our wedding photos, it was bizarre: why was this in a park? What the heck is this??

But now we bike past them all the time. And tour buses filled with wedding parties wait for their turn to take photos.

18. Sleeping Porch

When I was very young, we lived on South Grand. We lived in a four-family flat building, with four little shotgun style apartments and a center staircase in the front and one in the back. It was a two-bedroom apartment, with a closed in porch off the back bedroom (my bedroom at the time).

When my college roommate moved to Magnolia St., to a two-family flat, they also had a closed in porch off the small back bedroom. And when Mike signed the lease on his first (and later my first) apartment, it was a tiny 1 bedroom, three room shotgun in a four-family building, but it also had that closed in porch.

And I remember thinking, "what, is this some sort of weird 1910 excuse for a three-season room? Some sort of bonus space?" Why on earth would you build a porch off the back bedroom and then close it in with the same windows the rest of the apartment had? It wasn't added on later, and it wasn't closed in later. Windows all around, 8 total--well, 9, really, because the back bedroom it sat against had a window out onto the porch, too.

My great-aunt Sarah explained it to me, finally, the year I lived with her. St. Louis has had miserable summers as long as she can remember (and even though she'd be scandalized to read this in print, she is 92 years old). Those unheated, uninsulated rooms on the backs of the brick houses were sleeping porches. In the heat of the summer, they were the first defense against the sleepless humid nights in the city.

Of course, when the porches themselves got too hot, folks slept in the park. In the park.

I thought about this phenomenon when our air conditioning went out this week. We were in the middle of a strong summer heat wave and the temperature inside of our house started really creeping up. We have a second story porch, but it isn't blocked in or even screened. It has a regular railing and a teensy bit of a slope towards the outside edge. I don't think I'd sleep there at this point.

We made it through the two days without a problem, using a spare room AC unit we usually have up in the attic. But it reminded me that I want that porch in working order sometime soon. It's been three years of talking about it. Right about on schedule, Wissinger-wise.

13. Marbles

My house is 104 years old. I used to think it was 105, but the land was bought in 1904 and the house built in 1905. So my title search/abstract that Mary gave us when we moved in is for the land, not necessarily the house. The folks who owned it first, the Zieglers, owned it for only two years--I can only assume they were the buildesr.

Since then, three families. I've lived here 11 years.. The other two families, the Woltjens and the Kimpler-Murphy-Chapman clan (the Widow Kimpler became the Widow Chapman became the Widow Murphy and then she died, leaving the house to her daughter Mary), take up the remaining 91 years. I know very little about them, and what I do know isn't very complimentary. Mrs. Murphy ran the place as a boarding house. We still have deadbolts (or the holes from the removed deadbolts) on the bedroom doors. There was a makeshift kitchen in the second floor back bedroom (now part of the bathroom). The butler's pantry was ravaged and left as a 3/4 bath with the worst fixtures I've ever seen in any house. When Mrs. Murphy died, and Mary inherited the house, she let her indigent brother live in the basement. She didn't do anything really bad to the house, really. She had the kitchen redone in 1980; our bedroom and the living and dining rooms were given new ceilings around that time. None of it is really that great, though, and every time we change something, I think about how there's one fewer reminder of the Chapman-Murphy mistakes. Like when I finally painted over our hideous bedroom wallpaper.

There's not much left from the former residents these days. A heating oil tank in the basement is hardly sentimental. We haven't mustered the energy to rehab that butler's pantry bathroom, and so we just shut the door for now. That's about it.

But every spring I kneel down in the garden or in the yard, and out pops a marble. Way in back where I grow tomatoes. Under the back porch as I pull up the Virginia creeper vine. When I helped my grandmother plant daffodils. When I put in my two peonies. Front and back yards, one or two each year.

Mary Chapman, I must remember, was born and raised here along with her brothers. They weren't always indigent alcoholics. The Pelikanos family lived two doors down. I'm sure they had a bunch of kids. Are the marbles from the 60s, played with by my father's contemporaries, or are they from the 20's, shot across a dirt playing field by boys my grandfather's age now? I don't know how to appraise marbles like I might a quilt. But I liked this little literal souvenir, and so I kept them in a jar in my kitchen window.

My mom noticed them at some point and thought I was collecting them with some purpose. She picked some up at an antique mall. Now, I have a problem with collections. I love little things. So I didn't suppress this. Only about a third of my marbles are from my yard, but I know which ones are, for the most part.

I held the belief that these were unique to my experience somehow. There are marbles in my yard. This is special. Then I helped my sister move from a two-family flat on Tholozan, and as I was getting directions to the new place, one foot in the car, I looked down. A little orange and white marble, not new, was wedged between the dirt and the curb, exposed by a table leg that had scraped against the ground.

It made me want to take a giant rake to south city and find all the remnants of childhood underneath the daylilies and juniper bushes.

11. Parishes

We were standing in Soulard Market. We were in town, visiting my grandparents, and my mom and dad took us down to Soulard. It's a farmers market (and produce resellers market, I mean, they have bananas and avocados there, too), ancient in St. Louis terms (opened in 1779), filled with all sorts of characters. But that's a post for another time.

So we were there. I was twelve, I think, and an older man was talking to my parents, trying to sell them whatever he had at the moment (I think it was a whole box of cabbage). They weren't interested, but my mom got to talking to him about how we were in town from Dallas, but that she and my dad had grown up here.

"Oh," he said to her. "What parishes?"

"Immaculate Heart of Mary for me, All Souls for Terry," was her response. He mentioned where he'd grown up down on the south side--St. Cecilia's, I think.

I thought nothing of this.

Now that I've lived other places and been to other places and realized the whole world isn't Catholic, this strikes me as very odd. That old man didn't know my parents were Catholic, but he asked them what parish they grew up in. Because it didn't matter, in my parents' generation and before, whether you were Catholic or not--you knew what parish you lived in. It was a geographical marker as much as a place of worship (especially if you weren't Catholic).

Houston doesn't act this way; Georgia and Dallas don't have enough Catholic parishes to do this. And nowadays, I don't think even Catholics obey rules of parish geography. We just go to church where we feel comfortable. Right? And we tell people where we live by neighborhood or suburb (All Souls, for instance, could have been "Overland").

Nobody ever asked me what parish I lived in, unless we were already talking about church, until last year. The woman who runs the Irish Dance school we go to had a conversation with me--it turns out she knew my grandmother and her friends and so forth. My German last name dropped away and I became Bridgett BLAKE again. And then she asked, "But you're down in South City now, right?"

I nodded, amused by all this.

"What parish do you live in?"

I told her. And then she rattled off the (maiden names) of the people she knew in my parish. Didn't ask if I attended that parish. The fact that I lived there was enough.

I live in St. Pius V parish, now. When I moved here, I lived in St. Francis de Sales. But now, de Sales is an intentional parish (the Latin mass is said there), and St. Pius V took over its geographical boundaries. Now, Pius goes from Grand to the river. Not easy to pin down location with that. With fewer parishes due to the south side reorganization, I would guess that this question dies a quiet death, to be replaced with the more direct "where do you live?" or "what neighborhood?"

But I still think about places in terms of what church is there. Shaw is synonymous with Margaret of Scotland. Bevo is St. John the Baptist. St. Joan of Arc, Our Lady of Sorrows, St. Anthony. I can envision the typical architecture of the houses that fall in their boundaries. And parishes that are no more--St. Henry or Holy Family, for instance--still have a fuzzy area associated with them.

Now, besides the Presbyterian church that houses my kids' school, and the Lutheran church on the corner, I couldn't tell you what any given protestant church is close to a neighborhood. Of course, protestants don't tend to focus so much on geography as Catholics. Anybody can go to this or that Methodist Church, but there was a time when you couldn't be a member of a parish you didn't live in without the pastor's permission. It becomes ingrained. Even to the point that it spills over to your protestant neighbors.

5. Sidewalk

Elliot says that places that don't have sidewalks do so to keep the poor people away. This used to make me laugh until I spent more time in suburbs and realized that, yup, sidewalks are few and far between. Not only in the residential areas, but near the strip malls and commercial districts. Huh.

Here there are poor people, obviously. I technically live in the inner city, although it doesn't look like it because "inner city" has many shades of gray that suburban dwellers (at least those who dwell there out of fear of the inner city) do not see. Yes, people are poor here--63118 has an estimated 35% of its population below the poverty line, which, if you live here long enough, know is a big fat lie. It should be much higher, since it's based on a false assumption of how people spend their money these days. 0f the estimated 30,000 people who live in my zip code, that's approximately 10,500 people living on not enough money.

But this is about sidewalks.

Our sidewalks are busy little places. There's a bus stop at the end of the block, so we do have foot traffic back and forth. Usually the same faces. And the park draws people west down our street with their dogs, to the dismay (or excitement?) of my visually impaired rottweiler. But most of the busy comes from children. There are 26 children under the age of 12 on our block, with one on the way. Everybody knows everybody else--there are no strangers hanging out on the stoops and sidewalks here. Passing through, but not staying.

Hopscotch, of course, makes an appearance. Picnics, too. Bikes and scooters fly by, making my bare toes nervous in the summertime. Lots of digging in the tree lawns leads to small piles of dirt and rocks. An occasional smashed brick. One day, Brent walked out to find a large orange traffic cone sitting on the sidewalk in front of his house. No one claimed it, and so it's part of gangway scenery now, brought out when needed for obstacle courses.

Being so close to Grand, trash blows up our way sometimes, and so there will be a mysterious hot-fries package lying on the sidewalk. Passers-by will also litter, always the cheapest brands of beer for us.

Every snowfall produces dads on the sidewalks, shoveling paths. Brent meets up with Mike meets up with Colin. If you're out first, you try to do at least a one-shovel-wide rudimentary start down the length from Ralph's to Corey's. Mike, as I said, will shovel, but so will I (I'm also the only wife/mom who mows grass, but that's another story). I like getting the heart rate up and moving the snow, since here in St. Louis, snow is a soft blanket of 3-6 inches, not anything scary or big. And the sidewalk I'm in charge of is 36 feet long. Not much.

I'm glad the developer, back in 1903-1905, didn't opt to copy Compton Heights and eliminate sidewalks from his plan. I think they make our street more alive. Without them, the kids would be in backyards, cloistered away from each other in their own private spaces. And Dara wouldn't have much reason to bark. And how she loves to bark.

2. Stoop

In my "About Me" section below, I mention sitting on my south city stoop drinking coffee and chatting with neighbors. This is the view from the stoops on my block, down towards Grand Ave. You can see the double set of steps--the "stoop" in my definition is that first set that goes from the sidewalk to the level of the front yard. The second set goes up to the porch.

The first set of steps is the line between public and private space. Businesses leave fliers in the handrail of the first set of steps, but rarely come up onto the porch to deliver them. The mail, of course, is delivered at the front door (which is becoming more and more rare in America these days), but most interaction happens at the first set of steps.

We sit and watch kids play from there--the 5 or 6 moms who either live on my side of the block or know that's where the action is. And yes, I often have a coffee mug in my hand. The kids picnic on the steps, or right above or below them, smoothing out a blanket and producing picnic food from each house--peanut butter sandwiches, carrot sticks, leftovers from the night before, hummus and tortilla, fruit in season.

The stoops on my block are over 100 years old--the western half of the block was built in 1903 and 1904, and my house was the first one in 1905 on this side. The concrete is not in good shape. Mary's is crumbling dangerously, and mine is starting to eat out from underneath. Weeds grow in the cracks, and Trisha comes out with hot vinegar water to kill them (I pluck them from their homes and toss them into the street to be swept away on street cleaning day).

There are intermittent steps, too, that don't lead to the front doors of our houses, but to the gangways between them. This produces a cascade of stairs, I suppose you could call it, heading slowing down the hill towards Grand. The houses are so close, we can spread out between two or three sets of steps and still manage a conversation easily between kid noises and dramas.

It was on Mary's stoop that I sat when the gang walked up our street and attacked Joe and my husband. It was on Trisha's stoop that we ate take out ice cream on the hot 2006 power outage days. Standing on George's stoop, he told us about his wife's cancer diagnosis. We met Elizabeth's new baby from Korea after she brought her down to the stoop (again, the outside world meeting the inside).

Mine has the best shade of the houses on our side where we tend to congregate--that black oak and sweetgum keep the front of my house pretty cool, while Mary has lost a maple and Trisha an ash in the past three years. But it also is prone to mosquitoes due to the ivy growing right next to it. Since they don't bother me, that's where I usually start out on any given warm afternoon. I migrate, though, because conversation is more important than shade.