Another classmate & friend, who lives in St Louis, generously retuned to Elsah to bring us back into the city, where we had a reservation for our last evening’s hotel…’just across the street from our favorite museum, which we’d planned to visit after making an exploration of the city’s famous Botanic Gardens. Because it was a hot day we happily found shady benches near the Buckminster Fuller geodesic domed tropical greenhouse… the Climatron. There Stephen could comfortably check into a scheduled weekly Zoom call & I could catch-up with my mail after the busy time at the reunion.
After spending a satisfying hour or so inside the tropical spaces of the dome, we discovered we’d lost the time to have lunch at the cafe… but we certainly wanted to see the Japanese garden, having visited so many of such when we were there. This one is still relatively quite young, so we could only imagine how it might evolve after such time as the centuries the ones we saw in Kyoto had been tended. We must come back… this unexpected botanical treasure deserves much more time & attention!
Still, we both were happily anxious to find a Lyft driver who was a lively & fun woman to drive us to the Last Hotel, which, knowing its location in the old shoe manufacturing district, close to the City Museum we were to see next, clued me to understand that this was named for a “shoe last”, instead of an act of desperation! It is a very nice boutique hotel with a timeless lobby spanning spaces defined by handsome 12 foot columns.
The guest rooms are carved out of the industrial space of a shoe factory under the scarred concrete ceilings telling stories inside a lot of drapery to shade the hyper abundance of large industrial windows. We took a morning swim next day before we finished packing for the flight home. All in all it was a good “do”!
ONE UNIQUE MUSEUM…
However, The City Museum is quite another sort of architectural wonder. We would not miss returning here on any visit to the city! We walked almost immediately around the corner to this fabulously quirky & unique museum. This was our third visit. We were introduced to this venue by our cousin Anjana when we visited to attend a Bell Convention. “It is a jungle gym for adults” was her description while acknowledging that this is an all family adventure.
It, too, was a historic shoe factory of 8 stories, now filled with an eclectic variety of collections from any & all possible interests or “tastes”. Much of which might be considered junque… old signage & side-show art. Rooms full of activities for all ages: a gallery filled with innumerable large sponges inviting youngsters to play or build with. There are nooks housing small cafés or ice cream shops. There is an old pipe organ installed in an air shaft. Cases full of oddities like antique porcelain doll parts, for instance.
However, some of these earlier “filler” exhibits seem to be evolving over these years. New consideration & work is constantly being incorporated to finesse this raw mélange since our first visit. Many tubular structures of steel or newly handsome welded iron allow brave souls to pursue clambering adventures, sometimes up or down into other floors. A grander excitement experience is a conveyor/slide, originally designed for sending the shoes down toward other finishing processe, but now rebuilt for allowing humans to slide, on rollers with smooth & swift action all the way several floors to the lobby. This place is certainly a wild adventure!
My strong favorite, from the first visit, is a collection of stone & terracotta details salvaged from demolished buildings in Chicago & St Louis. Originally decorating corners & cornices high above street level… too far out of sight for easy study, these were at first simply rather haphazardly piled in a raw room, but now becoming featured in an evolving state, gradually being imaginably “reinstalled” as exhibits noting the history or becoming parts of venues being readied for weddings or social events.
The upper parts evolve into an amusement park in the sky, with even more adventurous climbing, several plane fuselages & a Ferris wheel!
Such a generously exploratory… & still evolving… public facility! We look forward to a next visit.