A trio of St. Louis classics captures our limited sightseeing time

It’s been eight years since I’ve set foot in my home town. For some people, that would be unremarkable. But before this stint I'd never gone much more than a year without visiting, even though I’ve lived in Europe since the late ‘90s. This was a long gap. As with people you don’t see for a long time, changes were more apparent than they used to be when I returned more frequently. 

On the whole, the differences I saw were positive and suggest the place is prospering. The Chesterfield river bottoms, agricultural in my childhood and under water when I moved away, is almost built out now, with a new outlet mall and a massive double-decker driving range to join the sprawl of retail, restaurants and offices that had already mushroomed there on my last visit. While the outlets are killing off the mall that was a highlight of my youth, built on higher land above the valley, developments around the old building are creating the Chesterfield business district promised when my parents moved there in the early ‘70s. 

Clayton Road, always an East-West artery lined with gracious houses, has transformed with new construction. Gone are many of the classic, rambling St. Louis-style ranch houses sprawling beneath the trees of wooded lots of an acre or more. In have come massive, multi-story mansions. Some have architectural merit, reaching back to my home town’s love of historic European vernacular styles, but many others are horrific, looking more like commercial buildings than residences. And far too many trees have been sacrificed for the explosion in square footage. It will be many years before the road re-gains its sylvan glories.

Downtown looked tidy and well maintained, though locals warned of the continuing disintegration of the City of St. Louis, the rising crime rates within, and warned grimly about going there after dark unless for a baseball game. (In this, at least, the divide between county and city hasn’t changed, though optimistic developers keep trying.)

Our four nights in the St. Louis area were devoted to family and friends rather than sightseeing, but we did manage to work in a bit of tourism. I was keen to see developments at the Gateway Arch and the Missouri Botanical Garden, and I wanted to introduce my husband to our spectacular Cathedral.

THE GREATEST BYZANTINE CATHEDRAL IN AMERICA

Officially the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, this is one of the grandest churches in the United States and could go head to head on the architectural front with many European giants. Few beyond locals appreciate this however, so outside of services the place is often empty, despite the free entry and well-informed tour guides who will illuminate secrets of the building with their laser pointers.

The church is Romanesque on the outside, Byzantine on the inside and was heavily inspired by the Hagia Sophia. No, the city has no link whatsoever to that style; the cardinal who led construction simply liked it better than gothic. With more than 83,000 square feet of mosaics, it boasts the largest collection of this art form under one roof anywhere outside of Russia. It’s for the rich ornamentation of its walls, ceilings, domes and columns that the Cathedral is best known. 

In fact, it dates from the early 20th century, when St. Louis was a much bigger deal than it is now and its population was almost entirely Roman Catholic thanks to the city’s French Colonial roots.  Breaking ground soon after the St. Louis hosted both the Olympics and the World’s Fair, the Cathedral was a statement to the world of both the city’s position and the power of the church underpinning it. Its floor plan actually owes a heavy debt to the Roman Catholic cathedral in London, which had just opened for worship when St. Louis' church leaders did a grand tour looking for inspiration. Unlike the Londoners, however, St. Louisans didn't run out of money and were able to finish our decorations; Westminster cathedral is a much darker, gloomier place.

St. Louis' cathedral glistens and glimmers like the inside of a jewellery box. Vast tracks of ceiling are covered with gold; pure gold sheets beneath glass that ripples, broken into tiny tesserae. The result is a background that flickers, gleams and moves behind scenes from the bible and the religious history of St. Louis. As the home of all the missionary orders serving the west, we have a lot of it. The canonised nun who founded my school has a prominent pendentive to herself. 

The side chapels are arts & crafts in style, with a more balanced range of mosaic colours as flowers twine up columns and neo-classical design motifs repeat. Perfect to accompany the Tiffany glass in windows and light fixtures. Perhaps most unique is the deep red mosaic ceiling of the side aisle to the right of the altar, meant to convey the blood of Christ and almost hypnotic in the intensity of its shade. The central dome repeats the red as its background but cuts it with gold, to present the heaven gained through the blood. 

I took these wonders for granted as a child, though was always grateful for the visual distractions when masses got too long. Returning with an appreciative, impressed husband in tow reminded me of just how lucky I was to grow up with this.

GATEWAY TO THE WEST
The Cathedral hadn’t changed since I last saw it, but the grounds and museum beneath the Gateway Arch had undergone a radical transformation. The museum here was always good. In fact, once you’d made the trip to the top of the stainless steel structure in its infamous rocking elevators, it was the museum that was worth coming back for. But the entrance … almost tomb-like ramps leading down from either leg … was unimpressive and there was little room for big groups or security. More problematic, a mid-century museum built to glorify Westward expansion by white European settlers, lacking in interactive displays to appeal to youth, was out of step with the modern zeitgeist. Outside, there was the problem of the noisy concrete canyon of a highway that separated the Arch from the rest of the downtown area.

The recent renovation addresses all these problems. The architects have essentially roofed and turfed over the road for a one-block width, creating a new park that connects the vast lawns beneath the arch to the architectural glory of the Old Courthouse. The view both to and from the monuments is vastly improved. There’s now a grand, oval entrance plaza facing the downtown area, but sunken so it’s hidden to the viewer looking uphill from beneath the arch. It’s much more suited to the dignity of St. Louis’ most famous monument, and disperses crowds that overwhelmed the original lobby area.

Instead of occupying a fan-shaped footprint beside the old entry, the museum is now a long corridor linking the new entry facility to the old lobby with the lifts to the Arch’s top. Friends tell me there was much hand-wringing about the “woke agenda” when the new museum was unveiled. I wasn’t bothered. All the stories from my childhood are still here. Jefferson is still honoured for buying the Louisiana Purchase, Louis & Clark are still heroes who went on a grand adventure, and the settlers who set off from St. Louis are still commended for their bravery and determination that reinforced the American dream.

There are just more stories here, and more perspectives. The most noticeable increase is about the Native Americans who already lived here, both how they helped the new society and how they lost out. We explore the reality that the identity of the aggressor in the Mexican-American war depends on your starting viewpoint. Going further back, we’re reminded that the French and Spanish colonial roots of the area made for a startlingly diverse society.

We also get more exciting and more interactive displays. There’s a fantastic new model of the St. Louis riverfront at the height of the steamboat age, with lights on a circuit that give you a sense of day and night.

Whole building facades have been moved inside. Touch screens offer games and quizzes. Social media snappers will love the photo opportunities on the back of a Westward-bound train or in a colonial trading canoe. There’s even an exact-sized replica of the top of the arch, complete with true-sized windows that show the actual view transmitted by live cameras. So if trips are sold out for the day, or you can’t face the claustrophobic rocking elevators, you can get close to the real thing. Best of all, the the grand tradition of all of St. Louis’ historic cultural attractions, everything but the ride up the arch is free.

SHAW’S GARDEN KEEP’S GROWING
While the Cathedral undoubtably had a role in developing my appreciation for grand European architecture, the Missouri Botanical Garden laid the foundations for my growth into an English gardener. Englishmen are rare amongst the French, Germans, Italians and Irish who dominate my home town’s story, but Sheffield-born Henry Shaw made an outsized contribution for his nationality. Having grown very rich selling English cutlery to settlers heading West from St. Louis, he returned to his motherland for a visit, was impressed with Kew Gardens and thought we should have something similar. The rest is gardening history.


The longer I live in England, the more I appreciate just how British this place is. It’s not just the English woodland garden, the Victorian parterres around Shaw’s house or the formal box hedge garden that, hopefully, will preserve the viability of that British native once the scourge of box blight wipes ours out. Rather, it’s how much the Missouri facility resembles our Royal Horticultural Society gardens: the devotion to teaching, preservation and science; the wide range of styles and nations represented in different gardens within the garden; the facility dedicated to home gardening advice with a series of smaller gardening rooms meant to inspire what you could do at home. And just like RHS Wisley is a multi-million dollar re-development of the entry pavilion. So alike, in fact, I have to wonder if they exchanged planning notes or at least visited our Surrey-based garden for inspiration.

The most noticeable change in St. Louis is that the entry building that once felt like a barrier between you and the garden is now an obvious gateway to it. Instead of entering on one level and going up to another to access the gardens you make the change of levels in front of the building, on ramps through beds that are currently unplanted but promise to be spectacular. A two-story, glasshouse-like entry hall (just like Wisley) takes you straight out to a new forecourt that will be planted with rotating beds of seasonal annuals and grasses (just like Wisley). The new facility has a bigger restaurant, more classrooms and exhibition spaces, a much bigger shop and what looks to be a new glasshouse.

Beloved favourites are still here, too. The Japanese garden looked grand, the climatron showed off its tropical plants beneath its geodesic dome and the tradition of local couples having a photo shoot here to announce their engagement continues. Watching two before the lens on my visit reminded me of our turn 11 and a half years ago.

Unlike the changes at the Arch, the renovations at the Garden are all raw and incomplete, with construction workers still beavering away across the site. It’s going to be magnificent, and my gardening interest demanded I check it out while I’m in town. But, to be honest, it’s still many months away from being in shape for the average tourist. The building needs to be finished, the new glasshouse and forecourt planted and the Victorian camellia house put back in order. (At the moment it’s just a functional storehouse for a lot of plants in pots.) 

I suspect visitors next May will be very lucky. But they won't include me. While I doubt I'll go another eight years before returning home, my time of annual visits is long gone. Who knows what transformations will have taken place before I get back again.