Vacation Days 2-3: St. Louis

The old federal courthouse in St. Louis. It's a building framed by the arch. It's also where the court case that eventually became Dred Scott, Plaintiff in Error v. Sanford was first heard. 

Driving to St. Louis consumed our whole first day of vacation. It was the first of four long travel days we have planned. Another comes Thursday when we trek from Omaha to Rapid City. The third will be from Medora to Willmar. The final one is the odyssey home. In the Odyssey.

Ugh. What a dry way to start out a post. Let's talk about what we did with the day and a half we did have in St. Louis.

The Wainright Building in the downtown. First skyscraper west of the Mississippi.

The new federal courthouse. The kids were struck by its unusual design. 

St. Louis is a neat town. Different from others I've been to. I'll be candid, the downtown seems to be a little bit in limbo. The Rams' decision to move from the city means that a particular corner of the downtown is missing a significant tenant. Also, there's a good number of government buildings clustered down there, which means on non-work hours there's not a lot going on.

But the city is about more than the downtown. And "downtown" is a bit more undefined than it is in, say, Philly or Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is the better example (it and St. Louis are similar in size). We drove to other parts of the city Saturday afternoon and found some really neat neighborhoods. I guess what I'm saying is that the things to see in the city aren't as centralized as I had expected.

Busch Stadium as seen from the observation deck in the arch. 

Caroline and Sherry look out an observation deck window.

In the tram heading up. 

Sam and Caroline await the arrival of the tram, car two. In some ways it felt like we were in a science fiction film.

Our first priority was seeing the Arch which is part of a National Park Service site memorializing westward expansion. Our morning at the Gateway Arch National Park exceeded my expectations. There's a museum at the foot of the arch that does a rather comprehensive job setting westward expansion into it's context. It's a new museum and the interpretation is top notch, the exhibits fairly interactive.

The arch itself is a fantastic structure to visit. A tram made up of claustrophobic five-person pods whisks you up the 600-some feet to the observation deck. I'll admit that I felt a bit of panic as we got into the pod for what was advertised as a four-minute ride. However, the door to our pod was glass and it actually helped me to see staircases, wires, and other artifacts of construction go by the window. The view from the top was superb.

The Park Service also makes it a point to do some interpretation about the Dred Scott case at that site. Of course I enjoyed that, seeing the complexities of that case, getting some perspective and context on why the suit happened and worked its way through the courts in the way that it did. I don't know how much Sherry and the kids enjoyed that, though.

The Cathedral Basilica.

The interior, looking toward the rosette window above the vestibule.

After lunch we ventured out to the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, a surprisingly wondrous church. The outside featured a Romanesque style but the interior was very Byzantine in appearance. It made me think of a distinct feature of architecture in St. Louis: a lot of fancy tile work. Buildings just seem to feature a bit more ornamentation than I've seen elsewhere. I wonder if this speaks to a certain immigrant tradition: the city was perhaps a magnet for craftsmen who plied that field.

I think this was what they called the Biblical Garden in the temperate zone. 

Stumbling upon a vintage base ball game at a park and taking a stroll through a botanical garden rounded out our day. I don't know how this happened, but our kids love botanical gardens. Strange, huh.

Our nighttime activity saw us go to a site many told us we had to do, the City Museum. It's an old factory that has been converted into a menagerie of mazes, tunnels, and challenges. Supposedly all of it comes from recycled or repurposed materials. It's a popular attraction and a lot of folks were there. We might have erred in going in the evening, for we didn't have as much energy to crawl, squirm, and otherwise struggle in an impossible environs as we should.

The one exhibit deemed too unsafe to be open. 

We crawled through that one plane. Terrifying.

And now I seem to be waning in the energy to write more about our St. Louis adventure. So I'll close for now. There's more to talk about though, for Sunday morning we visited something pretty neat before leaving the city.

In radio, that's called a tease. See you soon.