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St. Louis / June 9-11, 2017
Seen this trip:Union Station & environs,
the Chatillon-Demenil House and neighborhood,
Jefferson Barracks VA Cemetery & Oak Hill Cemetery
Opera Theater of St. Louis.
See also links for Webster Groves & Clayton on the Travel page
Opposite Union Station, Carl Milles, "The Meeting of the Waters" (Mississippi, Missouri), 1931.

The two rivers are shown as if at a marriage ceremony (left) that is attended by lesser figures (below, right). There's no water these days, since the structure will soon be undergoing repairs.


 
 
Inside Union Station there is a glorious collection of art in glass and plaster

 
 
  .
 
Ladies of the Light:

San Francisco, St. Louis, and New York

Looking around downtown

 
Soulard Market, below, left, with an exterior based on the Foundling Hospital in Florence (by Brunelleschi, 1420s; see below, right)
 
  The Chatillon-Demenil House  
(photo on left & first 3 interior photos courtesy of the museum's website).
It is hard to see from the outside, but the present building was built around a smaller, earlier house.
The later addition of a kitchen is easy to spot, last picture below, left.
 

The device to the left in the middle of the desktop is a "reader roll," 2 spools onto which people could paste newspaper columns containing serialized fiction. Not a great success, we were told, since the paste dried and the newsprint crumbled, but a lovely in wood all the same.

 
The 3rd (formerly servants' quarters) now holds a huge collection of memorabilia from the 1904 World's Fair.
 
 
The exit, next to an addition that created the attached kitchen (door to right). Right: what was once a river view, before billboards and the brewery.
 

The neighbhorhood of the Demenil house.
The family's home originally had extensive river views, but the Lemp Brewery restricted them. The brewery failed to survive Prohibition, and the area became a shoe factory with a tannery. The family was forced out by the smells. The brick buildings that remain are very handsome. A little background from a book on St. Louis history:

By the turn of the [20th] century, only nineteen of the 40 city breweries survived. Lemp and Anheuser-Bush had become the city's leading beer producers. They succeeded by gains from scale and technology. Bush introduced pasteurized beer in 1873, and both companies invested in refrigerated rail cars, which enabled them to ship their brands nationally. Anhauser-Bush survived Prohibition by selling commercial yeast, hops as animal food, and a variety of soft drinks and near-beers, but Lemp was ruined. The Italian Renaissance-style [of the Lemp] complex still stands, but is now used only for storage." (Elizabeth McNulty, St. Louis Then & Now [2000].)
Oak Hill Cemetery & Jefferson Barracks Veterans Cemetery
 

Jefferson Barracks
 


Opera Theater of St. Louis
We saw "The Grapes of Wrath" (Ricky Ian Gordon) and "The Trial" (Philip Glass)
Coming in 2018: La Traviata, Regina, An American Soldier, & Orfeo and Euridice
 
A picnic supper, lovely grounds

June 2017