High Voltage Has Disappeared

It was the first tourbus I had ever rented.  There were thirty-six people on board who were looking forward to seeing all the things I had promised them on a tour of the Near North Riverfront.  This was a working neighborhood in St. Louis, five miles long, and deserted on a Saturday.

The bus started up, crossed under an Interstate, and whizzed by the first place I wanted to talk about: a motorcycle place that creates “ratted out track bikes.”  I realized that I had asked the bus company for a bus with a bathroom on board, but I had not asked the bus company for a driver who could read my mind.

The two-hour tour became a dance: I had to tell the driver how fast to drive, where to turn, and when to stop --- meantime using the bus microphone to tell people what we were passing, while trying to remember that I was facing a different direction from the passengers and that my right was their left…

Among the things I had promised people that they would see:

            Where the uranium was refined for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima

            A shredder that could turn a Ford F-150 into tiny strips of metal

A dive bar that featured spaghetti wrestling on Thursday nights

            2 water towers built by Walt Whitman’s brother

            A dive bar where you could drive your motorcycle right into the bar

            A street that turned into a drag strip at night

            The locale where Kier Dullea (of 2001: A Space Odyssey) made his first movie

            The site of what had been St. Louis’ largest Indian mound

            The street corner where the leader of McGinty’s Rats was machine gunned to death in 1943

I also promised people that we would make two photo stops: at High Voltage and at American Timber Salvage.

Things were going fine until we hit two enemies of efficient touring: trains and entrancement.

The industries at the Near North Riverfront don’t work on Saturdays, but the railroads do.  This neighborhood is like a model railroad layout: the trains are remote controlled and have no humans on them, not even an engineer.  And the trains are long.  The tourbus had to stop and wait and wait for a train to pass.

The bus parked at the levee and we all walked through the floodgate to see Missouri’s first documented Underground Railroad site. In 1855, six slaves rowed across the Mississippi River here, hoping to obtain freedom on the other side.  

We walked to the Freedom Crossing Interpretive Center which was in an old Coast Guard station, staffed by enthusiastic AmeriCorps volunteers.  The center had a platform where you could overlook the river.  The tour people lingered on the platform, entranced by the history of the spot and entranced by the swiftly moving river called “The Father of Waters.”

I had to plead with people break their trance and walk back to the bus; we had more to see, including St. Louis’ most colorful building: High Voltage Tattoo.

The bus continued on.  We saw a place to buy used school busses, an abandoned railroad trestle that will be turned into an elevated park like the Promenade Plantee in Paris, a Buddhist compound, and the sculpture studio that created Bad Outlet (an educational mascot for Pacific Gas and Electric).

Over the microphone, I read a review from Yelp written by Emily of San Diego: “I have never been so excited to have a taxicab drop me off in front of a nondescript building in a desolate industrial area in a town I am unfamiliar with.”  The bus then drove by Smokio’s, the barbeque joint that Emily was praising.

I got the passengers pumped up.  We are now three blocks from High Voltage.  We are two blocks away!  Get your cameras ready!!  You will want to take photos of High Voltage!!!

The bus stopped.  I gasped.

High Voltage had disappeared since the last time I saw it.  The once-colorful building was now painted a bland tan.  No more medieval flanged maces.  No more tattoo needle dripping blood.  No more clown and devil flanking the doorway.  Disappeared.

It was a lesson for me.  A tourguide’s goal is to show people things that are new to them.  But a city is always changing, and there will be things that are new to the tourguide.

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

The Lactose-Intolerant Bus

I have been leading walking tours of downtown St. Louis on Saturdays for a decade now.  After a few years of downtown tours, I decided to branch out and lead walking tours of various neighborhoods in St. Louis.

This year, I really branched out: I chose a neighborhood that was too big for walking.  I needed to rent a bus.

The neighborhood was the Near North Riverfront, the most isolated neighborhood in St. Louis.  Squeezed between Interstate-70 and the Mississippi River, it is five miles long and only a few blocks wide.  Very much a working neighborhood: 200 companies are situated in the Near North Riverfront, while there are only 550 residents.

With so few residents, nothing is open in the Near North Riverfront on a Saturday.  Therefore, I needed to rent a bus with a restroom.  I went to the bus company, decided on a 36-seat bus, and signed a contract.

Signing a contract opened the door to lots of things to worry about.

I maintain a list of email addresses of people who have been on my previous tours.  I sent out an announcement, and questions flooded into my mind.  What if nobody wants to come on my tour?  What if the bus wasn’t full and I had to subsidize the tour?  What if the bus was full and I had to turn people away?

I set myself up on PayPal so people could pay in advance.

 

Turns out some people hate PayPal.  They sent me checks.  Some people claimed PayPal hates them.  More checks.  Someone uses a computer in a public library and is nervous about PayPal.  One more check.  Some people dawdled about using PayPal.

The bus list finally filled up and people finally paid up.  Now I had a new set of worries.

What if the bus shows up late?  What if the restroom doesn’t work?  What if the air conditioning is faulty?  What if some of the attendees are late? 

My biggest worry: what if someone tries to bring dairy products on board?  I sent out an email to the attendees telling them that beer, wine, and soda were OK, but they could not bring dairy products.

I got an email back saying that I was treating people like grade school children.

So, I had to go into details.  The bus company forbids dairy products.   The reason: The bus sits in a big lot in the blazing sun, and if someone had spilled milk in the bus, the bus would start to stink.  I would be responsible for making the bus rentable again ($95 bucks an hour)...and the bus company had made it clear that they were keeping my credit card number on file just in case.

Came the day of the tour: The weather was good, the bus was on time, and all 36 attendees were on time.  We were ready to visit St. Louis’ most isolated neighborhood with not a single dairy product on board.

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com

Highline And Lowlife

I read that only three cities in the world have one: Paris, New York, and St. Louis. These three cities have parks created from abandoned elevated railroad lines.

When we were in New York in September, we walked New York’s elevated park, called the Highline. Lots of people were walking the Highline. It was great fun to be above ground at second-story level. We could look into buildings. We could look down at New York’s street life: food trucks, street festivals, temporary roller skating rinks, restaurants, art galleries. We could look outward at vistas full of skyscrapers.

The New York Highline changed about every block. Sometimes you walked down the middle in between plantings on both sides. Sometimes you walked on one side and the plantings on the other side were wide enough to almost look like a field. At one point you came across wooden chaise lounges with people sitting on them enjoying the sun.

The plantings amazed me. They appeared to be drought-resistant native plants chosen because they do not need maintenance. These plants were thriving.

Here are 3 Highline photos: the chaise lounges, peeking into a building, a vista of skyscrapers.

The history of New York’s elevated railroad park is inspiring. It was a grass roots effort, first to prevent demolition, then to get the park funded. The history of St. Louis’ elevated railroad park is also inspiring. It was a grass roots effort, promoted by bicyclists.

Last weekend, the dogs and I walked St. Louis’ version of the Highline. It is called the Branch Street Trestle, and the differences with New York’s Highline were profound.

No one else was on the Trestle. It is a paved surface that is uniform block after block. There are no plantings.

The Trestle sits in an area called the Near North Riverfront, which is isolated from the city by an Interstate highway. The area does not have art galleries, street fairs, food trucks, or skating rinks.

The Near North Riverfront is used for storage: road salt, oil drums, strange wrapped things that look like giant sea scallops. Hardly anyone lives there, and very few people work there because you don’t need many workers to maintain storage facilities. However, these few residents and workers must like to drink because you pass a number of seedy bars to get to the Trestle. Actually, “seedy” is too kind a description of these bars.

Here are 3 Branch Street Trestle photos: Petey and Sierra roaming free, giant scallops, a vista of rusty chemical storage tanks.

One reason there were no people on the Trestle is that few people in St. Louis know about it, in spite of the fact that the Trestle leads right to a bridge where you can walk across the Mississippi River and wind up in Illinois. I plan to do some publicity, and when warm weather comes next year, I will lead a walking tour in the Near North Riverfront.

The walking tour will feature the elevated park and the seedy bars, so the name of the tour will be “Highline and Lowlife”.

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  You can purchase a copy at  http://www.puppyoutofbreath.com