Look Up While Walking Downtown

I was standing in front of the Mississippi Valley Trust Company in downtown St. Louis while leading a walking tour.  A guy on the tour asked me to tell him about the mermaids.  I thought he was pulling my leg. 

Mermaids in downtown St. Louis?  Really??

Then he pointed over my head, and there were two mermaids on the building we were standing in front of.  I was stunned, because I have been leading tours of downtown for 15 years, and I had never noticed the mermaids.

I had not noticed the mermaids because I had never looked up while standing in front of the Mississippi Valley Trust Company.  What else had I missed because I had not looked up while walking downtown? 

The county library had asked me to give a lecture on downtown architecture.  I decided that the theme of my talk would be: Don't Pass Me By: Look Up While Walking Downtown".

So, I took a camera downtown, and started photographing the tops of buildings.  I made some discoveries.

I discovered that there was a soldier in a gas mask on the Soldiers Memorial.

I discovered buildings that mimicked their neighbors.  The new AT&T building has setbacks at the top, just like the old AT&T building next to it.

I discovered a parking garage with giant stars of David.  Or maybe they were hexagrams: one showing air pointing up and earth pointing down, and another showing fire pointing up and water pointing down.  I will never know for sure because the garage was built around 1915, and the architects are long gone.

I discovered that sometimes architects drew your eyes upward by varying the rhythm of windows.  I photographed the four-story-tall Tiny Bar Building --- not just because I know the owner, but because each of the four stories has a different window pattern.

Mostly, I discovered that nineteenth-century buildings liked to have an ornate roofline, mid-twentieth-century buildings liked to have no roofline, and contemporary buildings like to have a little bit of flair.

The contemporary Metropolitan Building has a little bit of flair:

The mid-twentieth-century modern Laclede Gas Building has no roofline at all:

The nineteenth-century Bee Hat Building has an ornate roofline:

The Bee Hat Building made me worry.  I was giving a talk at a public library.  Would a picture of buxom ladies staring down at pedestrians offend some people in the audience?  I worried that I would be kicked off the public library lecture circuit.

I took the risk.  I included the Bee Hat Building in my PowerPoint show.  I put my show on a memory stick, and went off to the public library to fire up the projector.

I waited for the audience to arrive, still worrying about the Bee Hat photo.

The first people to arrive were two women in their sixties.  They came early so they could get front row seats.  When they sat down, one of the women looked at me, and asked, with great anticipation, “Are you going to show us the ladies with the big boobs?”

I stopped worrying.

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Ringo Starr sings "Don't Pass Me By" - a 3.5 minute YouTube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lkkRB0bGhU

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NOTE: Doug's best stories have been collected into a book: Puppy Out Of Breath.  Price = $11.  Send an email to ParadiseDouglas at gmail.com to find out how to purchase a copy by mail.