The Spirit of St. Louis

Other than sports and crime, my hometown of Saint Louis, Missouri remains one of America’s best-kept secrets. It’s relatively affordable, commuting is fairly easy, the food is fantastic with so many farms around, and an illustrious past has bestowed the metropolitan area with many more cultural and institutional amenities than most its size.

Nonetheless it’s become a reflexive obligation for local sophisticates to shit on our town, denouncing it as so very backwards because of all those Nazis in the exurbs and even right next door. Some of that is due to depressing historical decline—a century ago St. Louis was a key commercial hub and one of the nation’s premiere cities, before the advent of highways and then globalization rendered most of its industries obsolete.

But I don’t think Clevelanders or many other rust belt denizens expend half the time and energy hating on their neighbors and neighborhoods as many St. Louisans do, especially among suburban social climbers. It’s an attitude that’s festered for decades and turned customary since the death of Michael Brown in 2014, baseless as the “Hands up, don’t shoot” narrative ended up being.

Even as STL punches far above its weight in terms of universities, hospitals, museums et al, it’s still largely a blue-collar place where folks tend to like their beer, brats and baseball more than fine arts or progressive politics. However decent, hard-working and family-oriented, they make easy scapegoats for aspirational elitists to blame for the region being less happening than Chicago or Nashville.

I too long scoffed at St. Louis, desperate to get out, having grown up immersed in books, magazines and TV news mostly from New York. Today, after many years in the big city, I’m much more appreciative of where I come from.

Before I moved to Manhattan, it lived in my imagination as a kaleidoscopic capital of culture and conversation—where the best and brightest convened. That was certainly how NYC intellectuals liked to portray themselves, plus my mother had enjoyed a particularly picturesque ’60s hanging out at Greenwich Village folk clubs and renting on St Marks Place, even coming home one night to find Andy Warhol hitting on her roommate.

I can’t speak to the gritty New York of Lou Reed or Jean-Michel Basquiat, but by the time I arrived circa 2006 the city’s intellectual and cultural life seemed to be running on fumes. Creatives and eccentrics were increasingly priced out, their ramshackle tenements torn down for half-empty high-rises, replaced by upscale professionals and trust fund kids.

There were still gallery openings in Brooklyn and assorted talks up at the 92^nd Street Y, but the colorful old delis and diners and mom ‘n’ pops were dying out quick, superseded by boutiques and chains. The museums were world-class, there were some solid productions on and off Broadway, but it didn’t mean much for day to day quality of life if one weren’t awfully well to do.

And what passed for urbane discourse was rapidly constricting, formerly open-ended lefty bohemianism zeroing in on a feel-good technocratic consensus flattering the wealthy and well-connected. Not that there wasn’t still some sparkling repartee behind closed doors, but that the coin of the realm was increasingly debased: the knowledge class had grown every bit as parochial as any of the flyover nobodies they casually dismissed.

Even as it became my job to promote rising thought leaders and public intellectuals, there was little worth writing home about—just more would-be elites sporting New Yorker tote bags and namedropping people they knew. I seldom got the sense that so many were that interested in truly engaging with issues and ideas; it seemed more about saying the right things to the right connections up the greasy pole to fame and fortune, or at least tenure or a fellowship, than grappling with ambiguity.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t still a ton of smart and thoughtful people in New York—with 20 million tri-state residents of course there are—but per capita not much more than greater St. Louis or plenty of other places. There’s little about proximity to Times Square or Grand Central that imparts any special insight.

For years I was among those who blamed Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg for ruining the city, reducing it to a sterilized cross between Dubai and Disneyland. In the wake of the de Blasio administration, the soul is still gone but there are many more shuttered storefronts, turds on the sidewalk, and homeless folk yelling at you.

New York City isn’t a bad place—by all means come visit, see the sights and take in some shows and eat at some amazing restaurants. But unless you’ve got deep roots in the area, or really have to be here professionally, smarter to be a tourist and then go home somewhere less dirty, loud, cramped and expensive—especially if you want to raise a family.

It's only human, in enduring the inevitable banalities and indignities of life, to dream of other places where people are better and everything makes more sense—for many in Middle America, exalted locales like New York or Ivy League campuses. And yet wherever you go, there you are: flawed human beings remain flawed human beings regardless of income or pedigree.

Except for all the crime, the worst thing about St. Louis is Saint Louisans constantly putting it down. The region’s got a lot of problems, but rooted more in the changing global economy than any particular shortcomings of its populace versus anywhere else—and there are so many good things looming larger as trendier places grow more crowded and less livable.

If only self-hating St. Louisans could just get out of their own way, stop idealizing bigger cities and belittling their own, the still 21^st largest metropolitan area in the nation might yet be on the cusp of a major renaissance. But with so many locals’ sense of self and status so tied to disdaining their communities, the prospect still feels vanishingly far away.

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Next: Show Business (Uptown Broadway)

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