From a city planning perspective, St. Louis has done everything right. It has wide, tree-lined boulevards, one of the country’s largest urban parks, a brand-new stadium for a World Series-winning baseball team, and the most famous curve of elliptical steel on the planet. Yet for all the cash St. Louis has poured into its civic core over the years, its downtown never truly became a destination–even for its own residents, who have famously fled its urban limits for the past 50 years. But last July, the city began to ease its metropolitan hemorrhage with the opening of Citygarden, a 2.9-acre sculpture park. “Citygarden has given downtown St. Louis a sense of place that it has lacked for decades,” says Paul Wagman of the Gateway Foundation, the non-profit that helped to fund the space. “Gertrude Stein famously said of her hometown of Oakland, California, ‘There’s no there there.’ Citygarden has provided downtown with a feeling of ‘thereness.’”
Bold, graphic works by notable contemporary artists–a signature traffic-cone orange figure by Keith Haring, a bronze relief by Fernand Léger, even a video wall–dot the two city blocks, which were designed by Virginia-based Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects. The architects carved out a three-level environment to evoke the nearby rivers, from meandering paths that mimic oxbows, to golden-white “bluffs” sliced from local Missouri limestone quarries. Working with horticulturists at the Missouri Botanical Garden, the designers chose native plants like river birch and honey locust that seem to explode into seasonally-choreographed colors.
The decade-long, grass-roots effort to build Citygarden was launched by two non-profits: Downtown Now, which conceived the park as part of a new master plan for the city, and the Gateway Foundation, which helped to raise almost $30 million for its development. The location is strategic: Citygarden occupies a portion of the Gateway Mall, a 1.1-mile, under-developed strip of land that cuts through downtown’s busiest business district and runs nearly unimpeded all the way to the Gateway Arch. The sculpture park represents the first mend in one of many physical scars that literally divide the city, giving both residents and businesses something they don’t see much of: common ground. ”Because Citygarden’s sculptures and fountains and trees and flowers and stonework are so engaging, it often leads to interactions among people, who otherwise would never have the slightest thing to do with one another,” says Wagman. “It has given them a place where they can enjoy mixing with every kind of human being, because its appeal crosses all boundaries.”
Now, the idea to extend Citygarden’s aesthetic to the entire Gateway Mall, and elsewhere downtown, doesn’t seem as outrageous as it did ten years ago. Last year, St. Louis reported its first net population gain since 1950, making Citygarden a green, thriving heart for a city that is proudly–and finally–growing.
Photo: Steve Hall © Hedrich Blessing
Alissa Walker, a freelance writer, lives in Los Angeles, California.
