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I admit I’ve long had a blind spot when it comes to St. Louis. As we headed north in that direction last month, and as the Ozark foothills hover into view above the flatlands of the Missouri Bootheel, I tried to remember the last time I had been to our neighbor city to the north. It had been more than a few years, and every other time I went north on I-55, it had been just on overnight trips to see concerts. I had never dug deeply into St. Louis to find the heart of this city that, by geography and proximity, is something of a sister to Memphis. In retrospect, I wish I had done so much sooner.

Foodie Town

Obviously, baseball is big inthis town,” says Don the waiter, as the bustle of a busy restaurant in an Italian neighborhood swirls around us. “You have to visit Ballpark Village and go to a game.”

What basketball has been to Memphis since long before the coming of the Grizzlies, baseball has been to St. Louis for well over a century — a cornerstone of civic identity. Busch Stadium (which, I learned, is a completely different facility from the place where I had seen U2 perform in 1992) is surrounded by a passel of shops, restaurants, and, of course, the Cardinals Hall of Fame. Patterned after Chicago’s significantly older Wrigleyville neighborhood, Ballpark Village (formally dedicated in 2014) is designed to bring people into downtown for more than just the 80 or so dates the Cards are playing baseball.

But my wife and I were visiting long after the Cardinals season had come to a close, and frankly, we’re not big sports fans anyway. Our first priority was focusing upon something else St. Louis, besides baseball and beer that has made the city famous: Italian food. And the best place to do that is in the middle-west neighborhood known as The Hill. After much deliberation, we settled on Charlie Gitto’s On the Hill, one of the city’s oldest and finest eateries.

“There’s a rather large Italian population who moved into this area,” Don the waiter tells us. “Bricklayers and brickmakers located themselves here. It was kind of a self-contained neighborhood, which is why it still has lots of corner grocery stores. Things are all scattered around in different locations, basically making it self-sufficient. There are probably 15 sandwich places, and 10 sit-down restaurants. There’s no main drag. The neighborhood is unique, with a lot of shotgun homes. St. Andrews is the big church around here. It’s very safe to live in, and a convenient location. You can get anywhere in 10 to 15 minutes.”

Charlie Gitto’s is one of those restaurants that runs like a Swiss clock. It has a dark, comfortable interior and an international clientele — the family at the next table was having a spirited conversation in what sounded like Hebrew. I had the veal saltimbocca, which was simply incredible, and the rest of the menu is a greatest-hits compilation of pastas, raviolis, gnocchi, chicken, and steak dishes.

Don, an assiduously polite and well-groomed man, has been working at Charlie Gitto’s for 34 years, and despite the fact that the restaurant was hopping, he took time to talk to us about the city he clearly loved, describing the Victorian homes of Lafayette Square and the tree-lined streets of Kirkwood and Webster. “It’s a good foodie town,” he says. “There are a lot of family-owned restaurants. Just about any type of food you’re looking for, you can find it here.”

Don was absolutely right. Downtown, where we were staying at the Hotel Majestic, we came across a pair of excellent restaurants owned by St. Louis restaurateur Dave Bailey. Rooster is an exceptional brunch joint whose menu is designed around two different day-starters. Scrambles are like chaotic, three-egg omelets with meats, cheeses, greens, and veggies over fresh potato slices. Rooster’s crepes come in savory, sweet, or breakfast styles, with a variety of fillings ranging from German sausage to roasted apples to smoked sirloin. The restaurant also serves traditional brunch fare and sandwiches in its open, airy, and welcoming space on Locust street.

Next door is Bridge Tap House and Wine Bar, where you end the day you started at Rooster. With more than 50 beers on tap and well over a hundred wines on the list, odds are they’ll have what you need to chill out. The bartender, who said her name was Becky, told us that fall and winter are the times when Bridge is busiest. “What do you want to do when it’s getting cold outside?” asks Becky. “Drink wine, eat cheese, eat meat.”

Bridge serves small dishes on boards, such as the thinly sliced smoked strip steak with homemade tomato jam and focaccia with blue cheese. But they also have exceptional, full-sized entrees such as the chicken noir, a bone-in leg and thigh braised in pinot noir. “It goes great with so many wines,” says Becky.

As you would expect in the city that Budweiser built, Becky explains that microbreweries have been popping up everywhere in St. Louis, such as Perennial Artisan Ales in South City. “Almost every local brewery has a taproom so you can taste the beer. And most of them are starting to serve food, too. I think it’s always fun to go to the breweries.”

In The Neighborhoods

It’s a city built of neighbor-hoods, and every neighborhood is distinctive,” Becky says as we finish dinner. “If you go to one neighborhood, that’s just one part of the city. You’re going to get different vibes everywhere.”

Some of St. Louis’ most desirable neighborhoods are those in close proximity to Forest Park, the sprawling green space that is home to free theater events, courtesy of the Municipal Theatre Association, the Missouri History Museum, the St. Louis Art Museum, and the acclaimed St. Louis Zoo, a favorite of both locals and tourists.

Southwest of Forest Park is the Missouri Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park, a smaller but equally beautiful park bounded on the east by South Grand Boulevard. The South Grand neighborhood is one of St. Louis’ best success stories, a place bursting with international flavor, both real and metaphorical. If you’ve had your fill of Italian calories and your system needs a respite, the Treehouse in South Grand is the place for you. This vegan fine-dining restaurant’s fare is so well-crafted and presented, you won’t even notice how healthy it is. The Tree House’s bibimbap is among the most popular and tasty items on the menu.

One of the pillars of the South Grand community is Cafe Natasha, a Persian restaurant that has been in business for more than three decades. The menu, which is heavy on beef and lamb kabobs, also includes excellent vegetarian options, all based on the traditional recipes the Bahrami family brought with them from Iran in the early 1980s. Natasha, the Bahrami daughter for whom the restaurant was named, has now taken charge of her own establishment, opening The Gin Room bar next door.

But there’s a lot more than food in South Grand. “It’s a great little neighborhood; I love it here,” says Christina, the proprietor of Rocket Century, which specializes in mid-century modern furniture and home furnishings. “A little more than five years ago, city planners extended the sidewalks to make it more pedestrian friendly. Then they added more landscaping and some things that were more eco-friendly as well.

“That was exactly when I was looking at this space. I started my business as an online-only thing, since that was where most of the interest in mid-century modern [was]. Then interest grew and grew in St. Louis, so we thought it was time to go brick and mortar as well. And we haven’t looked back since.”

Rocket Century’s wares are swoopy and aerodynamic, as you would expect, but also extend into what Christina calls “the Bohemian Seventies.”

“This area does draw a lot of people from out of town because it’s been well publicized as a good place to eat,” she says. “But it’s only been recently that it’s also been recognized as a good place for shopping, too.”

The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial

It seems fitting that to get tothe top of the most retro-futuristic monument in America, you have to ride in a mini-capsule. The Gateway Arch is the epitome of mid-century modern style: a simple, swooping shape rendered in stainless steel towering over the city. Since it was completed in October 1965, it has become the symbol of the city, visible everywhere in official iconography.

As you approach the Arch, you pass by the Old Courthouse, an architectural treasure that dates from 1828 when it was the center of St. Louis civic life in the nineteenth century. It was the site in 1854 of the Dred Scott v. Samford trial, where the enslaved plaintiff briefly won his family’s freedom before the trial court decision was reversed by the Supreme Court in 1857, a decision that further divided North and South, and helped hasten the Civil War.

The Old Courthouse is now a museum and is also the place where you buy your tickets to go to the top of the Arch. Like the U.S. Capitol, its towering rotunda, completed in 1861, was modeled after St. Peter’s basilica in Rome. The grounds of the Arch are currently undergoing more than $300 million in renovation designed to enhance the Museum of Western Expansion — like The Gateway Arch, it’s operated by the National Parks Service — and to transform the entire Jefferson National Expansion Memorial into a state-of-the-art urban green space. The revitalization project is set to be completed in the summer of 2018.

Since a conventional elevator shaft wouldn’t fit inside the curved space of the Arch, visitors travel to the top in specially designed, cylindrical trams. Claustrophobes need not apply. Each capsule seats up to five, and if you don’t know the people you’re riding with when you leave the ground, odds are you’ll know them much better by the time you arrive at the top.

The space at the top is less claustrophobic, but still quite distinctive. Finland-born and Yale-educated architect Eero Saarinen, who also designed the iconic TWA terminal at JFK airport in New York, chose the shape of the Arch, known as a catenary curve, for its stability and strength; there are numerous Roman arches that have survived more than 2,000 years.

At 63 stories, the Arch is the tallest manmade monument in the United States, and visually striking. The peak is always buzzing with visitors peering out the slit windows, at St Louis on one side and the mighty Mississippi on the other. On the way back down, I sat next to a woman name Jeanne. She lives just across the river and says she visits the city and its landmarks regularly. “I have three girls. This city is great for kids.”

City of Children

Speaking of which, even withall the goodness of great food and the awesomeness of the Arch, the highlight of our trip was a visit to the City Museum. Almost impossible to describe in conventional terms, this sprawling complex is a functioning museum, with space for traveling exhibits and a collection of primarily architectural artifacts from St. Louis’ long history. It’s also an outdoors art project gone totally wild, allowed to grow into a crowd-pleasing monster.

In 1993, sculptor Bob Cassilly gained control of what was formerly the 600,000-square-foot International Shoe Company factory, which had been moldering in the Washington Avenue neighborhood for decades. Over the next four years, Cassilly and his crew transformed the building into an arts playground like no other; one art critic describes it as “quite possibly the ultimate urban playground ever constructed.”

The original space features the largest mosaic in North America, among many other wonders, but the artists have never stopped working. In 2003, the Enchanted Caves opened. (Imagine Memphis’ Crystal Shrine Grotto, only five times bigger, and riddled with secret passages and surprise slides.) Step inside for a moment, and you will know why they sell kneepads in the gift shop.

But there’s something else awesome about the caves. This is a child’s world; the kids, who can navigate the twisty passages much faster than adults, are in charge here. It’s a spectacular safe space, ringing with laughter and squeals of delight.

And that’s only the beginning. Did I mention the City Museum has a 10-story slide? The spiral chute once took shoes from where they were manufactured at the top to where they were boxed at the bottom. Now it’s the most fun way to get down through the building’s towering central shaft in a hurry, while being serenaded by a 1924 pipe organ salvaged from the Rivoli Theatre in New York City. Climbing the 10 flights of steps to get to the top is a great way to burn off the veal saltimbocca you ate at Charlie Gitto’s. I rode twice, just for journalistic purposes, of course.

I could fill another article with the wonders of the City Museum, but I’ll close by noting that they have a vintage Ferris wheel on the roof, and if the weather cooperates, the view is almost as striking as the one from the Arch.

Donuts

After we checked out of theHotel Majestic, we had one final stop before heading back home down I-55. A friend had urged us to visit the Tower Grove neighborhood and hit World’s Fair Donuts. We did not regret the trip. The modest storefront on Vandeventer Avenue is an unspoiled slice of working-class St. Louis. There’s no fancy coffee here, and they only take cash. But the donuts are out of this world. Their red velvet cake is now my favorite donut of all time.

We had to admit that we were thoroughly charmed by our sometimes-forgotten city to the north. We only scratched the surface of St. Louis’ mosaic of neighborhoods, and left eager to return and explore more. However, we’ll probably diet for the month before, next time!