Meet Me In Old St. Louis

Sylvester Jones started bottling soda in St. Louis in 1916 and named the company after himself, more or less. Vess. And for the better part of a century, if you grew up here, Vess was simply what soda was. 🥤

The orange whistle, the cream soda, the big returnable bottles clinking around in a wooden crate in somebody's garage. Then the company put up a nearly forty foot tall Vess bottle near downtown, and it quietly became one of those landmarks people use to give directions without ever thinking about why.

National brands spent staggering amounts of money trying to convince St. Louis to drink something else. St. Louis nodded politely, took the free sample, and kept a bottle of Vess in the icebox anyway. ✨

At the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis, a 24 year old runner named George Poage stepped onto the cinder track at Francis Field and became the first African American athlete ever to win an Olympic medal. He took bronze in the 200 meter hurdles, then bronze again in the 400. 🥉

He had been a standout at the University of Wisconsin, one of very few Black athletes competing at that level in that era. He also faced real pressure from within his own community to boycott the St. Louis games entirely because of the segregation on display at the fair. He weighed it, and he chose to run.

He later taught school, farmed, and worked as a postal clerk in Chicago, and he died in relative obscurity in 1962. For decades almost nobody told his story. He did something no human being had ever done before, and he did it right here in Forest Park.

Only about seven standing water towers of this kind are left in the entire United States. St. Louis has three of them. 💧

They were built in the late 1800s to house a standpipe that steadied the water pressure in the mains, which is about as unglamorous a job as a building can have. The city could have wrapped them in plain sheet metal and called it finished. Instead St. Louis gave them Corinthian columns and carved stone and made them beautiful, because that is simply what the city believed it owed itself at the time.

The Grand Avenue tower, the Bissell Street tower, and the Compton Hill tower are all still standing, long after the machinery inside them became useless. They are monuments to nothing but civic pride, and they are still up there, quietly holding down their corners of the north and south sides. 🏛️

For a few gloriously loud years around 1980, the hottest ticket in St. Louis was not baseball and it was not hockey. It was indoor soccer. ⚽

The Steamers played on turf inside the Checkerdome with the boards up and the ball ricocheting off the walls at strange angles, and this soccer mad city absolutely lost its mind for it. They regularly drew crowds well past seventeen thousand, some of the largest indoor soccer crowds anyone in America has ever seen, and the noise in that building on a Friday night could rattle your teeth. Steve Pecher, Ty Keough, players who had grown up on these very fields, playing in front of the neighborhoods that raised them.

St. Louis was the soccer capital of this country long before most of America was paying any attention, and the Steamers were the loudest proof of it. The league eventually folded, but ask anyone who was in that building and watch their face change. 🔥

You can be forty years out. You can have moved away, come back, and moved away again. It does not matter. Somebody will shake your hand in St. Louis and within about ninety seconds they will ask where you went to high school. 🎓

Outsiders think it is snobbery. It is not, or at least not entirely. In a city built out of parishes and neighborhoods, the high school told you the parish, the parish told you the neighborhood, the neighborhood told you who your people were, and suddenly two strangers have four friends in common and a whole conversation to have.

No other city in America does this in quite the same way. It is the closest thing St. Louis has to a secret handshake, and every single person here already knows their answer before anybody asks. 😄

In 1878, a group of St. Louis businessmen invented a mysterious figure called the Veiled Prophet, dressed him in robes and a veil, and paraded him through downtown by torchlight while thousands of people watched. Nobody was supposed to know who was under the veil, and for a very long time, nobody did. 🔥

The stated purpose was to celebrate the city and draw crowds to the fall agricultural fair. Historians have long argued the unstated purpose had a great deal to do with the labor unrest of the previous year and a desire among the city's elite to remind everyone who was in charge. The organization remained secretive and exclusive, and for most of its history it was closed to Black St. Louisans, which drew serious and sustained protest in the 1970s.

It is one of the strangest institutions any American city has produced, and in a much changed form it still exists today as the group behind the Fair St. Louis celebration. History here is rarely simple.

There was a time when you did not need a car in this city. St. Louis had one of the largest streetcar systems in America, hundreds of miles of track, and you could ride from Wellston clear to the riverfront for pocket change. The Hodiamont line ran on its own private right of way, cutting behind houses and through alleys, and people set their watches by it. 🚋

On May 21, 1966, the last streetcar made its final run, and the city let it go. The tracks were paved over or torn up, the overhead wires came down, and within a few years most people had stopped remembering the routes at all.

Ask anyone who rode it and they will tell you about the sound first. The hum of the wire, the bell, the rattle of the windows on a warm afternoon. St. Louis got its cars and lost something it has been quietly trying to rebuild ever since.

Before the horror films, before the voice that could make a doorbell sound sinister, Vincent Price was a kid from the Central West End whose family made candy. His grandfather invented a cream of tartar baking powder and his father ran the National Candy Company, so young Vincent grew up comfortable, curious, and completely obsessed with art. 🕯️

He studied art history at Yale, taught for a while, and fell into acting almost by accident. He spent decades as the most elegant villain in Hollywood, but the thing he actually cared about most was painting. He donated thousands of works to a community college so that ordinary students could stand in front of real art, and he wrote cookbooks with his wife that people still cook from today.

A St. Louis boy who scared a generation half to death, then quietly spent his own money making sure regular people could see a Rembrandt. What a life. 🎨