Volume 4, Issue 30: The Universe
"For better or worse, it's the only place to be."
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My grandmother, Mary Dooley of Moweaqua, Illinois, sat across from her 13-year-old grandson, as they spun ever so slowly, both of them feeling bigger and infinitely smaller, in that way you do when you are 250 feet in the air. She was a tiny firecracker of a woman, dressed up in her Sunday best for a summer Tuesday evening out with her grandson, who had told her this was what he wanted for his birthday. She’d been quietly saving up for the trip to St. Louis for weeks. She made sure her dress was cleaned and pressed. She’d tied his tie for him.
It took an hour-and-a-half to complete one rotation of “Top of the Riverfront,” the restaurant atop the Clarion Hotel in downtown St. Louis. The place moved so slowly you almost didn’t notice it; Grandma had placed her purse on one of the windowsills just so we could understand that we were moving at all. She’d called ahead of time and requested a table that began 45 degrees from the tables that faced Busch Stadium, where the St. Louis Cardinals, the baseball team we both loved, were playing the Montreal Expos that night. (“I heard that Ozzie eats here on nights he doesn’t have games,” she said in a hushed, reverential tone.) We sat down right when the game started, which meant, as long as we could draw out our meal—and we were absolutely going to draw out our meal, fancy dinners like this happened once a year at best, we were going to savor every second—you could see the second inning of the game from the restaurant and then be back around for the sixth or seventh. Every time the waiter would come by, she would take her time ordering, tell them she wasn’t quite ready, there are just so many choices, winking at me, making every last moment count. Her husband, my grandfather, had died the year before, had a brain hemorrhage right there at the kitchen table, right there in front of her. This was probably the first time she’d gone out somewhere fancy since then, probably the first time she’d done anything fun, anything for herself. I wasn’t thinking about that at the time, though, no 13-year-old thinks about stuff like that. I just wanted to see baseball and eat ice cream and hang out with my Grandma. She said I looked very handsome in my tie.
She sat across from me, in her red dress, on a Tuesday night in downtown St. Louis, the biggest city I’d ever been to, in the shadow of the great Gateway Arch, the gateway to the West, and we felt on top of the world, we felt eternal, we felt like the most sainted, blessed people who had ever lived.
We did not stay at the hotel: It was too expensive for us, she had splurged enough on the meal as was. We finished our meal right as the Cardinals took a 3-2 lead on the Expos, and took the long elevator ride downstairs, grins on our faces, a couple of Illinois farm kids who got to briefly let loose in the big city. It was a 109-mile drive from St. Louis back to Moweaqua, and we listened to the ballgame and talked about the meal and she told old stories about my mom growing up that I absolutely could not believe and then I fell asleep in the passenger seat. I woke up to her whispering in my ear: “We’re home. Time to go to bed. No more supper in the sky.”
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The Clarion Hotel, an unmistakable centerpiece of the St. Louis skyline, became “Stouffer’s Riverfront Inn” and then “Regal Riverfront Hotel” until the Millennium Hotels and Resorts chain brought it in 1999. By 1999, I was 24 years old and living in St. Louis, working for The Sporting News right before I’d move to New York City in January 2000. That hotel hosted the 1999 Association for Women in Sports Media Convention, and I was invited to speak on a panel about “Injecting Humor Into Your Writing.” (The panel consisted of four white men.) The place was bustling, packed to the gills with some of the smartest people I knew, and I felt included—honored to get to be among them. The evening of my panel, we had a cocktail reception held, obviously, in the rotating restaurant atop the hotel. Only 11 years after my grandmother and I had our special dinner, I looked out upon St. Louis and the vast Midwest, a place I loved and knew I was about to leave forever. I felt on top of the world. I couldn’t imagine a place more grand.
Like many industrial cities of the Midwest and Rust Belt, St. Louis would go through endless struggles over the next decade, a sudden implosion of once-bustling and vital cityscapes (and the rural communities that surrounded them and relied upon them) that would reorganize much of American life and politics in the new century. And the Millennium Hotel and its rotating restaurant collapsed beneath it. By 2010, the restaurant had closed and the hotel was only renting out an eighth of its rooms, with a drastically slashed staff. In January 2014, they finally gave up the ghost, closing the hotel entirely. “The hotel has served the St. Louis community well for many years,” Robert Rivers, the owner’s regional general manager, said at the time. “However, we have concluded that the hotel, in its current state, does not meet our standards and has not kept pace with guest demands.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch story said that the hotel “will maintain the building’s water and electric utility connections and discuss with city officials what might be done with the structure.”
As St. Louis continued to evolve and adjust, as it went through its most difficult period and, through the work and dedication of civic leaders who love the city the way it deserves to be loved, tried, with more success than they’re given credit for, to pull itself out of the spiral that has afflicted so many American cities …. nothing happened with the hotel. No one bought the property. No one did anything with it at all. There were brief rumors of a revitalization effort back in late 2014, but they never came to fruition. In 2017, the Millennium chain sold it to the Hong Leong Group, a Malaysian financial conglomerate that I spent about 20 minutes on their website this morning trying to figure out what exactly it is that they do and still have no idea. The Group has continued to pay the utilities and taxes on the property, but otherwise has left the building to rot.
And rot it has.
To see the building today is to see an urban eyesore with few modern parallels. The St. Louis Business Journal reported last week that the building has been fined (a paltry amount) for various violations, including “broken or missing windows,” dangerous erosion of insulation systems, weeds growing more than eight inches on the property’s former pool and "homeless people's open storage on the property's east side.” But you do not need a report to know that the building has fallen into disrepair. It is, after all, 28 stories tall, and smack in the middle of the city’s skyline. If you are at Busch Stadium, where I was with my father this week, there are three prominent structures seen beyond center field: The Gateway Arch, a new condominium complex built during the pandemic by the Cardinals themselves, and the abandoned Millennium Hotel. You can’t miss it. The stadium was in fact built to maximize your view of it.
This year, something new has popped up with the building: Weeds, growing out of its roof—perhaps fostered in that old restaurant itself.
(During the game, my dad and I had a conversation about how, in fact, that could happen. Were there weeds growing from the bottom, rising 240 feet in the air and sprouting through the top of the window? Dad posited, surely correctly, that birds had probably dropped seeds or grass over the last decade and the weeds had come from that. I still prefer my idea of 240-foot tall weeds.)
The city of St. Louis is fully aware of the problem but not sure what it can do about it.
The situation highlights a problem, according to Building Commissioner Frank Oswald: the lack of tools available to city officials when confronting a building owner that chooses to keep its property vacant, so long as taxes are paid and minimum code standards met. It also comes as downtown in recent years has lessened its number of vacant buildings, and has at least preliminary plans for most of the remaining ones — Millennium excluded.
“Constitutionally, I don’t think we could say that you can’t have a vacant building,” Oswald said. “You can have a vacant building as long as it meets minimum exterior standards."
It is also worth noting that the building has an oddly intense security presence: You can’t so much as walk up to the front door without a very large man showing up to chase you off. Someone even put together an amusing Reddit thread that posits there’s a criminal enterprise secretly run out of there, or maybe some sort of FBI front. Sadly, the simplest explanation is surely the likeliest: It’s both too expensive to renovate and too expensive to tear down.
So it sits, in downtown St. Louis, with weeds growing out of the roof and feral wolves prowling the lobby.
The Clarion Hotel was a place of my family’s, and many families’, dream, a shining ode to human progress and gleaming city luxury, a world so high in the sky that you just couldn’t believe it, a cathedral you honored by putting on your nicest clothes and making it the centerpiece of your biggest birthday ambitions. It was the place to be your best selves, a place among the stars, to have supper in the sky. The world changes, it expands, it contracts … the ground is forever shifting under our feet. When I look out at that building, just beyond center field, I see it for what it once was, for who I once was, for that night with an elderly Moweaqua woman, who had been through so much, who had suffered such loss, who went there to make her grandson happy and maybe give herself a night where she could be away, where she could look across the flat Midwestern plains, from far above, and feel like it would all someday turn out OK. Buildings rise, buildings fall, but it’s those moments that last. You put on your nicest dress, and you tie his tie for him, and you hold onto them as tightly as you can. It may all fade. It may all wither. There may be wolves. But those moments aren’t going anywhere. And they’re all that really count.
Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.
Sorry: Aaron Judge Isn’t About to Break the “Real” Home Run Record, New York. Always happy to bust out the old defenses of Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.
The Best Player at Every Age, MLB.com. This is a fun one to do every year.
John Wick Movies Without John Wick, Vulture. A fun list of knockoffs.
Five Predictions for the Series Finale of “Better Call Saul,” Medium. I got 3 1/2 out of five right. Not bad!
Your Friday Five, Medium. Bawitdaba-da bang-da-bang-diggy-diggy-diggy. Light week this week, sorry.
PODCASTS
Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Emily the Criminal,” “Bodies Bodies Bodies” and “Day Shift.
Seeing Red, Bernie and I have Pujols Fever, catch it. I was there for that grand slam on Thursday, by the way. That, uh, will be written about at some point.
Waitin' Since Last Saturday, we did our big SEC preview. Weekly shows have commenced!
LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK
“The Untold History of the Biden Family,” Adam Entous, The New Yorker. This was originally supposed to be a book, but the pandemic shut it down. It would have been a great book, but it’s deeply sad magazine story, a look at a family history that is both Joe Biden’s and also feels like many of our own.
ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!
This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!
Write me at:
Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603
CURRENTLY LISTENING TO
“Epic,” Shovels & Rope. I have a long emotional connection to the original Faith No More song, but I adore this reimagining of it. I’m seeing Shovels & Rope in a couple of months, and even though I doubt they play this song (they haven’t either other time I saw them), I wish they would.
Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.
We’re sneaking in one more bit of baseball while we can …
Also, all this talk of Pujols and my grandmother got me to thinking of this old story:
Have a great weekend, all …
Best,
Will
What a nice story about your birthday trip with your grandmother!
Now I'm imagining what those feral wolves are up to...