Jane Smiley on What St. Louis Tells Us About America

The family destination that had changed the most since I was a child was the Saint Louis Zoo. The original exhibit, the “flight cage,” now houses 15 species of “cypress swamp” birds, that is, birds that inhabit Southern Illinois and southern Missouri, where the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers meet. One of my favorite earlier tourists to St. Louis, Charles Dickens, was supremely disappointed when he arrived at the junction of the rivers — in his book American Notes he called the spot “a dismal swamp” and the Mississippi “an enormous ditch.”

In the 1950s, some of the zoo’s animals were housed in small areas surrounded by fake cliffs, others in large cages. There were many shows — I remember lions, elephants, monkeys. But zoos now recognize that they must be a refuge for animals, not a display case. We watched the black rhinoceros. His compound had three wings — he wandered here and there. His mate and his 6-month-old offspring were not with him. The hippos drifted about in a giant tank, visible beneath the surface of the water and above it. There were a lot of spots where no animals appeared, although the zoo houses almost 19,000 individuals (including centipedes, armadillos, catfish, giraffes, lions and woodchucks). I was disappointed and pleased — the zoo has done the best it can to transform itself from a place of spectacle to a place of education.

Forest Park, which houses the zoo, is 1,293 acres. It has a golf course where my grandfather used to play, tennis courts, the Missouri History Museum, the St. Louis Art Museum, a theater, a skating rink, the zoo and the Jewel Box, an ornate greenhouse built in 1934 and recently refurbished. There is also, as I saw when I crossed the street from the Cheshire Inn and walked around, a thick forest along the southeast end, with paths and huge trees, weeds, falling leaves, probably poison ivy, and signs that said that this part of the park was being returned to the wilderness.

St. Louis has always had gustatorial variety: French, barbecue (baked ribs with a sweet sauce), schnitzel and sauerbraten (especially at Schneithorst’s Restaurant & Bar, a St. Louis county institution on the corner of Lindbergh Boulevard and Clayton Road).

Source link