2008: What’s a Treemonisha?

 

Similarly, no one would insure them. There were few basic services but many crumbling streets and sidewalks. Above all, there was an indifferent city government.

Worse yet, highway expansion threatened the existence of any coherent neighborhood that might result from restoring the area. Interstate 70 had carved up Baden, Hyde Park and Old North. Interstate 40 (now 64) did the same with the entire Mill Creek Valley. The process of accommodating an automotive future nearly destroyed St. Louis’s past. Long established neighborhoods hollowed out as property values sank. Those remaining didn’t have the numbers or clout to generate significant tax revenues. As a result, they received little civic attention.

Mapping out winners and losers

As early as 1951, city planners looked to link the proposed 70 and 44 interstate highways. Their answer was Missouri Highway 755, known as the North-South Connector. Busy motorists would be able to bypass the entire downtown in their efforts to be elsewhere. How this was seen as beneficial to long term city development is beyond the scope of this essay.

The drawing above is from the Post Dispatch in March of 1971. It shows the Connector displacing 18th Street, taking the historic Harris Row of homes with it.

Lafayette Square properties saw two types of buyer in that time, There were those who optimistically saw a way to rehabilitate an area with great bones and a wonderful old park at its heart. There also were speculators, who wanted a marker on the table for when property buyouts for the Connector would jack prices upward. One group wanted to fix things, the other resisted making any repairs while waiting for their payoff. That is to say these forces worked at cross purposes. 

Local opposition organizes

The Lafayette Square Restoration Committee formed in 1969 as a coordinated group of homeowners focused on rehabilitating the neighborhood. In those days the committee actually bought and stabilized at-risk housing, to prevent city demolition crews from doing their thing. It was a race against time, as the Connector loomed, and the LSRC knew it. 

Long negotiations resulted in offers to spare this or that, but not to rescind the proposed freeway. Here is a map modified after objections from both neighborhood and city in 1972: The original alignment is in the dotted lines.  

Note that the access ramps and sweeping merge lanes would have taken many homes between Park and Chouteau Avenues. Development here might have been much different.  

To make a long, intracate story short, strenuous and prolonged effort got Lafayette Square named St. Louis’s first historic district. National historic district status followed. This guaranteed preservation of the neighborhood, although the actual eastern limit of the district remained in dispute until the mid 1980s. 

After 40 years, a road finally happens

In 1991, Truman Parkway was proposed as an acceptable compromise. It replaced Grattan Street with a four lane divided thoroughfare that effectively cut off Lafayette Square from the public housing projects to the east. On the other hand, it eliminated a lot of traffic pressure on neighborhood streets, so the 6th and 7th ward alderwomen and LSRC blessed the project.

Work began on the project in Spring of 2003, and Truman Parkway debuted about a year later. 

What we have today is an area uniquely positioned to access various major highways without having any of them directly enter the Square. This apparently called for some kind of marker, if not an explanation for the layout, so a sculpture was ordered.

The Treemonisha story

John Henry is not only a steel driving man, but also a public artist of national fame, living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He works with steel beams and poles, creating large sculptures that resemble pickup sticks in suspended motion. I counted fifty installations nationwide, with five in Chicago, 14 in Florida, and four in Nebraska.    

Left to right: Baltimore (2013), Dallas (2015), Miami (2008)

The Gateway Foundation, a private St. Louis charity funding public art and playgrounds, commissioned Henry to fashion a large sculpture for the point where I-44 and I-55 meet Lafayette Avenue at Truman Parkway. Therefore, it’s an isolated spot on a busy interchange.

John Henry is a fan of opera, and   admired Treemonisha, written by St. Louis’s ragtime legend Scott Joplin. Although Joplin composed it in 1910, it was first performed in 1972, with East St. Louisan Katherine Dunham directing the dance portions and Robert Shaw conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Joplin won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for music in 1976 for this opera, which celebrates African-American music and culture. 

Henry dubbed the new public artwork Treemonisha, and perhaps the name meant to heal the incision between Lafayette Square and Clinton Peabody. If it is a statement, it’s a big one, standing 81 feet tall and weighing 40,000 pounds. The red is a nod to the St. Louis Cardinals, and was perhaps tongue-in-cheek, as it was the second of a sculpture series Henry called Falling Cards. To speculate, maybe that’s what five placements in Chicago gets us. 

A 2009 Post-Dispatch article rated public sculpture in St. Louis. It was fortunate that the much  maligned Serra Twain sculpture remains downtown. It was the only thing keeping Treemonisha from being the city’s least appreciated installation. In fact, the similarly slighted Stan Musial statue at Busch Stadium easily outranked Treemonisha. The Gateway Arch was head and shoulders above the rest. 

Epilogue

Treemonisha lives its almost overlooked existence surrounded by thoroughfares and lies nearly inaccessible to pedestrians. However, its opera namesake has prospered. The Opera Theatre of St. Louis presented a production of Treemonisha in 2000. It’s also been staged in Venice, Helsinki, Houston, San Francisco, London and Dresden. Both Lafayette Square and Scott Joplin came out of this saga in great shape.

For more on the work of John Henry; http://www.johnhenrysculpture.com

The definitive on-line history of MO 755, the North-South Connector is from Brendan Wittstruck for NextSTL; March 18, 2021. An amazingly comprehensive retelling at https://nextstl.com/2015/05/the-life-and-death-of-the-american-urban-interstate-as-told-by-st-louis-i-755/

Chris Naffziger for St. Louis Magazine addressed the North-South Connector saga in terms of why the land existed for the new soccer stadium complex, but the backstory leads here too. https://www.stlmag.com/history/architecture/MoDot-land-proposed-soccer-stadium/

An extensive entry in Wikipedia chronicles Treemonisha, the opera, over the years. Recommended. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treemonisha