ANOTHER REASON to love St. Louis is that it's easy to get
around. Neighborhoods are close and traffic light. So when I pick a
restaurant in the South Grand area, it's only a 10-minute drive to
morning coffee, just the sort of weak joe you'd expect from a
diner. We join sleepy medical residents and early-bird families for
eggs and toast at the retro City Diner, home to Formica tables,
framed Elvis albums, and, with meals at $2.95, retro prices. In
neighboring Tower Grove Park, a Victorian greensward of towering
pin oaks and spreading elms that shelter a series of elaborate
1870s-era picnic pavilions, we walk it off with the joggers and dog
walkers.
Next, I talk Dave, a builder, into visiting the Contemporary Art
Museum and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, the two adjacent
museums, on the basis of their modern, mint-new architecture. Brad
Cloepfil did the former, and the more well-known
Tadao Ando the
latter, making St. Louis progressive - don't forget that Arch - in
design circles. At the compact Contemporary, huge concrete slabs
protrude over the entrance, mysteriously defying gravity. It's more
fascinating than an artist's bellybutton on video inside.
Next door, the Pulitzer is serenity embodied in glass and stone.
But the art is sparse and stark and there are docents everywhere
who make us feel felon, until we stumble into the courtyard and
enter the massive sculpture Joe, by
Richard Serra, which winds
through a spiraling passage of rusty steel sheets until you reach
the open center, a manmade canyon encircling the blue sky. Across
the courtyard, planted in a field of grass, is a torso of Venus.
Again, all is right with modern art.