Yeah, we are the Brick City. We are also becoming the Beer City of the Midwest. The history is certainly there, but the influx of microbreweries since Schlafly broke the mold in 1991 has been amazing to witness. 1991, the year STL malt broke!
Usually we look back at our past and pine for the good old days (World's Fair and Riverboats, I'm looking at you). Fact is, when it comes to beer, the past was indeed great...but the present and future is better.
St. Louis' beer scene is on the rise and getting more and more diverse. I thought we could only sustain maybe five breweries in St. Louis (a city of ~310,000). Boy was I wrong.
The latest trend is small town Missouri breweries opening locations in St. Louis...they want to join the scene and man, are they welcome.
First, 2nd Shift Brewery moved it's operations from New Haven, Missouri to an industrial section of the Hill Neighborhood at 1601 Sublette Avenue...adding a place...you know, place making in a spot you usually wouldn't visit.
"We're so excited to be located on the Hill," 2nd Shift co-owner Libby Crider said in a release. "Not only to be able to provide beer more locally to St. Louis, but also to be part of this amazing neighborhood."
Welcome, welcome, welcome 2nd Shift. I love off the beaten path locations, and you've done a great job with your space and of course the beer.
Then, yesterday I was driving home after visiting the new Kiener Plaza and noticed Charleville Brewing was open.
They are the newest brewery to open a St. Louis location from their winery/brewery in Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri.
Per the bartender, the rehabbed building was a former truck parts manufacturing facility. The nice one-story building is at 2101 Chouteau Avenue right across the street from Lafayette Square in the Downtown West Neighborhood. The pulley's and beams are still visible providing a nod to the past.
before
after
So we stopped in for a quick sample and will be back Fo-Chouteau.
I'm not here to rank beers or talk up one brewery vs. the other, I'll leave that to the experts. To me, all St. Louis breweries add to our city vibe and Charleville is a welcome addition.
I will say one thing, though: I'm a pilsner fan and their offering is...um, way up there. I'll leave it at that.
“The whole idea is to connect with the (St. Louis) community,” says Tait Russell, director of operations for Charleville...
For the new brewery and restaurant, Charleville is partnering with Paul and Wendy Hamilton, owners of Eleven Eleven Mississippi, Vin de Set, PW Pizza and 21st Street Brewers Bar.
Russell says Charleville reached out to the Hamiltons about the new brewery's restaurant operation while still searching for a location. During that discussion, Russell says, Paul Hamilton mentioned that he had recently bought the building at 2101 Chouteau, directly across South 21st Street from the complex housing Vin de Set, PW Pizza and 21 Street Brewers Bar.
They did a fantastic job with the building and interior space...but man, the pilsner was the star. There are 14 taps to choose from.
The large windows along Chouteau really make a bright, vibrant space.
There is a garage door that opens up to provide an al fresco experience leading to a small outdoor patio.
There is also an event space and of course the brewing areas.
There are nice nods to our wonderful city.
Not into beer? How about some house made root beer and the food looks dynamite.
Welcome, welcome, welcome Charleville Brewing! That pilsner should be in cans/bottles for the summer! Edit: they have the pilsner in cans, it's called Long White Cloud. Proof:
This 2015 documentary chronicles the life and times of two men, Nicholas Sand and Tim Scully, who together set in motion the psychedelic revolution of the late 1960's. Both men were idealists who thought that if everyone would just drop a little acid, the world would be a better place. People would be kinder to each other and the planet, have a larger awareness outside of one's own selfish desires, etc, etc.
Scully was a sharp scientist who knew the formula to make lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and had a method to produce and tablet it for distribution. Sand was driven by idealism and spiritualism and bent on bringing the psychedelic experience to the masses. The two became underground chemists who made the drug and did indeed change the world...for a little while anyway. They made massive amounts of LSD and got it in the hands of an entire generation, globally. Their product was called "Orange Sunshine".
It changed the culture and political climate for a brief period of time until the Federal Government could catch up and bust them all. Both men had connections to Timothy Leary, the Grateful Dead, the Hell's Angels, the Brotherhood of Eternal Love (the Hippie Mafia) and wealthy heirs who bankrolled the operations.
The documentary did a wonderful job with pacing and shining a light on the personalities and renegade aspects of the two men behind story, while not getting too bogged down with pro-hippie nostalgia or anti-government commentary. It was pretty objective...and thoroughly entertaining. Even the soundtrack branched out in refreshing ways, avoiding the Jefferson Airplane "White Rabbit" and Jimi Hendrix "Purple Haze" trappings one would expect. In fact, the soundtrack was great.
If you are reading between the lines, the parallels to Breaking Bad are all there, from the identity with color (blue meth in Breaking Bad - orange acid in Sunshine Makers), a duo working in basement labs, sidling up to dubious distribution networks, the whole nine. Scully even referred to making acid as "cooking". Walter White and Jesse Pinkman were in my mind from the onset.
Here's the official trailer for the film:
It is well worth a viewing if you are interested in drug culture, the 1960's, psychedelia and 20th Century American history.
But here's why I'm writing about "Sunshine Makers" on this St. Louis website:
One of these LSD evangelists, Nick Sand, eventually came to St. Louis to avoid the Feds in Millbrook, New York (~90 miles north of NYC), the Bay Area of California and the Denver area in Colorado where they were manufacturing LSD in larger and larger quantities.
I perked up when the story unexpectedly turned to St. Louis. There was a photo of Sand driving toward St. Louis with the Arch in the background. I was locked in...because you know when St. Louis comes up, it is not always a lock that they are talking about St. Louis...people generalize. Even intelligent, well-meaning people don't understand how the various city's in the suburbs of St. Louis ARE NOT ST. LOUIS but they naively, deceptively or charmingly call themselves St. Louisans (depending on your perspective). Either way, Sand came to the St. Louis region to set up shop to manufacture more LSD and escape some of the trappings and heat in California and Colorado. Sand set up his new lab downtown and eventually was busted near St. Louis and the jig was up...the psychedelic revolution hit a major snag with the arrest...right in our own backyard.
As it turns out, the documentary followed the same missteps with location accuracy that even the St. Louis media hasn't consistently figured out...but there were enough hints from the film that tipped me off to investigate where the LSD revolution continued to prosper and then came to an end just nine miles from St. Louis.
So here were my clues from the movie:
Notice the addresses? As it turns out the lab at 2209 Delmar Boulevard is just 2.3 miles from my home. The Sunshine Makers got it right, the lab was really in St. Louis, not the suburbs. Sand refers to the lab as "Downtown St. Louis"...and I will give him a solid "A" on that as the lab is located in the Downtown West neighborhood. The operation was called Signet Research and Development.
When Sand spoke of the move to St. Louis he mentioned that he purchased a two-story brick building in Downtown St. Louis. Everyone was happy, he got "kudos from the Mayor" for bringing industry to an "impoverished area". This is the early 1970's and St. Louis was already being described as "impoverished".
I had to check it out to see if the building is still there. The answer is yes; but you wouldn't recognize it from the photo above. In fact, the entire building was refaced and covered in stucco at some point.
So, it is two-stories which is corroborated by Sand, and the address is right. Also, the attached building just west of 2209 Delmar sports the blonde and red brick color combination that is evident from the photo in the film.
From three St. Louis Post-Dispatch articles from 19731, 2, 3 that documented the police bust of Nick Sand and his girlfriend it is hard to determine if LSD was actually manufactured here in St. Louis or mainly at their home in what the movie claimed was St. Louis (see photo below), but turned out to be the city of Fenton, Missouri about a 17 mile drive from the St. Louis border.
Anybody who knows St. Louis knows this is not a St. Louis house. This is more a product of the subjective "St. Louis": the 90 or so cities in the suburbs west of St. Louis. When Sand was arrested he told authorities he lived at 425 North Highway 21 in Fenton2. But, the actual address was 425 North Highway 141. The home was razed for interchange expansion at Gravois and 141 and was the area that is currently the Swing Around Fun Town. This home is where the evidence piled up that Sand who went by Leland Jordan and his girlfriend Judy Neil Shaughnessy, who went by Judy Jordan. How did they get caught? Well two things really. Per a 1973 Post-Dispatch article, the Fenton Post Office called the local police to do a check of a "house in the 200 block of North Highway 141" as mail had not been picked up for ~ a month by the occupants of the house that rented the post office box1. When the Police Chief of Fenton visited the property that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described as a "secluded mansion on a hilltop in Fenton....which is on an 18-acre tract and is reached by a narrow gravel road blocked by a gate near the property line"2, they found a interior laden with falling plaster and evidence of flooding. Fearing an accident, the police entered the residence. The furnace had run out of fuel and the pipes froze and burst, hence the sounds of running water from the outside and the interior damage witnessed by the police. When the cops entered, and investigated the source of the leak, they came across 825 gallons of materials for the manufacture of methamphetamine, LSD and other hallucinogens.1 The St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote that it was "the largest illegal drug manufacturing operation ever seen in St. Louis County."1 The police described the Fenton home as having "the general appearance of a hippie crash pad", but when they found photos believed to be the residents in the house they were "the straight type." Which Sand and Shaughnessy certainly were.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch Photo
The photo of the Fenton house used in the documentary wasn't the only evidence of activity in the suburbs of St. Louis County; Sand points out that when the bust was going down, the "sheriff in that town got him". Another clue that "that town" had to be a small town suburb.
He was busted and booked in Kirkwood, MO per the mugshot:
The couple were returning from a visit to California when they dropped their car off for repairs at 10160 Manchester Road in Kirkwood, MO. They were pulling away from the repair shop when the cops busted them.2 The site is still an auto repair shop today:
The police were on the case. A couple days later, the press used to tablet "half the world's LSD", was recovered from a taxi cab of Leslie Daniels, a young man who was going from a bus stop in Downtown St. Louis to the home in Fenton.3 This bust further provided the evidence needed to make the case against Sand. This press for making the LSD "sunshine tablets" was being sought by the FBI for eight years.
These arrests along with LSD evangelist Timothy Leary (who Richard Nixon claimed was the most dangerous man in America) in the 1970's brought an end to the psychedelic revolution. And who would've thought the demise was so closely associated with a lab in St. Louis, a drug house in Fenton, MO and a bust in Kirkwood, MO.
Photographs of the basement of the lab in Fenton showed chemical drums, including at least one marked clearly as being manufactured by Malinkrodt Chemical of St. Louis. Ready access to required chemi cals may have been one of the reasons that the LSD operation was centered in St. Louis.
So maybe raw materials and supply made St. Louis appealing. I reached out to the author of the sourced blog post above, and have not heard back as of publishing. I'll update this post if I hear from him.
So anyway, thanks to the makers of "The Sunshine Makers" for shedding light on a piece of history of my city that I did not know existed and giving me a new adventure to track down. When I drive by 2209 Delmar, I'll always think of acid and the early 1970's.
I'll be searching for this documentary on DVD to add to my St. Louis collection. Check it out, it's a solid movie with a local connection.
Sources:
1 "Quantity of Drug Materials Seized". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. January 18, 1973. pp. 1, 5.
2 "Pair Arrested in Fenton Drug Case". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. January 20, 1973. pp. 1, 3.
3 "Press for LSD Tablets Confiscated in Fenton". St. Louis Post-Dispatch. January 22, 1973. p. 12b.
The next is the potential for MLS soccer in our fair city. The league is expanding and they indicated that St. Louis is one of the top cities under consideration for a team. Per MLS' official website:
MLS Commissioner Don Garber announced Thursday that Teams 25 and 26 will be announced during the second or third quarter of 2017, at an expansion fee of $150 million each, and begin MLS play by 2020. Teams 27 and 28 will be announced at a later date, at a price delivered in conjunction with the timeline.
The league acknowledged ownership groups from 10 markets have publicly expressed interest in securing an MLS expansion team: Charlotte, Cincinnati, Detroit, Nashville, Raleigh/Durham, Sacramento, St. Louis, San Antonio, San Diego and Tampa/St. Petersburg.
Interested expansion owners must submit applications by Jan. 31, 2017. After review, a series of in-person meetings will take place during the first and second quarters of 2017.
2017 is going to be a critical year for St. Louis when it comes to this burgeoning sport.
Let me first say, I love sports. Really all sports, but I'm not an MLS soccer fan to date. That would change if we got a team. My kids love soccer. They are into it, they understand it, they play it in the CYC and SLPS. They would beg to go to games just as they do to Blues games.
Secondly, I have had the pleasure of working with people from all around the world. Argentinians, Colombians, Mexicans, Chileans, Belgians, Spaniards and Brazilians, they all have hard core fans. I've never seen such devotion to a team or a sport. It is infectious to be around. It is exhilarating just to be around them and hear them talk about their teams. The chanting, the songs, the colors, the pride...it is like nothing we have here...maybe college football, but Illinois and Missouri aren't those kind of teams.
I think soccer is one of the growth sports for the next century in the U.S. MLS in the most international sport and could help retain and grow our Latino, African and Eastern European populations. I think it could help to attract and retain the next generation of people who will consider living and working in St. Louis.
If any of these owners actually live in St. Louis, I apologize, but my guess is they are County residents who are not being asked for public $ at the city/county level and not expected to own the stadium if the team decides to pull a Arizona Cardinals/Los Angeles Rams move.
Now remember, some of these same well-meaning folks were behind building a second NFL stadium for the Rams. No offense, but they don't understand what people who live in St. Louis need. It is not stadiums, it is $ for schools, neighborhood stabilization, potholes, and cameras, cops, investigators and prosecutors to combat the out of control crime we have to deal with. It's always easier to spend someone else's money.
The group includes St. Louis Cardinals President Bill DeWitt III, World Wide Technology CEO Jim Kavanaugh, prominent hotelier Bob O’Loughlin, UniGroup President Jim Powers, St. Louis Blues CEO Chris Zimmerman and former NFL task force co-chairman Dave Peacock.
Jim Woodcock, global sports co-lead and senior vice president at FleishmanHillard, said the group — which is dubbing itself MLS2STL — came together naturally as several of its members, including Woodcock, began asking about MLS ownership following the departure of the St. Louis Rams. (source)
But the pretty pictures and potential for the city were a bit tarnished by the need for massive adjacent and on-site surface parking lots that are not needed 348 days out of the year, and financial support of public tax money from St. Louis only. No St. Charles, St. Clair, Madison, Jefferson or St. Louis County support has been asked for to date, just good old money bags St. Louis. Yeah right. We are broke and need the money more than any city in the region. But we're supposed to bankroll this thing for 17 professional sports games a year (more if you make the playoffs). The Blues bring 41 games and the Cards bring 81.
Oh, and they want the city to own the stadium. Remember how this works Rams fans? It is not smart investment.
I want MLS soccer here, but we should not be the only city paying for it.
However, I expect in any negotiation the first offer is the one that most benefits the party making the offer. This is how most negotiations work. It is now up to the leaders in the city to pass the napkin back across the table with a better offer. And hopefully the voters can decide if the public money from St. Louis should go to another sports stadium that we own.
Remember how this played out with the Rams? It is happening again.
As a citizen and voter in St. Louis, I am willing to pitch in some for this team. The terms have to be reasonable and the ratio of public funds should match the wealth of the region. If it does, this could be a great regional effort to bring a popular and growing sport to St. Louis.
The region can play together nicely and bring a team here. St. Louis would be a great location, we just need to not get completely screwed over financially.
It can work, but will it? Look no further than Great Rivers Greenway or the Zoo Museum District to see the amazing things we can do when we pool our resources.
Continuing on my favorite development proposals and under-construction projects in 2016, this one is a proposal, but seems to be well on its way toward real action bringing another St. Louis classic back to life.
The massive 13-story Jefferson Arms building at 415 North Tucker, between Locust and St. Charles Streets in the Downtown West Neighborhood is a 1904 classic that has been sitting empty for nearly ten years. But a ~$103.7M plan from a Dallas, TX developer Alterra International will convert the building to 240 apartments, a Marriott Hotel and 1st floor commercial space.
One of the things that appeals to me the most about the project is the bullishness of people investing money from outside the region. Outside investment is one of the things we need most. In fact, add new immigrants, residents and workers from outside the region and you have a nice list of what St. Louis could really use.
"We actually fell in love with this one. It's not a good idea as a developer to fall in love, but we did because it's absolutely beautiful," said Mike Sarimsakcs, president of Alterra International. "The outside is just gorgeous."
Sure, you're not supposed to show your cards during a negotiation, but it's great to see people come to St. Louis and see what I see: potential.
Alterra further spoke to this potential in a St. Louis Business Journal story in June, 2016 where Sarimsakcs was quoted as showing interest in the Butler Brothers building just west of here as well. Bring it on!
Alterra is also exploring a partnership with Sovereign Partners to overhaul the giant Butler Brothers building at 1717 Olive St. That building has an appraised value of $2.4 million, according to city records. Sarimsakci said if the partnership agreement goes through, Alterra would invest about $90 million to transform the 718,000-square-foot building into lofts and creative office space.
Here's to hope that the Jefferson Arms will be the first in a long line of buildings Alterra purchases and develops in St. Louis.
St. Louis is a diamond in the rough and I just don't think the powers that be/old money in the suburbs are enough to get us to the next level; we'll need outside investors with optimism and bullishness instead of the knee jerk grasping for silver bullets when what we really need is block by block investment, new ideas, commitment to the things that will, well...make St. Louis great again (bad, I know). But it's worth pointing out that there was mention of a Trump Hotel in the Jefferson Arms. Yet the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported there's no truth to that but it didn't stop anti-Trump protestors to make a stop in front of the building to speak their minds.
Work to turn the dilapidated and vacant Jefferson Arms into offices, apartments, restaurants and a hotel could begin as early as January, the prospective developer said Thursday.
Mike Sarimsakci, whose Dallas-based Alterra International has the 13-story downtown St. Louis building under contract, said he plans to complete the purchase in December. Clearing the Jefferson Arms of debris and beginning the environmental cleanup would then get underway, he said.
Renovation will begin with construction of shops and restaurants on the first floor and in the basement of the Jefferson Arms, at 415 North Tucker Boulevard, Sarimsakci said in an interview in St. Louis. Opening the retail outlets will occur before completion of market-rate apartments in the original section of the historic building that debuted as the Hotel Jefferson in time for the 1904 World’s Fair. Apartments also would occupy the top two floors of the hotel’s 1920s addition on Locust Street.
A hotel of about 240 rooms will fill the rest of the addition, said Sarimsakci, adding that the operator might be the Trump, Marriott or Divan Group hotel chain. The entire project could be done by January 2020.
It'll be great to see the windows lighting up along Tucker Boulevard once again. Again, this is a case where tax credits seem justifiable. Not only does the developer benefit, but so do we, the people of St. Louis who can extend one of our turn of the century beauties into the future. We can set ourselves apart from other cities with our architecture and beauty. Remember, not all cities have this wealth.
Here's a rendering showing the southern view:
How can you not be excited about this one? Maybe with the removal of more of our larger vacant buildings from the market, we'll start to see more of the many smaller buildings start to get new life Downtown.
Cheers, St. Louis!
