ALAN writes:

“Where were the teen-agers?,” Mr. John T. Stewart asked after he attended a performance of Shakespeare by the Old Vic Company at the American Theater in downtown St. Louis in the 1950s. He was writing about his 52 years of memories of theatergoing in St. Louis from 1906 to 1958.  [John T. Stewart, “Golden Days of the Theater in St. Louis”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Nov. 12, 1958, p. 3H]

He continued: “Do they have no feeling or regard for the living stage? Do they really believe that what they see and hear on television is worthy drama? The student whose only impression of the art is taken from the movie screen or television set could not even imagine what was offered in the ‘good old days’…..”

Of course the answer to his questions was that concerted efforts were being made in the 1950s to separate the younger generation from the older, a project made easier by three cultural factors:  The “youth revolution”, firmly in place by the 1950s;  the increasing presence of television in Americans’ daily lives;  and the promotion of a peculiar form of noise aimed at the young and called “rock and roll music”.

Those things were more than enough to eclipse any likelihood that teenagers would be able to understand the magical appeal of live theater.

“Television was hard on the little theater groups,” a woman said as she recalled her days in the 1940s-‘50s with the Trinity Dramatic Club, a church group in south St. Louis.  It had the same effect on professional theater life. From our vantage point 75 years later, it is easy to see that canned entertainment readily available by turning dials and pushing buttons had the effect of softening up an entire generation.

That church and school were on a street where residents today enjoy crashing automobiles and shooting each other.

The first play Mr. Stewart ever saw was “Rip Van Winkle”.  He wrote: “It drew packed houses to the old Century Theater, Ninth and Olive Streets.  McTague’s Restaurant was in the basement, but my crowd could not afford to eat there; we bought a piece of coconut cream pie and a glass of milk at Horn’s [restaurant] for a nickel. We walked, of course, from my neighborhood, Grand and Park…..”

Note his words “of course”.  To attend a stage play downtown, they walked three miles and then, presumably, walked the same distance back home.  How many teenagers today would consider walking even six blocks?

Ninth and Olive Streets is in the heart of downtown. I have walked across that intersection hundreds of times. My first job more than fifty years ago was in a building a block south of there. The Century Theater was in the Century Building. That building was also home to the Scruggs-Vandervoort-Barney department store with huge, glass display windows, the city’s oldest department store.

In 1923, it was one of four department stores in downtown St. Louis that “have paid particular attention to the appeal they make through their window displays….  These beauties are accentuated at night….   What then could be more attractive than a drive downtown…[where] the wizardry of the windows …can be seen and appreciated after nightfall….” [“Downtown Show Windows at Night Make Scenes of Thrilling Splendor”, Greater St. Louis magazine, Sept. 1923, pp. 7, 34]

During its Diamond Jubilee two years later, “the store was converted into a veritable fairyland…by artistic decorations.  A city block surrounded with a necklace of lights, with huge diamonds of electricity revolving at heights…which drew throngs downtown at night…” [Greater St. Louis, May 1925, p. 13]

At age 97, legendary St. Louis entertainer Harry Fender recalled the 1920s: “St. Louis had 14 live theaters downtown at that time, and people flocked to Union Station and the Fred Harvey all-night restaurant to catch a glimpse of the big stars like Sarah Bernhardt, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, coming in and out of town to perform in the shows…”

Restaurateur Vince Bommarito recalled similar night life in the 1950s:

“I really miss the all-night restaurants around town. Downtown there were about ten …  You’d come out of Loew’s State [Theater] and hundreds of people would be on the street. All-night newsstands, cruises on the Admiral, hotels busy… things were always exciting. Department stores had doormen, and the old American Theatre was going all the time with all the latest musicals …  Everything happened downtown…”  [St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 15, 1994]

I remember that kind of ambience downtown as late as the 1960s.

And today? There are no display windows because there are no department stores because there are no shoppers because the same streets used by those shoppers and theatergoers from the 1900s through the 1960s are now occupied by groups of “teens” who assemble there after midnight to mill around or fight or shoot each other. If such display windows were there today, they would be shattered and then boarded up and then the boards would be defaced with spray paint — a fine illustration of how St. Louisans, as progressive as they come, have agreed to surrender their rights and accommodate both lawlessness and endless excuses for it.

A 15-foot tall gold and black trim cast-iron clock stood on the sidewalk at one corner of the Century Building. It had been there since the 1860s and was still there in the 1960s.

I have a luncheon menu from the store’s Tea Room from the 1930s, in which 87 dishes are listed. It is from an age long before Americans agreed to adopt the “fast food” frame of mind. The highest priced item is 85 cents. Filet Mignon was 75 cents; it required 15 minutes’ preparation.  A dime would buy a bottomless cup of coffee.

All seven are long gone: The store, the theater, the music hall, the clock, the building, television programs like “Romper Room”, and hostesses like Miss Lois, who embodied the charm, restraint, and good manners that Americans once expected from women in the public eye. [Ha, ha, ha! There’s a real knee-slapper: Compare those expectations with how American women in the public eye act and speak today.]

I took pictures as the Century Building was demolished in 2004, in opposition to local preservationists. The city wanted it gone and replaced by (what else?) a parking garage, one of many such garages to provide space for thousands of people who will never go downtown.

My father would have enjoyed the irony in the fact that fifteen years earlier, in 1989, he took pictures of two ghost signs reading “Scruggs Garage” on a building two blocks from the store.  They were among the last relics of the store’s existence and are now long gone.

The American Theater that Mr. Stewart recalled had been the site of many memorable plays. Among the performers who appeared on stage there were Helen Hayes, Clifton Webb, Gloria Swanson, Ethel Barrymore, Paul Lucas, Marion Lorne, Sidney Blackmer, Joe E. Brown, Rosalind Russell, Louis Calhern, Basil Rathbone, Shirley Booth, Boris Karloff, and Jackie Gleason.  The theater was torn down in 1953 to make way for (what else?) a parking garage that was never built.

When I was a boy, stage plays were presented at the Empress Theater further west on Olive Street in an area that once was a thriving center of night life in mid-town St. Louis. Not long after, the Empress closed, then became a church, then became vacant, then was torn down and replaced by (what else?) a parking garage.

Old buildings on Olive Street downtown were demolished in the early 1960s to provide space for (what else?) a parking garage.  It closed years ago and now stands abandoned and vandalized, another stop on any “Ruins of St. Louis” tour.

The civil setting at Ninth and Olive Streets that I remember from the 1960s is now as distant as the theater life recalled by Mr. Stewart from the early 1900s. Only one theater building still stands downtown, and it has not presented any plays in many years.

The loss of elegant theaters, restaurants, and department stores is perhaps inevitable.  What is worse but not inevitable is the surrender of the frame of mind in which those things are created and are able to flourish in a civilized setting.  The most important elements of that frame of mind are moral authority, confidence, certitude, and gravitas, not a trace of which can be seen in “The Law” or municipal government in St. Louis today.

Above:  An example of what can be seen today in downtown St. Louis: Two entire blocks of buildings abandoned and vandalized.

The most impressive theatrics are now staged in City Hall and the municipal courts where shysters and their toadies display a prodigious talent for charades, weasel word-games, and sob stories galore as they perform backflips and somersaults to evade the inconvenient responsibility of upholding laws and punishing lawbreakers. Now THAT’s entertainment.

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