maplewood
Bart Simpson and a heck of a lot of cops say you can never have enough doughnuts. Maplewood is home to ‘Donuts 2.0,’ what with its Strange Donuts and most recently with Tim Horton’s. Forty of the breakfast and coffee cafés are due to open in the metro in the next few years, and, shoot … on its menu Tim Horton’s doesn’t emphasize doughnuts. But Dunkin’ Donuts does, and more than a dozen new locations are slated to open in and around the StL, with former NFL players as franchisees. Then we have quirky firms like the traveling Vincent Van Donut, whose donuts are square and, in some cases, topped with bacon. Bacon. Did I say bacon? Pretty soon, anyhow, we’ll be overrun with doughnut shops; well, not really. They’re not as pervasive as Starbucks. Coffee. Coffee, anyone? Yeppers. Like, anywhere …
city of st. louis
Whither goest Grant’s Farm? Will it become the south county branch of the Saint Louis Zoo—as it were—or stay in the Busch family, for good or ill? In either case, it looks as though the beautiful Bauernhof and mansion will stay, touches that always have lent a Bavarian air to the property’s nearly 200 acres. Four of the six Busch sibs support the $30 million Zoo deal, while brother Adolphus backs Billy’s competing offer, with plans to move Billy’s Kräftig brewery business to the property. We’ll have until late March, at least, for the other riding boot to drop in this mostly civil family squabble. The Zoo eventually would need voters to approve an $8 million measure to fund the animal park’s annual operations, it appears at this point through a sales tax in St. Louis city and county and surrounding ‘collar’ counties, including St. Charles, Franklin and Jefferson. With the A-B business continuing to transmogrify at the hands of international conglomerate InBev (is it Miller time?), where would future generations discover the Busch family legacy? Well, the main brewery looks much the same from the highway as it always has. The Clydesdales still thunder and whinny down on the farm. And it would still be mostly about beer, were Kräftig to relocate to the tract off Gravois Road. But the Busch legacy shouldn’t be Billy’s legacy alone, the sibs argue. The Zoo deal would yet provide a home for the buffalo to roam, plus a zipline and some other nifty millennial attractions for those who can’t drink and who may get bored with critters real easily. Bridges in the trees? An after-hours ‘safari’ to spy tapir and other nocturnal animals? (Yeah, but isn’t there an app for that?!) We think we’d have to throw our Tyrolean cap in with the Zoo. For, were things to ‘go south’ for Billy et al. in a future economic downturn, who’s to say another possibility—carving up most of the property for a residential subdivision—wouldn’t be back on the table? Shucks. We need another subdivision like a Chernobyl farm’s chicken needs a third head. Lush and rolling, the land along the north side of Gravois looks like the African savanna, where animals have more room to wander than they do most anywhere at the Zoo. ‘Animals Always,’ like they say in Forest Park. Plus, seeing the Clydesdales up close and personal from Grant’s Trail is a joy divine. Go biking, running or walking there some day and you’ll see what we mean.
clayton
Willkommen! One of The Lou’s 15 sister cities is Stuttgart, Germany, a relationship established in 1960. The vibrant sisterly partnership features an Oktoberfest (I know, right?) and the Winterball Karneval, which is coming up Jan. 30 at the Clayton Plaza Hotel. A major fundraiser for the organization, monies raised support scholarships and stipends for German programs and exchanges with Stuttgart at Burroughs, Lindbergh and Parkway South high schools, the German School Association, SLU, Webster University, and the German Culture Center at UMSL. ‘The Roaring ’20s’ is this year’s theme, featuring live painting by renowned artist Jennifer Hayes (think vibrant, like Leroy Neiman), a silent auction, a three-course dinner, dancing and special surprises. In the spirit of the Mardi Gras season, the evening promises to be festive, with cash prizes awarded for the best ’20s costumes. Mistresses of ceremonies are SLSSC President Susanne Evens and StL media personality Sherry Farmer from 106.5 The Arch and onstl.com. It’s the SSLSC’s 56th anniversary and 29th for the Winterball Karneval … kinda makes the OCD in me want to subtract a one from the former and add it to the latter.
creve coeur
So, say you’re not a Christian and are looking for something to do on Dec. 25 besides eat at a Chinese restaurant. Well, on Christmas Day, during the fifth annual St. Louis area-wide Jewish and Muslim Day of Community Service, you could help spread joy throughout the metro. Twenty-three agencies, the largest number so far, will host needed volunteers on Christmas. Any of you who profess different faiths, and Christians too, are invited to “participate in social justice work side by side as sisters and brothers,” organizers say. Jewish and Muslim volunteers will be working together throughout the day at the various agencies. The event will kick off at 9 a.m. with a community breakfast at the Jewish Community Center’s Staenberg Arts & Education Building, 2 Millstone Campus Drive in Creve Coeur. The breakfast will include a social action blessing and celebration of the purpose and meaning of the event. Participants will then head to their community service sites. One of the new sites this year is Magdalene St. Louis, which provides housing and support for victims of sexual trafficking, prostitution and life on the streets. Volunteers will be making and sharing a meal with residents of the house, which opened here this year. Other opportunities include: volunteering to play board games, do arts and crafts and play pick-up basketball with the teens held at St. Louis Juvenile Detention Center; playing and doing projects with the children at St. Louis Crisis Nursery in St. Charles; a variety of hands-on projects for families with kids 8 and under at the JCC’s Staenberg Arts & Education Center, like making dog collars for the ‘paws’ project of St. Louis Effort for AIDS and get-well cards for cancer patients served by the group whose name we love: Girls Love Mail. Co-sponsors are the Islamic Foundation of Greater Saint Louis and the Jewish Community Relations Council of St. Louis and its Milford and Lee Bohm Social Justice Center.
affton
The patient sat perfectly still while high-school students stitched him back up—as you would expect from a mannequin. The wounds may have been fake, but the event, EXP3, was anything but as 200 Cor Jesu Academy students spent the day sampling professions with the help of 26 participating businesses. The real-world, hands-on career exploration program, now in its third year, is meant to help the girls as they map their career paths. One group of 30 girls from the Catholic high school in Affton immersed themselves in a variety of health and medical professions with the help of eight women physicians at SLU medical school, led by Dr. Catherine Wittgen, a SLUCare vascular surgeon and Cor Jesu alum. Along with rudimentary suturing, these high schoolers learned to start IVs, assess heart and lung sounds, and discover the career paths of women doctors and nurses. Meanwhile, other young women fanned out across the metro to engage for eight hours or so in career options ranging from stockbroker to attorney in a more comprehensive experience than the traditional career day in which upperclassmen ‘shadow’ a professional for a day. The young ladies wrote closing legal arguments and designed commercial landscapes. EXP3 (Exposure, Experience, Exploration) began in 2013 with eight engineering firms and 35 students. Hosts, many of them women, helped the high-schoolers get a feel for what they went through before achieving their current status. The young women of Cor Jesu Academy hail from 61 metro-area ZIP codes and 106 public, private and home-schooling educational environments. About a third of the student body was involved, visiting employers from Boeing to Edward Jones, from Express Scripts to Lewis, Rice & Fingersh.
Pictured: Clayton
