ladue | I’m 69, so I grew up in the suburbs in the 1960s. We read about slavery in grade-school social studies, and in junior high, we breezed over the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws and lunch-counter protests. I was in eighth grade when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, but it’s only in the last few years that my eyes have been opened to the centuries-long tragedy of the Black American experience. I was in my 50s when I found out what the sad song “Strange Fruit” was about. The race riots in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on May 31 and June 1, 1921, had never entered my consciousness until I read an ‘On This Date’ email from the History channel about 10 years ago. It was one of the worst acts of racist violence in U.S. history. A white mob descended on Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, murdering as many as 300 people in what had become ‘The Black Wall Street.’ In two days, more than 35 blocks of homes and businesses were burned. But Greenwood rose like a phoenix from the ashes, in an epic tale that journalist Victor Luckerson weaves about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased. It centers around the Goodwin family, who had moved to Greenwood before the riots, joining a community at the center of Black life in the west. Just a few years later, the teenaged Ed Goodwin hid in a bathtub as violence raged outside. A number of years later, the Goodwins and their neighbors rebuilt the district into ‘a Mecca,’ in Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived and small businesses flourished. Luckerson wrote Built from the Fire, named a Best Book of the Year for 2023 by The New York Times Book Review and The Washington Post. Luckerson appears from 7 to 9 p.m. on July 25 at the Clark Family Branch, 1640 S. Lindbergh Blvd. The event is free, and books will be available for purchase. Signings are available at all author events. For more info, see ‘Author Events’ at slcl.org.
grand center
As much as playwright Tennessee Williams was known to have disliked St. Louis—one of his nicknames for our fair city was St. Pollution—the StL has given him several lifetimes of love through eight iterations of the Tennessee Williams Festival (TWStL). The ninth annual celebration of the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning dramatist will be held in and around the Grandel Theater and Grand Center. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which netted the former Tom Williams his second Pulitzer, will get center stage, slated for Aug. 8 through 18 at the Grandel, directed by the award-winning Michael Wilson, who has done most of his theater work in NYC. “Life Upon the Wicked Stage / Celebrating Grand Center Theatre District – Then and Now” will be the focus for three one-act plays (with music directed by former St. Louisan Brian Hohlfeld) upstairs at the Curtain Call Lounge, just steps from the bustling streets and locations where much of the action takes place. Like a mini-jukebox musical, “Life Upon the Wicked Stage” features songs from the period to evoke the flavor of Vaudeville and the type of entertainment Tom Williams would have encountered in his Grand Avenue outings long before he completed his first masterpiece. (He adopted his nom de plume partly due to his Southern accent: Thomas Lanier Williams III had been born in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi.) TWStL also will feature discussion panels, a walking tour, late-night open mic, a tribute reading and more. For a full menu of what, when and where, visit twstl.org.
clayton
Does it kind of chap you when a business promotes itself by latching onto a sport or other enterprise by announcing it’s the ‘official Styrofoam cup of America’s favorite pastime?’ How about ‘NASA’s official cotton swab?’ Sometimes, it actually makes sense. We just got word that Clementine’s Naughty & Nice Ice Cream is the official partner of the Missouri History Museum for its exhibit celebrating the 120th anniversary of the 1904 World’s Fair. Famously, the ice-cream cone was introduced there. Score one for Clementine’s. And we’ll bet that you didn’t know that July 21, is National Ice Cream Day, the third Sunday of National Ice Cream Month. We didn’t either, but reckon the special day should be any Monday all summer—and declared a federal holiday! So, score two and maybe three! All right; score four: Four new limited-edition, Fair-inspired flavors will be available online and in-store at the DeMun neighborhood ‘scoop shop’ in Clayton and Clementine’s seven other locations in the metro. And you want to see the exhibit, right? It will likely be one of those days when the air feels like wet noodles in the StL—that’s when five out of four actors who play doctors on TV recommend consuming ice cream to prevent heat stroke. And beginning at 10 a.m. at the museum on July 21, Clementine’s will scoop out a Fair flavor for the first 120 people sweating in line. There’ll be T-shirts! And history, of course. Tipping a straw hat to Fair history, Clementine’s named the four special flavors as such: ‘Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis,’ ‘Banana Split,’ ‘Vegan Waffle Cone-a-Copia,’ and ‘Fairy Floss.’
notable neighbors
frontenac
Although the brand-new Clark Family Branch of our St. Louis County Library (SLCL), 1640 Lindbergh across from Plaza Frontenac, looks immense and somewhat forbidding from the road, it has about as much interior room as the headquarters building it replaced: 74,000 square feet. That’s not an optical illusion. “It’s just huge, but still manages to be warm and inviting!” says Kristen Sorth, who’s been with the library 26 years, starting in H.R. and now CEO of the library district. Today you can see and feel the new building for yourself. It opened to the public onJuly 7. “Although it’s the same size as before,” Sorth points out, with no shortage of enthusiasm, “there’s two times as much space for the public.” A new headquarters building, at Spoede and Clayton roads, now houses the administration, communications and foundation staff. It boasts windows, which the basement of the old building didn’t. “Your Library Renewed,” the 10-year capital improvement plan funded by a six-cent tax that voters approved in 2012, has meant that 21 buildings have been replaced, and presently there’s so much more to do, see, read and listen to—inside and out. Author events have been held there for weeks. For one thing, more people can attend discussions and book signings at Clark. Its auditorium seats 800 and is equipped with drop screens for multimedia presentations. And the number of high-profile authors who might otherwise have skipped ‘The Great Flyover’ has increased: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Amor Towles. A recent presenter was novelist Amy Tan, who discussed her recent book on birding, which features her own fabulous watercolor sketches. “She was saying that authors usually only came to the coasts,” Sorth recalls. Now, we’re a destination. The pandemic forever changed the way everybody operates in public spaces, of course, and SLCL is as ahead of the curve with public service as it is with its state-of-the-art technology and infrastructure. Just introduced in June is the ePopUp Library program, through which anyone, library-card-carrier or not, can download eBooks or audiobooks to a smartphone or tablet via a QR code: at the airport, MetroLink stations, County government offices and Schnucks stores. “We can reach people who aren’t always in our buildings,” says Sorth. “Yes, we’re still about paper books … and literacy, of course. But we want to continue removing barriers to access.” To that end, SLCL will roll out four new bookmobiles in the fall. Meanwhile, the Sachs Branch in Chesterfield was renovated some time back, “but it’s too small for how busy it is,” she says. The Natural Bridge Branch may be facing the same dilemma. Communities grow, and the County library is a “center of community,” she says. The library provides diapers and period supplies to those in need. Homelessness and food insecurity are other focuses of social services. SLCL has provided 1.5 million meals through Operation Food Search. Social workers can be accessed at several branches. (And to answer that question on the tip of your tongue, Sorth graduated from high school in Jefferson City. She’s married to Mike Sorth, a St. Louisan. Their son Jack, 20, is a junior at ‘The’ Ohio State.) Finally, for more info about your library, visit slcl.org.
