[chesterfield]
Peyton Wennenberg, 10, is a fighter. The young lady wasn’t able to spend the last month of her fourth grade year at Ascension Catholic School in Chesterfield. Rather, she spent most of that time undergoing treatment for leukemia at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Recently, however, Peyton got quite the celebration in her honor at school when she was awarded a ‘Powered By Hope’ medal from Teri Griege, a stage IV colon cancer survivor who has remained a competitive triathlete throughout her treatment. Griege is president and founder of Powered By Hope, a nonprofit dedicated to offering support to those diagnosed with cancer. Peyton has been very active raising funds to fight cancer, and especially to support Pedal the Cause, a ride designed to raise awareness of and money for the fight against the disease. The ride is slated for Sept. 26-27 … Funds stay in St. Louis to fund cancer research through the Children’s Discovery Institute at Children’s and the Cancer Frontier Fund, an initiative of Barnes-Jewish Hospital that benefits Siteman Cancer Center. Last year’s ride raised $2.8 million! At any rate, Peyton was center stage as her classmates cheered her on, and many did their part with donations for this year’s Pedal ride. A fringe benefit? Students got to eschew uniforms, dress down and/or wear orange—the cancer ribbon color for leukemia—that day at school. Pictured: Teri Griege, Peyton Wennenberg, Heidi Glaus
Let there be … LEDs! And there were. Are, that is. The after-dark lighting at the top of Art Hill had been fading for years as it was traditional lighting installed in the 1990s, and funding for its upkeep was scarce. But thanks to a donation from Pershing Charitable Trust, Forest Park Forever has installed 128 LED units at ground level along the tree-lined path on either side of the statue of Louis IX, officially Apotheosis of St. Louis. LEDs are all that and a bag of chips that you don’t have to fumble for in the dark, lasting typically 50,000 hours (traditional bulbs burn for only 10,000 hours). According to our math, which didn’t even require a calculator, the lights last five times longer. What’s more, they use 20 percent less energy. And they produce little to no heat, allowing for sealed concrete compartments that help keep the weather and roots out. If we didn’t mention the word ‘efficient’, already … consider it mentioned. The lighting complements that of Emerson Grand Basin and the Art Museum itself, restoring the statue to its aesthetic position as a central, iconic figure, even after the sun goes down. The switch was flipped on around 8 p.m. on Sept. 10.
[ladue]
Ladue cops say the ‘snatching’ of the purse a woman left behind at St. Louis Country Club after she secured her child in the safety seat could be one in a series of similar crimes that have occurred over the past few years in several states. At any rate, not long after the purse went missing, the crook cashed a check for nearly $10,000 at a bank in St. Charles, using the victim’s driver’s license for I.D. and a stolen check from her purse during the illicit transaction. Cops say similar crimes have been committed at schools, parks and country clubs, and suspect this is the same perpetrator who has managed to make off with as much as 200 grand, total. Could this crook be that opportunistic, wily … or just plain lucky? Sheesh! We usually call them knuckleheads around here. But this is a horse of a different color. Smart? Audacious, at least—who walks onto tony CC grounds like these and snatches a purse? Cops have a great surveillance photo from the bank, but we surmise it’s of a woman who’s been made up to look as close as possible to the victim, like that’ll be of much help for anyone with an eye out. Maybe she had time to do some shopping at Plaza Frontenac before heading to the bank? Indeed, she looks well-heeled. The nerve! That’s fast work to get your hair and your face arranged just so, perhaps using a pair of glasses also found in the purse? Our collective jaws drop. This gives one pause for another reason: Wouldn’t you think that a fingerprint or a strand of hair to test for DNA would be required for a transaction of this size? It also calls to mind D.B. Cooper, the infamous dude who parachuted from a plane with a briefcase full of dough years ago. Maybe this woman will never be found, either. Perish the thought. At any rate, this case would make a fantastic storyline for any one of the 574 police shows all over the dial, 24/7.
Robert Fishbone, creator of the famed Lindy Squared mural that was a downtown landmark at the Lion Gas building since 1977 until its demolition, has been at it again. He’s painted a mural that illustrates ‘66 Reasons to Love’ St. Louis. Commissioned by local Phillips 66 stations, this 1,200-square-foot work is a vision of the peripatetic Fishbone and his daughter, Liza, and graces the side of the KDHX Radio building in Grand Center. It was a focal point of the ‘Music at the Intersection’ block party series, where it was dedicated during the third and last installment of this year’s celebration a few weeks ago. It had to be satisfying for Fishbone, who with his late wife Sarah Linquist managed to make the destruction in 1981 of (the first) Lindy Squared into a block party. But better to celebrate creation than destruction, don’t you think? Fishbone has done everything from devise inflatables fashioned after Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” to promote group drumming as a therapeutic pursuit. But back to Lindy … who’s been lucky, indeed: The creative couple painted a second, scaled-down version for the ill-fated St. Louis Centre. When that white elephant was demolished, however, this second pixilated image of The Lou’s most famous aviator was preserved. The half-scale replica was taken down in pieces for reinstallment elsewhere, perhaps at the City Museum. Local dreamers see murals as a way to continue our town’s revitalization, perhaps through rugged, removable panels that won’t have to face the ‘headache ball.’ Instead, they could be engineered to be removable and used later on another blank wall, of which we have plenty.
[town & country]
Going to the hospital is no fun, especially for kids. But the experience can be made aesthetically pleasing for them, at least, if not outright whimsical. Pediatric patients are distracted by the colorful metal animal sculptures outside St. Louis Children’s Hospital, and inside by the model choo-choo running overhead. Designers faced myriad challenges with the spaces inside St. Louis Children’s Specialty Care Center in Town & Country, which houses 13 discrete clinics. Arcturis, the interior designer, had a tall order from BJC HealthCare, which requested evidence-based design.’ Children respond more positively to different color palettes, for one thing. But the center serves patients from the very young to those in their teens. So the design approaches needed to be playful enough to capture the imagination of smaller patients and complex enough to appeal to those up to 18 years old. And they need to stay relevant for years to come. Meanwhile the building, 141,000 square feet, needed to look cohesive despite the variety of clinics it would house. The team integrated functional touches like engaging imagery on the ceilings of treatment areas where patients recline, hopscotch tiling on the floor to support mobility therapies, and graduated levels of privacy glazing at suite entries to protect sensitive eyes during ophthalmology treatments. There are inspirational words and phrases incorporated within the graphics. And baseball themes. But it couldn’t all be day-care-center appropriate. Parents of teens know that eye-rolling is one symptom displayed by patients of that age, who tend to respond negatively to an overdose of cute.