Posted on by Cara Jensen

Architects Group Opposes Plan For Tower Grove Park – 22 Apr 1990 P-D

n a rare public statement, the St. Louis Chapter of the American Institute of Architects is strongly opposing a proposal by city officials to put Tower Grove Park into the hands of the city’s park department and reduce the park’s own budget.

Eugene Mackey III, chapter president, said the architects were willing to be mediators to help city and park officials resolve the matter.

”We realize that the city has budget restraints,” Mackey said. ”But Tower Grove Park is a classic example of a Victorian Park, complete in every way. To tamper with it would be a very serious matter.”

The public statement – issued this weekend – is the first by the chapter since it publicly criticized the proposed design of the Adam’s Mark Hotel downtown seven years ago. Mackey said architects decided to go public again because of their strong concerns about protecting the park.

”We emphatically oppose any proposal to drastically alter the administration of Tower Grove Park,” the statement said.

”We also strongly oppose any effort to drastically cut the city appropriation for Tower Grove Park, which already operates at a lower cost per acre than any other city park. The city fully accepted responsibility for adequately funding the operation of Tower Grove Park when the land was given to the city by Henry Shaw in 1868.”

The architects’ group – as well as a variety of others who have expressed concerns recently about the park’s future – was responding to an item in the city’s proposed $302.4 million general budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

Under it, the city would put $170,000 into its general park budget to maintain Tower Grove Park, and no longer give maintenance money to the park’s commissioners. The state-appointed commissioners have operated the park with city money for 122 years under a deed conveying the park to the city, and a companion state law.

The city’s appropriation to the park commissioners this year was $530,000 for operating and maintenance expenses, and $34,000 to buy a tractor.

The 287-acre park, recently designated a National Historic Landmark, is bounded by Kingshighway, Grand Boulevard, Magnolia Avenue and Arsenal Street.

Park officials and JoAnne LaSala, the city’s budget director, said last week that they will meet soon to resolve the matter. LaSala said a solution must be reached before the Board of Estimate and Apportionment votes on a proposed budget to send to the Board of Aldermen. The budget must be sent to the aldermen by May 1.

One possible compromise under discussion, LaSala said, is to give the park commissioners around $400,000 for the coming year. A more permanent operating arrangement could be worked out later, she said.

But John Karel, the park director, said $400,000 is not enough to maintain the park adequately. The city’s money is about all the park gets, he said, except for fees from park users and private donations. The park does not have an endowment.

”The budget director indicated that the city park department is taking a 3 percent cut. If that is the case, we feel that something in that same vicinity is reasonable and fair to ask of us,” Karel said.

Karel has support on that position from several aldermen whose wards are in or near the park, including Martie Aboussie, D-9th Ward.

”The cut for Tower Grove Park should be the same as for other city departments – 3 percent or 4 percent,” Aboussie said.

Others concerned about the park include the St. Louis Chapter of the Coalition for the Environment, the Eastern Missouri Group of the Sierra Club, the Landmarks Association of St. Louis Inc., several neighborhood groups and the Friends of Tower Grove Park, a group formed recently to raise private money for park improvements.

State Rep. Tom Stoff, D-64th District, said he was sending a letter to city officials about the park. He lives near it, and his district ends at Magnolia.

”My feeling is that the city entered into an agreement, many many years ago,” to maintain the park properly, he said. ”I think that structure should remain.”

Thomas Keller, president of the 700-member Shaw Neighborhood Improvement Association, said its directors had expressed ”outrage that Tower Grove Park is being singled out for such a drastic cut.”

The Sierra Club, which usually does not get involved in parks in urban areas, made an exception for Tower Grove Park, said Paul Stupperich, its chairman.

”We feel strongly that it is an urban forest and needs to be protected,” he said.

Carolyn Toft, executive director of Landmarks, said the park is ”a living work of art” and that the city’s budget proposal would be ”disastrous for Henry Shaw’s legacy.”

Posted on by Cara Jensen

TOWER GROVE PARK ADDS FRINGE BENEFIT: SURREY RIDES – 17 Apr 1988 P-D

A lost part of the history of Tower Grove Park will return April 30 when horse-drawn surreys and carriages will again carry visitors along the winding, tree-lined streets and lanes.

Park officials have hired Tower Grove Carriage Co., which is affiliated with St. Louis Carriage Co., to provide the horses and carriages as part of a renewed effort to restore the historic, 277-acre Victorian park on the city’s South Side. When the park was built in the mid- 1800’s, its walkways, roads and landscaping were designed specifically for strollers and visitors in carriages.

”Today, probably 90 percent of the people who visit the park do so in a car, and hardly anyone uses the park the way it was designed to be used,” says John Karel, the park’s director.

”We think this will open the eyes of a lot of folks as they ride through the park and get a sense of what was so exquisite about the way it was designed.”

Henry Shaw, who established Tower Grove Park and Shaw’s Garden nearby, wanted to duplicate popular walking parks in his native England. After he conveyed the park to the city of St. Louis in 1868, he helped to shape and build it into a tranquil, Victorian-style enclave with gazebos, statuary, more than 20,000 plantings and trees and stately entrances and gatehouses. The park was the city’s first driving park for horses and carriages. Tower Grove Park is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The park is bounded by Kingshighway on the west, Grand Boulevard on the east, Magnolia Avenue on the north and Arsenal Street on the south.

Michael Stokes, president of the carriage company, says rides will be offered initially from roughly noon until 9 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, and on Monday and Wednesday evenings when concerts are held in the park.

”The carriages will be touring in the park and will pick people up when and where they want to get on,” Stokes said. Or, he said, reservations can be made by telephoning the carriage company or by going to the stable area. The stable area is north of the tennis courts, facing North West Drive, and just west of Center Cross Drive.

The rides will cost $5 a person, for about 20 minutes. As St. Louis Carriage Co., Stokes’ company also offers rides in Laclede’s Landing on the riverfront.

Stokes said pony rides and hayrides would also be available at the park.

As part of the return of horses and carriages, the park’s original stable, built in the 1860s, is being renovated as a headquarters for the operation. Park employees have been repairing the old, one-story stone stable for the five horses that will pull the carriages. Employees are renovating also a two-story stone house where stable keepers once lived and are building a stable for the ponies.

The stone house will have a full-time resident – an employee of the carriage company. And an office for arranging rides is being set up there as well.

The public will be able to tour the stable area and view the horses – including two Clydesdales and a newborn Clydesdale stabled there, Stokes said.

Posted on by Cara Jensen

TOWER GROVE PARK: STILL JEWELL-LIKE, BUT BEDRAGGLED – 21 Feb 1988 P-D

N AN AGE when solicitations from cultural organizations are often immodest, importunate and disproportionate to their merits, it is curious but refreshing and even a little touching to find a venerable and esteemed institution hesitant about asking for money.

Such is the case with Tower Grove Park, the jewel-like but bedraggled 285-acre public garden on St. Louis’s south side. It is probably the city’s most admired park. Hundreds of St. Louisans will tell you it is their favorite and, the attitude of many of the neighbors is aggressively proprietary. The park is listed in the national Register of Historic Places. It is generally considered the finest surviving example of a formal Victorian park in the nation.

But the place is battered and bruised and sorely in need of resources to repair the ravages of malicious mischief, past mismanagement and time. The statuary and furniture have been attacked by air pollution and vandals; the structures, including the 10 whimsical gazebos and bandstands with their celebrated bouffant Turkish roofs, are deteriorating; the trees and shrubs are disappearing faster than they are being replaced. Officials estimate that about $500,000 is needed for rehabilitation and repair.

Yet Tower Grove’s officials have not so far tried to put the arm on the public. There have been no mailings, no radio spots, no telephone solicitations at suppertime. If you want to find out what the park’s emergencies are, you have to ask.

The cause of the diffidence of the Tower Grove administration may be its unusual nature. It is a virtually autonomous entity, governed by a board of commissioners, but enjoying an annual city appropriation suf ficient to cover operations.

That it was generously endowed by Henry Shaw, the English-born merchant who also founded the Missouri Botanical Garden, when he donated the land to the city is a common misconception.

The history is a little complicated. The land Shaw originally acquired was former farm land set aside in accordance with Continental custom by the city’s French original settlers. The land lay mostly outside the city boundary, which at that time ran roughly north and south about 40 rods east of what is now Grand Boulevard. Shaw deeded the land to the city and then landscaped the tract, planted the trees, installed the statuary, built the structures and roads.

The city had no authority under its charter to accept real estate outside the city limits, so it took an act of the Missouri legislature to create the park and enable the city to accept it.

The act went into effect in 1867. It stipulated that the control of the park would rest with a board of commissioners of no fewer than five nor more than seven members, comprising the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, ex-officio, and the rest appointed by the Missouri Supreme Court.

The enactment, in accordance with the terms of Shaw‘s gift, also required the city to make an annual appropriation of not less than $25,000 for the maintenance of the park. It was hardly enough, even then. The city’s annual contribution is now about $500,000 but still only covers ordinary operations; there is not enough left over for major rehabilitation, according to Gerhardt Kramer, an architect who is one of the park’s commissioners and perhaps the member most active in trying to drum up support.

In what was to turn out to be the most perplexing part of his gift, Shaw reserved a 200-foot wide strip around the perimeter of the park to be rented for house lots. The rent, had their been any, would have gone to Shaw, or his estate.

The notion of owning a dwelling on rented land is alien to most Americans and the scheme was not a success. The only house ever built was the Italianate stone dwelling on Magnolia Avenue at Tower Grove. It was intended as a demonstrator to promote the development. It now serves as the park director’s residence.

After a legal fracas in the 1920s with the Botanical Garden, which claimed an interest in the strip on account of Tower Grove’s failure to develop it, the strip was incorporated into the park. The seemingly meaningless free-standing stone columns dotting Tower Grove near the edges marked the boundaries of the strip.

”We’re happy the strip never took hold, because if it had the park would be nothing but a backyard today,” says Kramer.

Another reason the Tower Grove commission may be shy about seeking support is that the park has acquired in recent years a reputation, not entirely unearned, as a market place for homosexual prostitution.

John A. Karel, former Missouri State parks director who took over last October as director of Tower Grove, says that according to police the activity has receded somewhat. Still, it will take some time for the park’s unsavory image to change.

A third reason for Tower Grove’s diffidence is that it has not been decided exactly what the park’s priorities are. A master plan for improvements and repairs drawn up two years ago lists approximately half a million dollars in critically needed projects, but it probably needs to be updated, Karel indicated.

Some the master plan’s provisions, such as relocating the Turkish Pavilion, the largest and best known of the victorian gazebos, might prove controversial.

Tower Grove represents a style of landscape design that emerged in England in the first half of the 19th century in a sort of synthesis of the fascination with rugged, romantic landscapes and an attempt to create serene pastoral scenery that was fashionable during the previous century.

Shaw and his architect, George I. Barnett, introduced an element of morbid romanticism at Tower Grove by including an artificial ruin, built from the stones of the Lindell Hotel which had burned down.

But the ruin seems a little out place. A much stronger theme is the 19th-century reverence of Art, Progress and Science as almost anthropomorphic entities. The three most prominent statues in the park, cast in bronze in Munich by sculptor Ferdinand von Miller, head of the Bavarian royal foundry, are of Shakespeare, Columbus and the now almost forgotten explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.

Shaw also tried to create an arboretum, which, while not wild, would be only gently tamed. The tract was meadow when Shaw acquired it, with three trees on it. He planted between 10,000 and 20,000 trees and shrubs, representing about 200 species from all over the world. His object was to have examples of every species that could survive in St. Louis, and of course not all of them did. Air pollution, especially during the time when coal was the chief heating fuel here, took a terrible toll. The park today has about 8,000 trees comprising about 100 species. Possibly 200 of the sp ecimens planted in Shaw‘s time are still alive.

One mistake made during the 1930s and 1940s, Karel says, was replacing dead trees with fast-growing, short-lived instant-gratification varieties such as silver maples, sweet gums and pin oaks. These species are now coming to the ends of their lives and the park is losing 200 trees a year.

Other mistakes were made. One was the recent installation of a less than life-size bronze statue of Baron von Steuben mounted on a streamlined pink granite pedestal. It is badly out of scale with its surroundings.

Others were the designs of the modernistic tennis pavilion and the comfort station in the 1950s and early 1960s, a period representing the low point in architectural design generally.

The design of the park’s latest improvement, the Stupp memorial senior citizens center with its awkward attempt to echo the Turkish motif of the gazebos, has been questioned.

But there have been some triumphs. The park commissioners prevailed in a long political and legal battle with the city in the late 1950s and early 1960s over a proposal to run a highway through the park linking Tower Grove Avenue and Morganford Road.

And they successfully resisted the city’s attempt to replace the park’s quaint street lamps with the space-age cobra-head variety.

Oddly enough, one of the most felicitous recent improvements was apparently inadvertent. Faced with choosing a design for a concession stand, the Tower Grove commissioners, instead of consulting an architect, merely picked a prefab out of a catalogue.

It is small octagonal structure with grey, vertical tongue-and-groove siding and a low conical roof. It conforms neatly with its Victorian setting.