Runners, bicyclists, walkers, ballplayers, equestrians, skaters, fisherfolk, lollygaggers and lay-abouts, cricketers, the amorous, feckless sunbathers, fierce ruggers, picnickers, cardiac rehabilitees, hopeless romantics, assiduous star-gazers - all these and other consumers of Forest Park's tangible and ineffable pleasures would testify eagerly to its magnificence, pre-restoration tattiness not withstanding.
If you paused and looked at the park and reckoned with what was happening to it, however, you were appalled to watch as bridges, walkways and stairways disintegrated; as muck built up to the surface of lagoon; as standing water let off a stench. Broken fountains and sculptures in distress presented their own frustrations.
The hard-core faithful, however, never gave up. Forest Park was our park, one of our greatest claims to fame. Run down or not, it was more civically satisfying and enduring than booze or shoes or our relative place in the National League. It was - is - vast, at 1,371 acres, much bigger than Central Park in New York City, and almost as big as the Bois de Boulogne on the edge of Paris. It can and has absorbed a million memories, and there is room for millions more.
The two major organizations forming the partnership for rebuilding Forest Park were the St. Louis Department of Parks, Recreation and Forestry and a not-for-profit corporation, Forest Park Forever, which was formed in 1996. Since the dual regency of the parks department and FPF was established, about $94 million has been spent to resuscitate the park.
What's been accomplished? A good place to begin is a tour of the building where Forest Park Forever has its offices. This is the old Lindell Pavilion, just east of the Missouri History Museum, in front of the handball courts. This building rose in 1892 as a station for the trolley cars. After the car tracks were removed, the building took on new life as a field house and a sort of blue-collar country club for golfers and other duffers.
Now thoroughly renovated, the Lindell Pavilion has become the park's Visitor and Education Center, a light and lovely place. The building houses offices for the Missouri Department of Conservation and the OASIS program for senior citizens as well as Forest Park Forever, a snack bar and gift shop and an information booth staffed by volunteers. The old locker rooms have been spruced up, and the building's venerated clubby function as a meeting place for card games and gossip carries on.
Across from the south entrance of the visitor center, beyond a necessary-evil of parking, stands the Nathan Frank pavilion, the central jewel in a handsomely replanted and richly cultivated Pagoda Circle. The Muny Opera, with its Art Deco facade and its promise of al fresco theatrical fun, looks out onto the colorful exuberance of the Pagoda Circle grounds like a proud mother.
This neighborhood, always amenable to having one take the load off one's feet, is now even more inviting and refreshing. If you walk by it early, before traffic picks up, you hear the music of birds taking their leisure in the abundant growth.
If you walk south and uphill from the bandstand grounds, in a while you'll come to a building that doesn't get enough credit for being genuinely formally interesting. That may be because for years the Jewel Box was a botanical kitsch house. No more.
Now, this stylish structure lives up to its name - a greenhouse that meets functional needs and exceeds them. It stands as a precision-cut gem, fitted out so as to serve as a party place as well as a hothouse.
If you walk southwest from the Jewel Box toward the Planetarium, you'll see the improvements to the ball fields. Once home to a small airport visited by barnstorming aviation pioneers, the fields have been improved, and now sport a performance-level field for public high school league teams, St. Louis University High School and Forest Park Community College teams and, by permit, for other organizations. There is a new concession stand and bathroom building in the center of the field.
If you walk west from the Jewel Box toward the St. Louis Zoo, then hang a right on Concourse Drive and follow it north, eventually you will come to the World's Fair Pavilion.
Built in 1909 with proceeds from the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which brought Forest Park international glory in 1904, the building was one of the first to receive new life in the grand restoration scheme. The pavilion is a popular place for parties and weddings. If you stand in one of its archways and look to the north, the view is nothing short of spectacular.
A stroll down the stairway from the pavilion takes you by the Kerth Fountain and brings you to the shores of Post-Dispatch Lake. If you look to the right, you'll see a new boathouse that replaced a charming old vernacular structure well endowed with character and integrity. The replacement doesn't quite measure up.
Walk to your left, west, then take the first path to your right, and you are on your way to one of America's most dazzling sights, the renewed and dramatically improved Grand Basin. Run-down does not begin to adequately describe its former condition. With its jubilant geysers, its new bridges, its repaired parapet walls, the stairways leading down to the water and bridges passing over streams leading into and out of the basin, it seems magical, Brigadoonish. Fortunately for us, the Grand-again Basin is not going to go away, no time soon anyway.
Northwest of the Grand Basin is the new golf course clubhouse. Low, sleek, clearly modernist, handsome by day and by night, delicate and responsive, the building not only performs well but also contributes to the visual integrity of the park.
Another pavilion building by virtuoso Shigeru Ban is proposed for the park, and its addition would be an architectural event of international importance. Planning is in progress for this pavilion, which would be built on the east side of the park, just north of Steinberg Rink.
One way to get to Steinberg Rink is on what's often called the bike path, although nowadays that moniker is in disfavor because of skirmishes between factions of bicyclists and skaters and walkers and runners in various coalitions and in varying degrees of fanaticism. There have always been tensions on the path - "get out of my way" - but they've been exacerbated by wonderful stretches of "softer surface" pathways for "slower velocity users," which cyclists think should remove runners and walkers from the asphalt trails. Ever true: No good deed goes unpunished.
In many parts of the park, these paths pass beside or over the riverway that meanders from the old cascade near Skinker and Forsyth Boulevards on the west side of the park, all the way over to ponds near Steinberg Rink. This gentle, naturalistic effluence - with its narrows, its rapids, its gentle falls and streams that flow in and out of lagoons - is a remarkably successful feature of our reclaimed treasure.
As is true for the green herons and great egrets, the mallards and wood ducks, the great horned owl and her young, the beavers, coyotes and raccoons, a visitor takes nourishment from these waters in this place, and solace, too.
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