Tired of people hating on STL? So are we! It’s time for a GROUPHUG!
IF YOU LOVE ST. LOUIS, SHOW ST. LOUIS!
Calling all lovers of St. Louis! This city needs your tender embrace! Too often we hear more about what’s wrong with our city rather than the things that make it great. And far too often we counter this negativity with words rather than actions. Now is our chance to change that.
CITY LOVERS UNITE TO GIVE ST. LOUIS A PROVERBIAL HUG
WHAT: GROUPHUG ST. LOUIS
WHO: All lovers of St. Louis
WHEN: Thursday, June 2, 2011 at 7 – 10 pm
WHERE: STyLehouse, 3159 Cherokee St., 63118
HOW MUCH: Free!
City Affair presents GROUPHUG, the first event of its kind in the nation!
WHAT IS IT?
We are asking you and your friends to scour the city for your favorite people, places, and objects—ones that define our city and/or help to explain why you love St. Louis—and HUG these subjects for the camera. Get a friend to snap a photograph of you with your arms wrapped around your favorite St. Louis building, business, monument, person, etc. On June 2, all participants and friends are invited to attend the GROUPHUG party to view pics, imbibe, listen to music and express your love for STL.
Cleveland-based Saving Cities will be filming portions of the event and conducting interviews to document grassroots efforts to “save” Rust Belt cities from the community up. Put forward your best photograph—and our city’s best face—for our guests from Cleveland. For more information, visit www.savingcities.com
OK, I DID IT. NOW WHAT?
E-mail your photograph(s) to: grouphugstl@gmail.com by Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 5 p.m. More than one is encouraged! Tell us your name, where you are or who you are with.
WHY AM I DOING THIS?
Each submission is a chance to win prizes at the GROUPHUG event on June 2, including $100 cash, gift certificates to various St. Louis businesses, and, of course, free hugs. Prize will be awarded to Jury’s Selection for best submission.
For a list of submission rules and guidelines, event news and sneak peaks, visit
http://grouphugstl.tumblr.com/.
One of the major sculptural monuments of Renaissance Naples is the portal to the Castel Nuovo.
Francesco Laurana's double triumphal arch features scenes of a parade through the streets of the city.
Abandoning the stiff, unnatural poses of the Medieval era, Laurana's sculpture looks back to classical art and motifs for inspiration.
Finished in 1282, the Castel Nuovo, or New Castle, provided the rulers of the Kingdom of Sicily with a bastion in the city of Naples.
The walls of this fortress are just unbelievably massive, meant to intimidate and repel attackers. The pointed stones and scalloped walls were designed to cause battering rams' blows to glance off at an angle.
The massive towers punctuate the walls made of tuff, the local, sandy colored stone.
Now a museum, the fortress has greeted visitors to Naples coming into the port for close to 800 years.
I found some old photos of downtown that I hadn't posted yet; above is the Bell telephone exchange, which will house a new restaurant in the near future.
Above is the Sante Fe building, anchoring the southwest corner of the Old Post Office plaza. Below is the northwest corner of Tucker and Washington, with the Bogen Lofts.
Finally, the slender profile of the LaSalle Building completes a row of historic office buildings on Olive Street.
As was pointed out recently, some of the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects still exists. Besides the power substation, the Pruitt School, an elegant building of brick and marble, still stands and is in use.
The school must have fit in nicely with the well ordered streets and public areas of the housing project.
It sits with ball fields on one side, and dense underbrush on the other side.
The close proximity to downtown points to the desirability of the site, and raises questions as to why such as valuable site could site empty for so long.
This is the power substation that still serves the area just around Cass Avenue, and at one point served the Pruitt-Igoe housing project.
It's actually an interesting little building, with great detailing in the bars covering the window as well as the smallest of details such as the overhead light.
There's probably few of these remaining in the United States.
I'm not sure what the plan is for the Pruitt-Igoe site, other than there the plan is to have no plan.
While tentatively part of the Northside development, there has been little movement on that project, so the site is left to bud and blossom for yet another summer.
The old roads that cut through the housing project are still here, and they create alleyways of trees that are slowly being subsumed by nature.
It would be interesting to study the plant life of the site, right in the middle of the city.
This church, also in Femme Osage, I thought warranted its own post. Made of stone, it has a sense of permanence to it, even if it is architecturally simple.
The accompanying cemetery sits to the side of the church, filled with presumably the inhabitants of the last two hundred years.
