Item From the Past: St. Louis 1990

Twenty years ago, I broke my life in half; into before I moved to Japan and after I did so. In February 1990, I was still on the ragged edge of the break. February 2 was my last day at work in Chicago, and shortly afterward I headed for Dallas with a load of possessions, to store them at my brother and sister-in-law's house.

On the 13th, I headed back toward Chicago to pick up the rest of my possessions, making it as far as a cheap, independent motel in Rolla, Missouri. I must have paid no attention to TV weather forecasts that night, since the next day I didn't try to beat the winter storm that was headed for central Illinois.

Instead, I decided to spend a few hours in St. Louis. I'd never been to the Gateway Arch, so I wanted to do that. The view from the base of the thing, curving up as it does impossibly into the sky, struck me as more impressive than the view through small windows at the top, or at least it did on that gray winter day. But I was amused by oddity of the enclosed tram pods that take you upward inside the Arch and to the top. Mork came to Earth in a pod something like that.

Afterward I visited the Basilica of St. Louis, King of France (the Old Cathedral), which is practically underneath the Arch -- or rather, the Arch was built a stone's throw away from the church. It's a fine Greek Revival church building, dating from the 1830s, and well worth seeing inside and outside. As I was leaving, one of the staff (I think) said, "If you liked this, you should see the New Cathedral." New in that it had been completed in 1914. He gave me directions.

The New Cathedral is actually the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis (just the Cathedral of St. Louis in 1990). I didn't know anything about it, but I took the tip and I'm glad I did. It's one of the most astonishingly beautiful churches I've ever seen. I'm a sucker for mosaics.

A few years later I wrote a squib about the New Cathedral for a newsletter, which I'm quoting here in its entirety: "It isn't necessary to cross oceans to savor the majesty of large-scale mosaic art, vaultingly expressed in a cathedral. You only need to visit the Cathedral of Saint Louis, about 10 minutes west of that city's well-known Arch. Composed of millions of tesserae -- tiles of stone or glass -- the mosaics of the cathedral dome and walls offer visitors a pageantry of Christian saints, symbols and stories rendered in hundreds of subtle hues. The architecture is deeply reminiscent of the great Byzantine cathedrals of Italy and points East."

After seeing the New Cathedral, I drove northward toward to Chicago and hit an ice storm. But I'm not sorry I tarried in St. Louis that day.