brutal building
i now go to work sometimes and i work in the lower level of a community college library built in the 1960s, on the same site as an old amusement park that my parents used to go to as kids called the forest park highlands. i am looking up a recent article about it now, some kind of “remember when” journalism piece for local radio: in 1963, a random fire took hold of the park grounds and everything burned down. the forest park highlands became a bulldozed lot, and some developers took it and built st. louis community college forest park. the fire supposedly started in a kitchen of one of the restaurants by the rides. the article uses nice verbs like “siphoned” and “doused” to describe the streams of water from the fire department hoses. it’s written that the only structure left after the burning was the swimming pool. but i guess that’s gone now, too.
at my job, i sit in a room bordered by old dell computers on long tables like a computer lab, with circular tables in the center for comfortable tutoring space, with neatly curated bulletin boards and a bowl of candy to draw in students to use our free services. i sit with individual students at the circular tables and ask them what they’re working on. which part are you having trouble with? a student shows me her personal narrative essay about staying at the homeless shelter. a student shows me her essay titled “education” about moving to st. louis from afghanistan in the early 2000s. i ask these students questions about their writing, asking them about their lives. can you clarify the timeline of events? the student rearranges the order of information. i tell the student which sentence sounds stronger to me to end the essay with, something simple, about finally going home. this is powerful writing, i tell them. one student wants to write herself into the essay in third person, her self as a child in the past, an image moving through time. i tell her, this feels so right, there’s so much distance between you writing this memory and the memory’s visual representation.
most of my job, it seems, is reassuring strangers that their communication has been felt clearly or heard. it’s about helping people to pass the assignment, pass their class, and move on with their lives.
while m was napping and r was watching my little pony, i told my parents i had started writing about the forest park highlands. i asked them if they remembered anything about it. my mom said she remembered going there on school trips. she remembered an attraction called “candyland” that had fun mirrors. she was too young to ride the roller coasters, but my dad said he did. my mom asked him if he remembered anything else — no, he said, only that he went there.
my mom got up, trying to find this book she has about the boomer years of st. louis, stacked right in front of us in the living room among other local history-related coffee-table books they like to have. she flipped through and then found the page for me, titled “park’s demise.” i tell my mom that she’s my personal reference librarian. “1963 - it remained in local lore as one of the most famous fires in st. louis history.” according to this article, the amusement park was planning to close after the 1963 season anyway, with the community college already being negotiated. the peak of the park was in the 1940s, and it opened as a beer garden in 1896. it’s address, 5600 oakland ave, is the exact address as my saved “work” tab on google maps. according to this writer, all that remained after the fire was the roller coaster, ferris wheel, merry-go-round, and “an American flag” — the flag seems placed there to make the story more sentimental. on the right page of the spread, there’s a huge black and white photo of the smoke pillowing over the rides that remained; way more than just a swimming pool. the pic inserted into the text shows two white teenage girls in 1941, riding the comet roller coaster with their arms in the air, hair coiffed, collars flying, and goofy faces of no inhibition:
the highlands were never meant to stay, even if there wasn’t a fire. it was always meant to be the school where anyone in the community, regardless of background, can go to get affordable college credits and a degree. i wonder what st. louis would’ve been like if the highlands stuck around, or how its absence symbolized a shift in how people experienced the city, or just that they didn’t. by the early 1960s, the city was emptying out as lots of white people had moved to the suburbs in a huge white-flight. i scroll through another nostalgia blog, called forestparkhighlands.com, and realize everyone in the photos are white. i look for my mom’s memory, and find a picture of a mother and son staring at a distorted image of themselves in a long fun-house mirror, but no mention of a candyland. in the section titled “glory years”, the photos show all the rides offered, including “cuddle up”, like disneyland teacups ride, except the cups seem to be just brown, lined with bar-booth leather. white teenagers “cuddle up” in the cups, the highlands probably being the perfect date destination. in the section titled “final years”, i don’t see any people at all — just aerial views of the park at night, smeared lights of the rides and games, like any american fairground daze.
at this point in st. louis history, a ferris wheel ride now resides downtown, like a navy pier wannabe, as st. louis tries to be a “fun” city that tourists (white people) would like to go to. none of my friends who live in the city have gone on the ferris wheel, as far as i know. but none of us go downtown much anyway. the ferris wheel seems to be a suburbs people thing. my sister and i often drive down the highway and stare right past it, in the distance, a circular grate edging the office buildings.
when i was interviewing for my job, my boss told me that the forest park community college structures are architecturally significant, on some sort of registry of important properties to protect. a couple years ago, the college decided to tear down some brick “towers” or “wings” (neither of these terms seem right) to create a newer building. they immediately got in trouble with the city for crushing something historic. so the rest of the building has to stay. brutalist architecture, i asked her, right? yes, something like that. my boss laughed, telling me all of this, because she thinks the school is so ugly. it’s funny how something ugly, (brutal), can be “architecturally significant.” she told me this story again, forgetting she already told me, obviously one of her well-rehearsed bits. we were walking underneath the school, in a basement maze passageway that leads to the other towers, which apparently is a great way to get there when it’s raining.
brutalism in architecture means that the materials used are exposed and minimal, instead of intricate and detailed. the materials are not adorned, they just are. the brick-colored rectangles of the school are stacked on each other, long and closed, unable to see through the elongated slits for windows.
my sister and m and i drive through downtown to get to an edge of the city that touches the river. this part of the city is arranged with factories and abandoned warehouses, remains from the old industrial days. st. louis is full of these brick spaces that have lost their function, their meaning. we get to a park called rootwad, designed and unfinished by the guy who built the city museum, something else historical or important purely by its style, its creator. i can’t see the structures too well in the dark. some DJs are performing through a generator on top of the sculptural bridge, decorated with some kind of recycled circular metal pieces like alien eyes. the eyes match well with the “club” music they are playing. groups of people cluster and dance and talk, it’s not very crowded. it’s one of the first cold nights of the fall, and we are half-dancing just to keep warm. i can’t see the mississippi river over the flood wall but i know it’s there. some people climb and sit on the sculptures off to the side, a giant cement turtle and snake, snuggling against the quiet industrial outline. sometimes st. louis really does feel like one giant playground.
back on google, i find another article about the architecture of the college and the tearing down of the important wings. the journalism piece begins with a whole paragraph about the comet roller coaster, which was “america’s tallest and longest roller coaster with nine drops, a double dip, and a 500-foot tunnel.” did my dad really ride that as a kid? how can any of this become real to me? i can’t see the carnival lights or hear the laughing people or see the candy swirls. i can only listen, i can only read words about it and create a mental image of information, looking at nostalgia websites idealizing the 1940s/1950s white families enjoying their day. whatever else was going on back then, jim crow and overseas wars and deaths, are harder to place in my collected understanding of this specific plot of land.
the journalist uses a personification device: the comet roller coaster was watching the destruction of the fire come down on the park from above. as if the wooden looping curves of the ride were a community of people, seeing memories sizzle in real time.
in the ruins of the amusement park, i read through a person’s personal essay while he sits next to me and watches. in the essay, he reveals that his parents died when he was young, and his siblings abandoned him to start their own families. the essay enters a graduation scene, as the narrator (the person sitting next to me) holds a photograph of his parents in his palm as he approaches a stage. at the end of his graduation speech, his siblings stand up in the audience, finally there for him. the essay is about forgiveness. the essay is about how success is possible, but it is not valuable without the love of others. this is powerful work, i said. i watch the person leave the room, and i stare at the dark faces of dell computers and the white board that says “welcome to the writing center” and i don’t know how words can do this, tell events and emotions and memories, and that’s how we can relate to others and prove that we know our world.
the writing center has no windows, but the library itself has one big sky light in the center, sleepily emitting daylight right into the central area for quiet study. I looked through the bookshelves the other day for the first time, waiting for a meeting to start. i went and found the poetry section right away. i picked up a copy of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland. on the front page, someone wrote in pencil, “No one reads poems :( -Dee 2009” -- this person must’ve been really sad about this. should i be more sad about this? maybe i should’ve written back with my own message, for no one: “I read poems :) -Dee 2021”. before i slid the book back into its resting place, i flipped through the wasteland, trying to learn anything. my eyes caught one fragment -- “unreal city” -- but when i come to write it down here, i remember it wrong --- “unclear city.”
