Review, George Lipsitz, The Sidewalks of St. Louis: Places, People, and Politics in an American City (University of Missouri Press, 1991)

Columbia Missourian, March 22, 1992

The ethnic, racial and class diversity of American cities frequently creates a volatile mix as different cultures often encounter each other with suspicion and hostility. But as George Lipsitz argues, this interaction of cultures can also lead to cross-breeding, producing a stronger, more vibrant hybrid culture. In this study of St. Louis, Lipsitz says that the city’s cultural greatness derives from the inter-mixture and mutual influence of the numerous minority groups that have composed the city’s population.

Lipsitz, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego, lived in St. Louis from 1963 to 1982. His love affair with the city, he says, grew out of his experiences as a student at Washington University in the 1960s, where he lived in proximity to various ethnic neighborhoods, listened to radio stations that played blues, soul, rock and roll and country-gospel, and participated in the city’s political life, particularly the civil rights movement. As a scholar, his fascination with the city has continued; one of his previous books was a biography of St. Louis civil rights organizer Ivory Perry.

The Sidewalks of St. Louis gathers together articles that originally appeared in a column Lipsitz wrote for St. Louis magazine. Taken together they present an impressionistic portrait of the city’s history, focusing on, as Lipsitz says, “the lives of oddballs and outcasts, immigrants and artists, women and workers, and many of those whose influence is rarely acknowledged in the standard histories.”

The history of St. Louis is filled with fascinating characters who left a lasting impression. For instance, there was Edward Gardner Lewis, a flamboyant con man who designed the suburb of University City. Lewis arrived in St. Louis in 1895 hawking mosquito repellents and patent medicines. In 1899 he began publishing a magazine, The Winner, in which he advertised another of his businesses, the Progressive Watch Company, promising readers a fortune if they would become Progressive Watch salespeople. Postal inspectors charged Lewis’ watch company was an illegal pyramid scheme and began an investigation of him that lasted more than twenty years. In 1902 The Winner became The Woman’s Magazine and soon claimed a readership of 1.6 million. Advertisements in The Woman’s Magazine reflected the range of Lewis’ business investments, including the “People’s University,” which allowed students to take college courses by mail.

Lewis designed University City to be the center of his business enterprises. As Lipsitz says, “Lewis spared no expense designing and implementing his vision of suburban life as an enclave free from the pollution and overcrowding of the industrial city.” He hired sculptor George Julian Zolnay to design the lion statues overlooking Delmar Boulevard. University City was incorporated in 1906 and Lewis served as its first mayor before leaving the area in 1912. His shady business dealings eventually caught up with him and in 1924 Lewis declared bankruptcy and in 1928 he was jailed for postal fraud.

“The strange career of Edward Gardner Lewis,” Lipsitz comments, “reminds us that history is made by both saints and sinners, and that it sometimes takes an eccentric to impose a bold vision on the commonplace realities of everyday life.”

Another largely forgotten character in St. Louis business history is Chris von der Ahe, a German immigrant who, in the 1880s, owned a small store selling beer and groceries on the city’s north side. When someone suggested that von der Ahe sponsor a baseball team, he replied that he knew nothing about baseball, but “if it sells beer, then I’m all for it.” Von der Ahe’s club, the St. Louis Browns, became St. Louis’ first championship team, winning the American Association title four straight years in the late 1880s. Von der Ahe promoted the team with a variety of gimmicks, including constructing an amsement park at the ballfield and hiring an all-female band to play before games. But he never learned much about the game itself, once telling player-manager Charlie Comiskey that the Browns had the “biggest diamond” in the league. When Comiskey responded that all baseball diamonds were the same size, von der Ahe replied, “Well then I’ve got the biggest infield.”

St. Louis had a lasting influence on several figures who were in the city only a relatively brief time. Theodore Dreiser lived there only sixteen months in the 1890s, working as a reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Covering the urban scene, Lipsitz says, “Dreiser cultivated his understanding of and his ability to write about everyday life in the modern city,” a talent that flourished in his novels Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy.

Josephine Baker lived in St. Louis only during her formative years. Born in 1906 in the slums of Mill Creek Valley on the city’s south side, Baker learned to dance by hanging around the taverns and dance halls in her neighborhood. She escaped to New York in 1921 and to Paris four years later, where she became an international sensation as the lead exotic dancer in the Folies-Bergere revue. Her childhood experiences of being poor and black gave her a life-long sympathy for the downtrodden. During World War II she served in the French resistance and after the war she returned to the United States to work in the civil rights struggle.

Short stays in St. Louis by two musicians left indelible marks on the development of American music. W.C. Handy was a young, itinerant musician who spent two weeks in the city looking for work during the severe depression of 1893. Sleeping in vacant lots and under Eads Bridge, Handy experienced misery first-hand. He also saw it in others, especially a woman walking along the levee moaning that her man “had a heart like a rock cast in the sea.” Twenty-one years later Handy recalled this scene and used it as the basis for the St. Louis Blues, one of the most popular songs in American history.

Like Handy, Bix Beiderbecke lived in St. Louis only briefly, but that period marked a major transition in his career. The son of a wealthy Davenport, Iowa, family, Beiderbecke arrived in 1925 to play trumpet in the orchestra of Frankie Trumbauer. While in St. Louis, Beiderbecke frequently spent his days attending concerts of the St. Louis symphony, listening to the works of Debussy and Stravinsky. Then at night, after playing, Beiderbecke frequented the clubs of Mill Creek Valley, where he learned the wild, free improvisational jazz played by black musicians. Beiderbecke drew inspiration by fusing the two musical styles, Euro-American classical and African-American jazz.

This fusion of cultures has marked St. Louis history as a whole. Lipsitz looks briefly at some of the groups that have had a permanent influence on the development of the city. He begins with the American Indian culture of the era before European settlement which, in the thirteenth century, had established a city of more than 40,000—more residents than lived in London at the time—just east of St. Louis in what is now Cahokia, Illinois. Similarly, he examines the legacies of the French, German, Polish and African-American groups that have settled the area.

Lipsitz manages to avoid any romanticization of the American “melting pot.” If at times these cultures intermixed to produce a dynamic synthesis, Lipsitz makes clear that normally prejudice and cultural segregation prevented them from mingling. In discussing the black influence on Beiderbecke’s music, for instance, Lipsitz says the trumpeter “gained an enthusiastic following among white jazz fans for playing music that they could have heard everywhere if segregation had not limited black artists to mostly black audiences.”

Lipsitz also points out the tragic consequences of racism on the great ragtime pianist Scott Joplin. After making a fortune composing such songs as Maple Leaf Rag, Joplin sought to expand the concept of ragtime, writing extended pieces and eventually a ragtime opera. But such an idea ran up against the majority of Americans’ view of ragtime as the music of “happy darkies.” Joplin’s more serious compositions were commercial failures and he died, broke and embittered, in 1917.

The Sidewalks of St. Louis will not replace traditional histories. But in exploring the city’s neglected nooks and crannies and the various ethnic influences that are frequently overlooked, this book serves as an excellent supplement to more standard narratives. Lipsitz asks the reader to explore St. Louis’ history in the same way he describes Beiderbecke exploring its streets in 1925: “when we walk streets that he walked, we might want to remember the wealthy, young white man drawn to the culture of the working-class blacks, the wild-living jazz musician who spent his afternoons at the symphony. Beiderbecke understood that these worlds were not so far apart, that everyone has something to offer others, and that the best cultures are those that are fused from the contributions of everyone.”