♪♪ - Welcome to Living St.

Louis, I'm Brooke Butler.

Every city has landmarks that help define it.

St.

Louis, of course, has no shortage, but few are as recognizable as 314.

20 years ago, those three digits helped define a new way to celebrate our city and the people who call it home.

Now, I like to think of every Living St.

Louis episode as capturing the spirit of our city, but in today's stories, we talk about why celebrating 314 Day is more important now than ever.

In This Living St.

Louis, we'll hear more about the special 20-year milestone of celebrating 314 Day.

And I think that that's the most important part for us.

Plus, we'll debunk some hometown myths, like does the arch really disrupt storm systems?

Are we home to the second largest Mardi Gras celebration?

And digging in to whether the Ferris wheel from the World's Fair is really buried in Forest Park.

We also visit a historic city farmstead, giving color where it's needed most.

And a behind-the-scenes look of a St.

Louis music video dedicated to our most famous landmark.

It's all next on "Living St.

Louis."

♪♪ - Growing up in St.

Louis, I heard some incredible stories about this city, but not all of them are true.

Throughout this episode, I'm going to be debunking some famous St.

Louis myths, but it's important to note that myths aren't a bad thing.

In fact, I think they add to our city's lore and are a great way to spark conversation.

And believing in one or more of these myths in your lifetime proves that you're a St.

Louisan.

As a St.

Louis area meteorologist, there's one myth Steve Templeton hears all the time.

I've been here two decades and I've heard it the whole time I've been here.

Sometimes I hear it from people who are serious and sometimes most of the time I hear it from people who are kind of joking about it.

Templeton is the chief meteorologist at KMOV.

He's talking about the so-called arch effect.

The thinking is people believe that some people believe that the arch can divert storms around the St.

Louis metro so they actually kind of split and then rejoin or that they weaken as they move into the St.

Louis metro but it's just not true.

The myth comes from the idea that many large storms and tornadoes seem to avoid the downtown area near the Gateway Arch.

If storms would weaken and or divert around St.

Louis, especially severe storms, well then we wouldn't have the unfortunate and tragic history we have with tornadoes.

You just look back at last year, we had May 16th but then also on March 14th, we had two on the ground at the same time in the St.

Louis metro, one in Maryland Heights and one in Arnold.

So, that was all just last spring by the way, not to mention Good Friday tornado among many, many others.

Templeton says the location of tornadoes is mostly up to chance.

Downtown's a relatively small area.

Um you know, we we average 17 tornadoes in our whole uh viewing area.

So, if I gave you 17 darts every year to throw at the St.

Louis region, would you hit a city or would you hit farmland?

You'd probably hit land.

To hit to hit a town or specifically downtown St.

Louis, the odds are stacked against you because the city is a relatively small parcel of land compared to where tornadoes are roaming across the Midwest.

And any difference between the weather downtown versus elsewhere has more to do with heat than the arch.

There could be an urban heat island effect, not an arch effect.

Uh but generally, the rivers are pretty small.

There's a localized effect.

If you're near the river, it's going to be more humid.

It can impact our temperatures too, but that's very localized to the rivers.

The big, big impact that impacts severe weather around here is the fact that we get our humidity from the Gulf of Mexico.

And when that humidity ramps up through the Mississippi Delta and up into our area, that sets up the storm fuel.

It's one of the ingredients, but it sets up the storm fuel for severe weather.

The other thing is the arch.

Its effect is kind of laughable on a 60,000-foot-tall severe thunderstorm.

Now, don't get me wrong.

The arch is tall, 630 feet, but you would have to stack 100 arches on top of each other to get to the top of a severe thunderstorm.

So the sheer scale of a severe thunderstorm is huge compared to the relative small scale of the arch.

But Templeton doesn't see any harm in the myth.

I think it's fun.

Whether it's something that brings us together, it's something we can all bond about and sometimes joking about it can just be kind of a good humored way to feel part of a community.

This year, the 314 Day season kicked off at the History Museum.

Yes, the local holiday has evolved into a full season, a week-long citywide celebration, with a packed itinerary of events, partnerships with businesses, organizations, and neighborhoods.

20 years in, 314 Day is proof that, while some trends may come and go, sometimes the simplest ideas, like loving your city, can have a lasting impact.

Co-founder Tatum Polk is celebrating the major milestone, while also looking ahead and beyond.

Year one to year 20, what's been the most surprising thing?

- That we thought we were the only ones that had this sort of love for the city, and we see it's much greater than us.

We embrace our flaws.

There's gonna be a joke about potholes in St.

Louis every time, but I think that we also just embrace the culture of being a melting pot.

- You're implementing this in other cities as well.

- Yeah, so other cities, City Chamber of Commerce and mayors have reached out to us and kinda want to know what the blueprint looks like.

And so actually the other guy who should be standing here with me is in Atlanta working on a 404 day.

And so we're excited about Atlanta having their day in Kansas City, Milwaukee, Nashville.

Everybody's kind of popping them off.

- And people need to love where they live to make it a great place.

- Absolutely.

If you don't have pride in your city, it's really hard to be a champion for it.

- 20 years from now, what do you hope to see?

- We're putting a time capsule together.

And so in 20 years, we look to open that time capsule.

What our favorite foods were, what the map of the city looked like from an aerial view, that sort of thing.

Yeah, you think in 20 years, White Castle, IMOs, I think so.

I think they'll be top of the list.

I think they'll survive.

I think they'll survive.

We'll see.

We'll see.

Will the Cardinals still be here?

Will the Blues still be good?

Right?

I think that's all of it.

The city soccer team will be 20 years in, 25 years in at that point.

Yeah.

So you can see real passion in the city and I think that that's the most important part for us.

Three, one, four.

Not even cold rain will prevent St.

Louisans from celebrating Mardi Gras in Soulard.

So this is my 26th year being involved in this.

I can't ever remember rain on Grand Parade Day, but in terms of the crowd that actually came out for the parade, candidly, it was much larger than I expected, given the weather.

People in St.

Louis are like, "It's Mardi Gras and I'm going, and I'm not letting this rain get in my way."

Mack Bradley is the president of the Mardi Gras Foundation, and like most St.

Louisans, he takes pride in our excellent celebration.

It's become something that St.

Louis is known for around the country um and it brings people here for an outdoor festival in February to St.

Louis which is nuts.

And there's one thing St.

Louisans love to share about our festivities.

That St.

Louis is allegedly the second biggest Mardi Gras celebration in the U.S., the first being New Orleans.

I remember hearing it in the '90s.

I mean, before I ever got involved in this, people frequently said that.

And I hear it all the time.

No one is exactly sure where this claim comes from.

Bradley says it doesn't come from the Mardi Gras Foundation because they don't have exact numbers on how many people attend.

Like we don't have turnstiles.

Nobody walks through a turnstile.

We can measure the relative size of a crowd year over year based on trash tonnage.

- And while we don't have any confirmed numbers for St.

Louis, I was able to get some from a couple of other cities.

Outside of our region, Mobile, Alabama is generally regarded as the second biggest Mardi Gras celebration in the U.S., with over 1.3 million people attending the city's 39 parades over a three-week period.

Galveston, Texas, is also a Mardi Gras hotspot, drawing 400,000 people to the island for their festivities.

So it's safe to say that Soulard Mardi Gras is not the second biggest celebration in the U.S.

But hold on.

The real question is, does it even matter?

I don't think it matters whatsoever.

I think we can toss that aside.

That's Amanda Clark, a public historian at the Missouri Historical Society.

There's so many things that locals really want to be true, and the actual true story is way more interesting than the myth.

She says, forget the numbers.

St.

Louis has an awesome celebration, with unique events and an interesting backstory that has nothing to do with the French.

There is not a direct line between the French history of St.

Louis and us having this big Mardi Gras.

There's actually about a century in between, century, century and a half in between those two things.

So it really is just more connected to the Catholic history, which, you know, it definitely has some French roots, but much more influenced by Germans.

Soulard Mardi Gras actually began around 1980 with five guys playing poker.

It was a brutally cold winter.

They were bored and said, "Let's do a party because this winter is so terrible."

The men eventually threw what was basically a huge house party at a building in Soulard.

And the first parade was actually a march through the snow to the bar McGurk's.

So it grew organically into what I would describe as a large neighborhood festival to the mid-90s.

Then we had three consecutive years of 70 degree weather on Grand Parade Day.

And that changed everything.

I mean, the weather changed everything.

In 1999, Soulard Mardi Gras almost stopped for good.

Back then, there was a nighttime event in the neighborhood on Fat Tuesday itself.

There was some measure of disturbance at the Fat Tuesday that night.

Fights broke out between police and attendees, which devolved into a riot.

34 people were arrested.

This had been coming for some time.

The crowds got bigger every year.

This became more and more of a huge regional event.

So I think the pressures were already there.

But 1999 really sort of focused everybody's attention.

Mack Bradley helped lead the charge to make changes and keep the party going safely.

We spent most of the summer of 1999 creating the non-profits that run Mardi Gras now.

The two non-profits helped create the Soulard Mardi Gras celebrations that we know and love today.

Of course, there's the Grand Parade, but there's also the Mayor's Ball, the 5K, the Cajun Cook-Off, the Wiener Dog Derby, and more.

We have tried to do a schedule that allows you to sort of build your own Mardi Gras adventure.

And we have an event that qualifies as the largest in the world, the Purina Pet Parade.

That event today is our only Guinness Book of World Records holder is the world's largest costumed animal parade.

All the events are a boost to the local economy.

It fills up hotel rooms and bars and restaurants around the region and generates a little more than $23 million for the regional economy in February when there isn't a lot of other stuff going on.

On top of all that, St.

Louis still has one of the biggest celebrations in the country, even if we're not in second place.

That's really not important to us.

What is important to us is that we're one of the best.

You know, one of the most fun.

If you want to go someplace with your friends and have a great time, and do it safely, and get back home, and all of that stuff, this is the place to come.

That's really what we care about.

- If you're like me, when you think of farming, wide open spaces, far outside of the city limits, probably come to mind.

But right here in the heart of the 314, the city of St.

Louis, crops are blooming in the middle of a neighborhood.

♪♪ - You don't have to go all the way out to the country to see how things grow.

- This is Mimo Davis, co-founder and horticulturalist at Urban Buds, a one-acre, fresh-cut flower farm located in the Dutch Town neighborhood of South St.

Louis, proving that agriculture doesn't have to be rural, and buying locally-grown blooms are possible in every season.

- We grow over 80 varieties of cut flowers.

We grow year-round, and we sell direct to florists, do small weddings and events, and sell at Tower Grove Farmers Market every Saturday.

- I wouldn't even know what you would call them.

- These are called high tunnels.

- Okay.

- And we have two of them that are heated.

Plants will grow all winter long.

It really, you know, it really takes some sun and warmth to get them to bloom.

- Are you the sun and warmth that comes in then in the winter and makes it all happen?

- I am, I come in the winter and just, yeah, blow on them.

♪♪ - When Mimo and her business partner purchased this property on Tennessee Avenue in 2012, they didn't know it was the last remaining piece of what was once a 30 acre family farm.

- We knew it was a florist shop.

- Uh-huh.

- We did not know that they grew flowers here.

- Well, that's meant to be if you've ever heard it.

- Right, it gave us chill bumps.

- When they bought this property, it was a shadow of its former self.

- It was abandoned, it was condemned, it was vandalized.

This was an eyesore for this neighborhood.

- It's not unusual to find vacant land in metropolitan cities that can be turned into urban farms, especially in older post-industrial cities like St.

Louis.

What is unusual is when that land is successfully cared for, cultivated, and integrated into the neighborhood.

Urban farms stand out not because the land exists, but because they transform vacancy into something productive, visible and stabilizing.

So this is our alley.

And why can't alleys in our city be beautiful?

They don't have to be dumping grounds.

Harvard did a study that even just to look and see a beautiful scene of flowers automatically reduces your blood pressure.

It's a calming effect.

And that's what this alley does for people now.

When it's in full bloom, they say, "It's beautiful."

They just love what we've done with the alley.

- Mimo also understands the business of locally farming flowers.

That's, as she puts it, growing flowers that don't do well in a box.

80% of flowers are imported from South America.

So at her small urban farm, she grows crops that foreign growers won't ship.

Because we definitely don't want to be competing with South America.

So we want to grow specialty flowers, like the lupins.

Like, where are you going to get a lupin?

I don't know.

I don't even know what a lupin is.

Mimo began her career cultivating and growing flowers in 1993 at a farm she owned two and a half hours west of St.

Louis.

And I was driving into St.

Louis twice a week.

And that just wasn't sustainable in my life, right?

- Commutes like that also aren't great for the environment.

Transporting crops, flowers, and other products from rural farms to urban markets, not to mention imports from South America, produce significant carbon emissions and air pollution.

- You know, there's farm to table.

That's mostly about food, but there's flowers too.

Flowers to vase, field to vase.

Growing Where She Sells has turned Mimo's five-hour round-trip delivery into a two-mile commute to the Tower Grove Farmers Market, and a short drive for florists to pick up the freshest, locally city-grown flowers they can buy.

A job that never gets old for this farmer.

It's the best work.

I mean, can you imagine that, like, this incredible flower comes out of that little tiny seed?

I mean, isn't that, like, mind-blowing?

It's crazy.

Some structures remain in St.

Louis from the 1904 World's Fair, like the flight cage at the St.

Louis Zoo, the St.

Louis Art Museum, and the Grand Basin.

And according to many St.

Louisans, the Ferris wheel is still here too, buried somewhere.

Some people say that it's on Y-Down.

Some people say it's right under Skinker at Lagoon, right when you come into the park.

Some people say it is on Art Hill.

That's Amanda Clark, a public historian at the Missouri Historical Society.

She's also the content lead for the History Museum's exhibit, Yours Forever, Forest Park at 150.

- So one of the best parts about studying the Ferris wheel is the fact that if you bring it up with anyone that was raised in St.

Louis, they are very quickly probably gonna ask you, but isn't it buried?

Or they're gonna tell you they were told it was buried and they may list about five or six different places.

No one really agrees on where it was buried.

It's just this myth has persisted that it is buried somewhere under Forest Park or nearby.

And the one at the World's Fair wasn't just any Ferris wheel.

It was the Ferris wheel.

Capital F, George Ferris, you know, designed this.

This is his wheel.

This is his thing.

And it was designed for the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago.

And then it was moved from that fair site to more of an amusement park type site in Chicago.

And then it was moved to St.

Louis in 1904.

But after the World's Fair ended, St.

Louis leaders struggled with what to do with the gigantic structure.

It sat in Forest Park, unused after the fair closed.

They could not find a buyer for it.

They looked at Coney Island, they looked at Highlands Park nearby, and just the cost of moving it didn't make a deal for anybody, so they decided to scrap it.

But unfortunately for Ferris wheel truthers, the axle and the scraps were not buried under Art Hill, or on Wye Down, or anywhere else around Forest Park.

So we know that it's not true, because in 1906, the day that the Ferris wheel was demolitioned, we have a journalist that reported in the newspaper, very clearly, he said, "Yesterday, "the last of the Ferris wheel was taken."

He mentions the axle, he mentions how it fell when it was demoed, and how they put it back on a cart, and they took it to Chicago.

We also have eyewitness reports from people that worked for the demolition company that saw the axle in Chicago for many years after the fair.

Despite the facts, though, the rumor lives on.

So I think the myth persists because of our emotional connection to the World's Fair and our connection to this moment in St.

Louis history where we were the center of the world.

And there's something about the idea that maybe if that axle is buried and we can go get it, well, maybe we can reclaim some of that.

I think there's some kind of interesting emotional connection to there still being a piece of the World's Fair in place.

I'm Dino Dave and I'm Justasaurus and we're Elektrodinosaur.

♪♪ We are at the Gateway Arch today.

We're going to give you a little behind the scenes video of us shooting our music video down at the Gateway Arch about our song called "The Gateway Arch."

Gateway Arch, Gateway Arch, going to the top of the Gateway Arch.

Gateway Arch, Gateway Arch, it's my fate to see the Gateway Arch.

So we usually do our own music videos using our iPhones, but since we sold all our POGs and our Magic the Gathering cards, we've been able to make this fancy new video with a whole new top-notch crew.

Check this out.

I'm going to show them to you now.

We are getting our money's worth today.

We are the official songwriters for St.

Louis theme songs.

We got the arch, dominant, distinctive.

Mississippi River never looked so pretty.

Sweet, hot, hot dogs.

Bingo.

Sunshine daydream, it's what I need.

Sunshine daydream, I'm on the beat.

BeatleBob, BeatleBob, your work is in done.

He's a lobster, he ain't no mobster.

Lord Stanley.

That's better.

Dave and I go all the way back to high school where we started writing music together.

He taught me how to play the acoustic guitar.

He taught me how to play bass, kind of.

He wrote a song in a show that you guys might know called "Over the Garden Wall."

"Potatoes and Molasses."

That's right, "Potatoes and Molasses."

That's Dave's song.

Nobody in St.

Louis knows that, so I'm telling you now.

- Then Justin went to LA, he worked with Lady Gaga, Snoop Doggy Dog, Lady Gaga ate his snacks.

- And I got some Grammy credits on the Anderson .Paak album Ventura.

- Oh, I didn't know that, that's cool.

(laughing) Anyway, now we're back together.

Since 2018, we've been writing music, making videos, making content, all this stuff you gotta do online to stay, you know, in the thing of the internet.

It's a lot easier than playing because we're old now.

Gateway to the west, that's what they say.

All the river boats float across the way.

Muddy Mississippi's where it lays.

It's like a gate, so it's called a gateway.

Gateway arch goes up and down.

You sit in a A and you flip around.

Once to the top, you can see your house.

Running around like I'm a church mouse.

My wife knows everything and she told me that Steve Templeton has the keys to the arch and comes in here on the weekends and dials it to affect the weather in the St.

Louis metro region.

That's why they always get it right now!

So our music video is coming out on March 14th.

It's going to be up on our YouTube channel.

That's youtube.com/elektrodinosaur with a K. We also do like a live show every other Thursday or whenever we have time to.

Yeah, we try to do it twice a month.

We do live streams on YouTube.

You can see us in between 11 and 1 p.m.

at either Clayton Studios or Lindenwood University in the practice rooms or in the studio there.

Groovy.

May your raviolis always be toasted.

And your highways always be forty.

Happy 314 Day, guys!

Yay!

Oh, I said guys.

♪♪ Living St.

Louis is funded in part by the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation and the members of Nine PBS.

♪♪ (whooshing)