New Gilded Age Grandeur

By KURT ANDERSEN

Not many years ago, downtown St. Louis was, like most old American downtowns, a void, dreary and disheartening, a place where respectable people worked, bums lived and almost nobody strolled. Given that lifelessness, the city's attempt to create a heroic modern monument to itself in 1965, Eero Saarinen's arch beside the Mississippi, came to seem like self-mockery: a pure, gorgeous steel span rising from a dying downtown and a forgotten riverfront, a giant logo erected as a wishful substitute for authentic urban reconstruction.

Lately, however, the core of St. Louis is being redeemed for real. The Old Post Office, a grand Second Empire concoction, has been converted to shops and offices. Louis Sullivan's 1891 Wainwright Building, a prototypical skyscraper, was saved and refurbished. Laclede's Landing, nine cobblestoned blocks of 19th century brick commercial buildings, is suddenly thick with stores and boites.

This week St. Louisans will celebrate the opening of the most ambitious of all their proliferating preservation projects. The ornate Union Station and its glorious steel train shed, abandoned by Amtrak seven years ago, have been restored and turned into a complex of restaurants, promenades, 80 shops and a 550-room hotel. Under the far end of the shed, a boat pond and beer garden (Did someone say Budweiser?) are to be ready soon. The project cost $135 million.

It seems worth it. The depot's main building, finished in 1894, is a massive, lovable quirk. The local architect, Theodore Link, was obviously under the influence of Henry Hobson Richardson: rough limestone blocks, big arched doors, Romanesque bulk. But inside and out, he and Louis Millet, the interior decorator, wildly mixed and matched styles. The west wing has its odd Gothic outcroppings, the Grand Hall some rather Moorish nooks and ornament; an intimate dining room seems Viennese; and, of course, the steel-truss roof built to cover trains and tracks is pure 19th century Industrial Age.

The restoration is sensitive and, for the most part, scrupulous. Always there are quibbles: Why have the hoteliers covered the tile walls of a main hallway with cheesy green felt? In the 65-ft.-high barrel-vaulted Grand Hall, however, the strict preservationists were indulged. The gilt is real gold leaf. Artisans worked 3,000 hours fixing up the large pictorial stained-glass window. The marble for the floors is from the same French quarry used by the station's builders. Indeed, to the modern eye, accustomed to cleaner colors and lines, the period hues and ornamental density of this main interior space may seem too authentic: the muddy green and stained-glass glow and riot of gold are, all together, extremely rich. The room's Gilded Age swank is gorgeous, not inspiring.

Six new arched doorways have been cut into the south wall, alas, diffusing some of the compact power of the hall, but direct passageways to the wide open spaces of the train shed were deemed essential. Out there, things do get interesting. The vast, gently arched roof is a 110-ft.-high web of steel trusses fitted with alternating wall-to-wall strips of clear glass and unpainted wood planks. The glass and fir are all new, but almost every bit of steel, 2,700 tons, is original. The space is gloriously scaled, and the strips of roof make for neat plays of sun and shadow on the eleven acres beneath. One simultaneously feels inside and outdoors, comforted and invigorated; the ambiguity, akin to that in medieval town squares, is delightful.

Once a loud, murky place of grime and steam, like Monet's Gare SaintLazare, the cleaned-up St. Louis train shed has had a shopping mall and a new six- story hotel tucked inside. It is the architectural equivalent of the boat in the bottle, but the trick satisfies. The owners might have built a high- rise; fortunately, they deferred to the steel ceiling and let the architects, Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, spread the new buildings out. Planes and walls jag fetchingly, as in real cities. Rounding a corner or descending a stair, / there are architectural surprises. Store names may be as treacly as the stuff they sell (Deck the Walls, Let's Make a Daiquiri and I Can't Believe It's Yogurt), but steel stairway railings and iron treads are raw and hard- edged, in keeping with the Bessemer grittiness of the original shed. In all, the commercial arcades work hard to be interesting.

Maybe a little too hard. The new Union Station is the work of the Rouse Co., developer of the charmingly urban Harborplace in Baltimore, the charmingly urban Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, the charmingly urban South Street Seaport in New York and several lesser-known charmingly urban shopping-and- eating entities. These profitable developments are distinctly funk free, but they are not ugly. If it takes an artificial heart to save a dying downtown, as Harborplace probably saved Baltimore, why complain? The problem is programmed quaintness: Ghirardelli Square was a revelation 20 years ago, a copy or two elsewhere were great, a few more were fine, O.K.; but when every second downtown in the U.S. gets cheerfully Roused, the formula starts to pall. A pleasurable urban experience ought not to depend on Laura Ashley and Famous Amos.

In fact, more than just upscale retail sales and rents are funding the nationwide preservation boom. Since 1982, the Federal Government has granted owners of certified historic buildings a 25% tax credit on renovation costs. For every $4 put into qualified rehabilitation, the developer pays $1 less to the IRS. The incentive effect has been extraordinary. In fiscal 1980, before the new tax law was passed, 614 Historic Register renovations were approved; last year the number was 3,214. St. Louis has used the tax incentives more often than any other city, and the Union Station project is the single biggest beneficiary of the credits so far.

As social policy, the scheme would seem to suit this Administration perfectly: private-sector dealmakers getting some fiscal encouragement to rebuild old-fashioned American buildings. President Reagan himself was bragging about the successes of the program last year. Which makes it all the more ironic that the credits are in jeopardy this year. As part of the proposed tax-reform plan, the Administration has called for their complete elimination.

With reporting by J. Madeleine Nash/St. Louis