via stlouis-mo.gov

Cupples 7.

Unless a developer steps up, the historic Cupples 7 building in downtown St. Louis will soon be demolished.

And even if developers do emerge, they would need to have a solid plan to stabilize the site immediately -- or else it will have to come down. So says the city, which doesn't own the site, but has determined that the structure has become a serious safety hazard.

Still, the mayor's office and local preservationists are still hoping that someone -- with funding and a plan -- comes forward.

"We will welcome them until the wrecking ball swings," Maggie Crane, spokeswoman for Mayor Francis Slay, tells Daily RFT.

Will anyone be able to stop the demolition?

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Most U.S. residents are aware that today, April 15, is the day we all must file our income tax return (if we haven't already). Probably not as many of us are cognizant of the fact that it's also the anniversary of the day in 1947 when Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball.

Jack Buck interviewing Jackie Robinson.

On this occasion it seems appropriate to revisit a Daily RFT blog post from 2011, which we ran after longtime Cardinals radio flagship KMOX (1120 AM) aired a long interview with Robinson that featured a young Jack Buck. The radio station re-broadcast the interview, which took place in 1960, during an extended Cardinals rain delay and was kind enough to provide a few excerpts to Daily RFT so we could share them with our readers.

See also:
- Jack Buck, "the Negro," and Jackie Robinson

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via YouTube

St. Louis, fifty years ago.

Here at Daily RFT, we like to take a trip down memory lane every once in awhile, and this week a video is making the rounds that takes viewers right to the streets of St. Louis in 1963. Recently posted on Reddit -- but uploaded to YouTube a few years ago -- the video comes from Bill Kendall, a retired engineer who now lives in Florida and grew up in south St. Louis.

"I made that film for my boss...to get some interest in people coming to St. Louis," Kendall recalls to Daily RFT.

What made St. Louis appealing in 1963? Watch the video below -- and transport yourself to St. Louis half a century earlier.

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National Park Service, Jefferson National Expansion Memorial

Workers on the Arch leg in the 1960s. More photos below.

On February 12, 1963, construction began on the Gateway Arch, launching the two-and-a-half year, $13 million build-out of the tallest national monument in the country. In honor of the anniversary this week, we've assembled historic photos below.

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courtesy Missouri History Museum

Woman crossing the frozen Mississippi, 1905.

Yes, it's cold this week, the coldest it's been here in St. Louis in several years. What's particularly galling is that this cold is not as lovely and refreshing as we thought it would be last summer when the thermometer crawled up to 108. Remember that?

Back in the good old days before global warming, it got this cold a lot. The cold was enough to stop even the mighty Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Cakes of ice would jam the Mississippi from the confluence to as far south as Cape Girardeau. And then St. Louisans would go out on the river to play.

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The Wellston State Bank sign with the "weatherball" on top.

In its heyday, the tower above the State Bank of Wellston flashed different colors to alert passersby of the weather forecast. A red signal might denote warmer weather. Blue could signal a cold front. White was status quo.

These days the tower's only discernible color is a rusty brown. The bank at the corner of Dr. Martin Luther King Drive and Kienlen Avenue in Wellston has been shuttered for years and is now undergoing demolition. Word has it that a McDonald's will soon take its place.

Yet there still may be a second life for the bank's iconic tower.

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Image via

Mark Twain insulted everybody. He was incredible.

The great Missouri sage Mark Twain went after everybody: Congress, the French, Christians, school boards, mankind, the French.

(He liked insulting the French).

In honor of his 177th birthday today, we give you six of our very favorite Mark Twain disses.

Classic Twain Insult #6

"The average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was."

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arcadiapublishing.com

Framework for the Climatron rises around the garden's existing palm trees in 1959.

Each week publishers bombard Riverfront Times with dozens of books that we will never read. Once in a great while, though, one of those unsolicited tomes will sit on a desk long enough for someone to actually pick it up. Such was the case last week when we received (and actually flipped through!) a copy of Missouri Botanical Garden.

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H.W. Brands' new book The Man Who Saved the Union is not the first book we've encountered about Ulysses S. Grant this year, but it's certainly the most voluminous. Brands, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, was in St. Louis yesterday to talk about the book at the Missouri History Museum and the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site at Grant's Farm...and with Daily RFT.

Why here? Well, Grant is the only U.S. president ever to have lived in St. Louis; his wife, Julia Dent, was from here, and after he retired from his first stint in the Army in the 1854, he tried to make a living farming what is now Grant's Farm (though it should probably technically be called Dent's Farm, since his father-in-law owned the land) and then selling real estate in the city. Both enterprises failed, and he decamped, in disgrace, for his family's tannery in Galena, Illinois.

And why Grant? Let Brands explain.

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Mathew Brady

In addition to his other accomplishments, Grant was also capable of posing for pictures like a badass.

Springfield and Independence do a lot of crowing about Lincoln and Truman, but St. Louis is remarkably reticent about Ulysses S. Grant, the only U.S. president who ever lived here.

Now it's true Grant was born and grew up in Ohio and spent the bulk of his adulthood in the Army and Washington, DC, (although his campaign machine occasionally deployed his years in Galena, Illinois, where he worked at his brothers' tannery to show he was really a common workingman) -- and also that the years he spent in St. Louis in the late 1850s were ones of misery and spectacular failure.

But still. We had one of the great American heroes here, and we should appreciate him way more than we do. That's the gist of H.W. Brands' new book, The Man Who Saved the Union, which he will be reading from tonight at 7 p.m. at (where else?) the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site at Grant's Farm.

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