TALK OF THE TOWNS

talk

OF THE TOWNS

by bill beggs jr.

u. city

Interface Construction has had a chain-link fence up around the site of the late, lamented, flagship Pasta House at Delmar and Bonhomme in U. City for months now, much heavy equipment and a porta-potty sitting on the dirt and at the ready for workers. Another new Total Access Urgent Care (TAUC) is to be built on the lot, which has languished with little to no activity since that warm little slice of suburban-style Tuscany closed last November and was razed; a

new Pasta House popped up in January at 8831 Ladue Road. At any rate, a city official says the construction process has been somewhat delayed because of U. City’s need to complete ‘due diligence.’ Just spitballing here, but could TAUC be saturating the market? Interface has built many TAUC clinics in the last several years: One on Page in Overland, near the Home Depot at I-170, was completed post haste. TAUC on North Kirkwood Road due south of the CVS at Manchester seemed to pop up overnight. At least two dozen have opened throughout the metro. To the casual observer, there seem to be about as many TAUC clinics as Starbucks or McDonald’s. (OK; so, a casual observer exaggerates. But only a little.) All that said, it’s got to be better just walking in for emergency medical attention than waiting perhaps hours in a hospital ER. (BJC on Kingshighway in the wee hours of a Saturday? No, thank you very much.) Emergency medicine physician Matt Bruckel, M.D., founded TAUC in 2008, fueled by the belief that there should be an efficient and cost-effective alternative to

the metro

A lame T-shirt you’ve probably never seen says: “Q: Do you wanna taco ’bout it? Q: No, I donut. It’s nacho problem.” Groan. Dozens of sophomoric spins on this are lurking out on the interwebs, a magical place somewhere up in ‘The Cloud’ you can find with this nifty new electronic doodad called Google. It’s right here on my laptop. What, pray tell, will those I.T. wizards think of next? OK, OK; please excuse me. I’m back to the future now, full analog. I’d slipped into a time warp back to 1995 while searching online for just what the heck is going on with taco joints in the metro. Seems it’s one up, two down at present. Club Taco in Kirkwood may be ‘donut wanna taco ’bout it’ beyond a Facebook post announcing they had to throw in the towel after being unable to renegotiate an acceptable lease. They opened at 200 N. Kirkwood Road in 2016. Taco Circus, a trendy Tex-Mex eatery—read, Austin style—gave up the ghost Nov. 20 at its location on The Hill, open since 2019; no word on their Tower Grove spot. Then there’s Tacos 4 Life, a Conway, Arkansas, taco joint that made its first foray among our river cities by taking over a shuttered Steak ’n Shake location in St. Charles. They’re bona fide, from south of the border—the Show-Me State line, anyhow. Certainly, all is not lost. You should visit Hacienda on Manchester in Rock Hill on a day that isn’t Cinco de Mayo. They have yummy fare beyond frozen margaritas. Lunch business was brisk a few Saturdays ago at Taco Buddha on Pershing in U. City. And 24/7 almost anywhere; just drive thru a Taco Bell. Do I have tacos on the brain? Donut ask. It’s nacho problem.

chesterfield

It’s not easy to maintain ‘social distance’ at a sporting event or concert. Although two recent shows we saw at The Sheldon were elbow-to-elbow (one sold-out), projected above the stage before showtime was a reminder to keep 6 feet away from everyone else. Ushers approached anyone whose mask did not cover both nose and mouth—still, folks were seated close enough to suffer their neighbors’ halitosis. Proof of vaccination was required before entry, which we assume is de rigueur for most any venue. Judging from the schedules at The Pageant et al., the StL music scene has gradually returned to its robust, pre-plague levels. Which brings us to an exciting new development in Chesterfield Valley: The $150 million Gateway Studios & Production Services (GSPS), a 32-acre campus at 900 Spirit of St. Louis Blvd. broke ground last month. GSPS is projected to be one of the largest production services and rehearsal facilities in the country. Its strategic location, smack in the Midwest’s midsection, will allow for productions to be designed here before moving on. Adjacent to Spirit of St. Louis Airport and I-64, the campus should make arrivals and departures a snap. Gateway Studios, a 330,000-square-foot complex employing 100-plus entertainment veterans, will feature conference and dressing rooms, on-site catering, sound stages, green-screen studios, live streaming, audio, lighting and video manufacturing and production services. Studio 80 will accommodate stadium-size tours, with 52,500 square feet of open space and an additional 50,000 square feet of adjacent support space. Studios 75, 65 and 50 will be able to simultaneously accommodate the development of arena-size tours and incomparable corporate events. The senior leadership team at GSPS has rocked and rolled with big acts including Bon Jovi, Phish, Kenny Chesney, Maroon 5, Drake, Jimmy Buffett, The Eagles, Aerosmith, John Mellencamp, Florida Georgia Line and Prince … as well as the oft-maligned Nickelback. There’ll be a new hotel, a large private courtyard suitable for outdoor entertaining and even a six-lane bowling alley, ‘B. Goode Lanes.’ Visit gsps.com.

TT trivia ☛

WHICH COMPANY HAS THE LARGEST FOOTPRINT, IN TERMS OF TOTAL NUMBER OF U.S. LOCATIONS: MCDONALD’S, STARBUCKS OR WALGREENS?

LAST ISSUE’S Q&A

Chutzpah and mishegas, or mishigas, are favorite Yiddish words of your scribe, a lapsed Protestant. What does it mean? (‘Mishegas,’ not ‘lapsed Protestant,’ although it’s a valid question.) ‘Mishegas’ in this case means ‘all this mess here’ since the water main burst a month ago right at the end of our sidewalk. ‘Chutzpah’ is suitable Yiddish for the action Missouri-American Water has taken on our case since then. Different workers have shown up to spray-paint arcane white, blue, yellow, orange and green markings on the grass, concrete, gravel, dead leaves and dried mud. We still wait. What ‘chutzpah’— oy; have they got nerve! We’re just about ‘meshuggeneh’ around here. Crazy, that is!

kirkwood

If you looked closely, you might see ink on his fingertips. Mike Kleckner, 34, isn’t offended by being called ‘old school.’ He pores over print newspapers, when many of us, including old-andgrey journalists like this reporter, jump from one virtual headline to the next. In J-school, we were taught to never ‘bury the lead.’ Well, Kleckner’s a digger, and readers of Mike’s Unforgettable St. Louis History, Vol. 1 will be amazed by what he’s discovered by reading front to back, top to bottom, in every metro print publication you can think of and some you may not even know about—including our esteemed metro daily, of course, the RFT, Webster-Kirkwood Times, the long-defunct Globe-Democrat, etc. Kleckner delights in finding that one nugget farther down, maybe past the ‘jump’ to a page deep inside. He’s cozy with the Library of Congress and exults upon exhuming photos that may have been long hidden. He might even be able to explain the Dewey Decimal System. “See that?” asks Kleckner, pointing to ‘Vol. 1’ below the title. “I have enough for volumes 2 and 3 already.” He planned to upload the text and photos to Amazon on or about Cyber Monday for holiday shoppers to order their copy or copies, printed on demand. As readers may know, it’s anything but business as usual in the publishing industry. When a publisher reacted to his project with condescension, it only stiffened his resolve to self-publish. People who’ve loathed having to make cold calls at work will understand how vulnerable he felt, but he led with the chin anyway. It didn’t hurt. St. Louisans as prominent as Peter Raven, director emeritus of Missouri Botanical Garden, were impressed. “Simply wonderful!” Raven wrote Kleckner after reviewing an advance copy. “In this joyful, well-written tour of the buildings, historic sites and people of St. Louis, Mike Kleckner provides a rich mine of information that will be of interest to every newcomer or resident of our fascinating city. People of any age will enjoy this well-researched book!” With 40 years in newspapers, trade publications and PR under my belt, I learned a lot from Kleckner, CEO of his own marketing communications firm (kleckstl.com) and a magna cum laude grad of Mizzou’s J-School. Whenever he or his mother spot published errors, they gleefully share them. (She majored in journalism at Kent State, natch.) His strange factoids are fascinating. Upon spying a real-estate listing for Fienup Farm, 223 acres in Chesterfield where McBride planned to build as many homes on 1-acre lots, Kleckner researched the late W.G. Fienup. He was astonished. Seems the Pillsbury Doughboy wouldn’t have been possible without Fienup’s invention of the pop-open biscuit can. Arcane? The more obscure, the merrier, Kleckner might say. He didn’t. But he did say: “I could have written a whole book on Chouteau, but I want you to want more.” Besides, Pierre Chouteau has been done to death. To paraphrase another dead guy, Abraham Lincoln: “You can fascinate all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fascinate all of the people all of the time.” Kleckner aims to fascinate most of the metro, and soon. Visit mikesunforgettablestlouis.com. &

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