We visit Antagonist Café in Soulard, located inside an Art Deco landmark built by the WPA agency during the Great Depression. Plus, the story of the Piasa Bird, painted on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River in Alton, IL, and this week in history: silent film star Florence Lawrence’s appearance here in 1910 jump-started movie stardom.
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Antagonist Café
The former Third District Jail Station in Soulard is now a coffeeshop and board game bar. The Art Deco building is a local landmark built as a WPA project during the Depression and previously housed an art gallery and event space.
Piasa Bird
The first European explorers saw the painting of a creature on the Mississippi River bluffs, and since then the story of the Piasa Bird has been shrouded in mystery and misinformation and even adopted as a high school mascot.
This Week in History – Movie Stardom
Silent film’s Florence Lawrence’s personal appearance in St. Louis in 1910 is considered the start of movie stardom in America. St. Louis also played a role in the publicity stunt that helped make her famous: a rumor and well-publicized denial that she had been killed in a streetcar accident.
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