The following was written and presented by the president of the Missouri Historical Society at a meeting of CAMOC (Collections and Activities of Museums of the City), a committee of the International Council of Museums, in Boston, April 30–May 2, 2006.

It is a perfect April St. Louis Saturday morning. The native redbud trees trimmed in rosy magenta have peaked. The dogwood trees sport white cup-shaped yellow-centered flowers. In the parks these trees form a white and rose understory beneath the huge oaks and hickories that have not yet leafed. It will be 80 degrees today but without dreaded drenching summer humidity. I meet Rama Lakshmi at the visitor services desk of the Missouri History Museum. For 15 years Rama Lakshmi has been a Washington Post reporter based in her native New Delhi, but for now she has set that world aside and become instead a student pursuing a master’s degree in museum studies from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Today I am taking her on a tour of St. Louis. I look forward to the day, but I will be caught absolutely unawares by the richness of what is about to happen. While Rama Lakshmi explores St. Louis, I explore New Delhi.

Neither history nor culture is a museum. What we collect and exhibit is but a small sample of reminders of where we live. The bigger museum, the main stage, is here on the streets, enclosed in buildings, encoded in memory, and encased in the repeated stories of grandmothers and grandfathers. Rama and I drive to a fascinating section of the city, and I park in front of Sumner High School. It is a huge old school that architecturally testifies to the importance of the educational enterprise within. The grand façade, the parapets, the solid reddish brick walls loudly proclaim that this is an important place where important things happen. But this school and the nearby building that was Homer G. Phillips Hospital are edifices of segregation, centers of African American excellence and persistence in a racially segregated world. The hospital, abandoned in the 1970s, is now condominiums. Sumner High is still open, but instead of excellence it now symbolizes the failure of urban education. Rama mentions the caste system in India, and our conversation turns to parallels and distinctions between racism and poverty in America and the persistence of castes in her home country and the silence and impoverishment of Dalits, India’s outcasts, the untouchables.

Homer G. Phillips Hospital and Sumner High School are in St. Louis’s “Ville” neighborhood. While African American St. Louisans are aware of the place and its history, the majority of white St. Louisans are not. It is one of too many unshared histories in our region. The result is a profound lack of common understanding of our shared place and a paucity of common aspirations for our future. A few weeks ago the Times of India printed an editorial piece by Rama Lakshmi. “Many,” she wrote, “believe that the biggest social cleavage in India is not religion or gender, but it is caste. Despite progressive constitutional guarantees and abolition of untouchability, discrimination continues. A caste museum is one way of confronting the existence of parallel narrative (of Dalits) that has remained invisible from mainstream historiography.” One of Rama’s incentives in entering the museum studies program was the concept of such a museum.

We drive a mile or two from the Ville, and I stop the car near the intersection of Jefferson and Olive. There is a nondescript building on the southwest corner. The odd little building typifies vernacular architecture of the 1950s, a style that does not respect its environment but rather ignores everything around it, an ugly knock-off of International style. But it is an important place because of the Jefferson Bank protests that happened here in 1964 and ultimately pressured St. Louis businesses to hire more African Americans. Despite ferocious rhetoric and red-faced anger all around, the long protest was nonviolent and in the end successful. Rama had visited the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Center in Atlanta a few weeks earlier. Our conversation turns to Gandhi and nonviolent struggles for justice and freedom oppression in other places at other times.

The first great east-west “mother road” of the United States, Route 66, passed through St. Louis on two-lane concrete between its start in Chicago and its finish in Santa Monica, California. This road, enshrined in romantic nostalgia, was America’s first transcontinental road that did not zig around farmhouses and zag at every country corner. It crossed the Mississippi River on the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge, just north of downtown St. Louis. The bridge is aptly named. There is a chain of rocks just down from the bridge that creates treacherous rapids. Towboats and barges bypass here through a series of locks and dams. The Mississippi is big and powerful here, fortified a few miles upstream by its confluence with the Missouri. T. S. Eliot called the Mississippi at St. Louis “a strong brown god.”

The Chain of Rocks Bridge is not a road for automobiles anymore. It is now part of a regional trail system for walkers and bikers. We slowly walk out on the bridge to the midpoint. The river is a muddy brown. Huge trees carried downstream by the river pile up like twigs against the upriver sides of the gray, rust-stained bridge piers. The river does not flow placidly and smoothly, but instead the surface reflects deep turbulence in abundant whorls and vortices and gigantic swirls. It is an awesome display of power that overwhelms human hubris and requires respect. My companion compares it to the Ganges. “On the banks of the Ganges,” she says, “people crowd the riverbanks. Hindus make pilgrimages to the holy river to bathe, scatter human ashes, and burn corpses. Chemicals and untreated sewage are dumped in the river.” The Mississippi, too, is scarred with chemical and human waste. We humans have done this. How can we re-imagine our relationship with the earth so that the children inherit a world that can sustain lives worth living?

How we imagine our place in the world determines how we will treat the earth and each other. If we think of the planet as a basket of resources for our consumption, we behave in predictable ways. If we believe that places are sacred, we behave quite differently. How must we think differently about water and air so as to ensure that there are plenty of both of good quality? What values and what kind of community arrangements are most conducive to healthy places for people? Can we reach a level of common agreements on the attributes of good places that permits us to proceed? Rivers are good places to think about these things.

Cities are built by emigrants who come from the other side of the planet and the other side of the river. St. Louis still has black sororities, Polish Falcons, bocce clubs, and Turnvereine. They are reminders of the transitions that all newcomers make as they seek accommodation to urban life in a new place. All first-generation immigrants are suspended between former places that they cannot quite leave behind and new places that they cannot quite fully adopt. Many collections in my own institution reflect the ethnic origins of people who came to St. Louis and their sometimes wrenching efforts to adapt to a new place that was often not hospitable. The rusted shackles, narratives of slavery, and terrifying white robes of the Ku Klux Klan document the extreme. Treasured photographs of relatives and loved ones left behind and upbeat letters with undertones of homesickness are the more common. Immigrants inundated St. Louis in the 19th century. Growth since then has been modest. Globally, however, the story is different because urban populations are expanding at huge rates.

I drive with Rama Lakshmi along streets and blocks that were once solid rows of houses, now just pockmarked with a few dilapidated buildings and plenty of garbage strewn over vacant lots. Because of the struggle for human rights by Dalits in India, Rama is really interested in the explosive brew of intergenerational poverty and covert racism implicit in what we see. This uneasy co-existence of poverty and wealth is echoed everywhere. Just last fall CNN bombarded living rooms with images of people stuck in this unconscionable underclass huddled at the New Orleans Superdome to escape floodwaters that surged over the levees. Many Americans reacted with shock, presuming that New Orleans had a peculiar problem. The problem is here on the streets of my city, and likely on your streets, too.

For three years I have served on the board of the St. Louis Public Schools as a member of a board majority committed to securing better outcomes for children. I see those angry faces of the dispossessed at every school board meeting. Some line up behind the microphone to speak during the public comment period. Their voices are both pathetic and vitriolic. I know my community well—the people behind the microphone who sit on the dilapidated porches and those who congregate at the St. Louis Country Club. These worlds do not intersect. Rama and I have more in common with each other than my fellow St. Louisans in the mansions on Upper Barnes Road have in common with those who live just a few miles away in ramshackle old houses on Dr. Martin Luther King Boulevard. We have no common understandings of our place upon which to base the future. This is an acidic stew of race and class served up in big portions. Rama explains to me how the caste system in India is based on heredity, on who your people are. She has understood the parallels in our disparate cultures. How can we reconcile? How can we make shared stories with common elements? Sometimes I wonder simple things like, how can we just become aware of each other?

As we drive the north side of St. Louis we pass block after block, street after street that look like bombs fell, grenades flew, and dynamite exploded. Desolation is the accurate noun. This is a land of prodigal waste. This is a place of destruction, destruction of infrastructure and abandonment of sewers, streets, sidewalks, houses, stores, and schools. The process here is the opposite of community building. This is the story of someplace becoming no-place. Each home demolition or arson is the destruction of a point of attachment for someone’s memory. Every vacant lot is a story forgotten. Community destruction is a process of forgetting, just as community building is a process of creating shared memories. This kind of community disintegration is also an environmental debacle. It is not just about disinvestment. It is also about abandonment of huge investments of capital and those nonrenewable resources consumed to build the place.

Later we drive west to the suburbs. We have not only abandoned the city at enormous cost, but we rebuilt on the periphery at equally enormous cost in ways that require massive consumption of even more nonrenewable resources. This kind of city cannot work. It is built on automobiles, fossil fuels, and cheap land. This kind of building is not good for us or for the earth. It just may be that good places for people are also good places for the planet and for the future. Good places for people are places that conserve. Good places allow us to build relationships. Good places respect memory and continuity. Good places are clean and healthy for us. Good places connect us to each other, and to those who were here before us and those who will come later.

Henry Ford discovered a century ago that if every automobile that he built was absolutely identical, then he could standardize the parts, create an assembly line, hire workers who did just one thing, and produce cheaper cars. That principle now applies everywhere. It surely applies to suburban housing. Suburbs in St. Louis are interchangeable with nearly every other suburban development in proximity to every other American city. It is not just the sameness of suburbs but also the creeping sameness of culture in St. Louis and everywhere else. (Rama says she needs to get back to India before it is all changed.) Old cities reflect time passages, continuity between generations; and they insist upon recall and remembrance as a condition of living in them. Humans require memory because it attaches us to place and to each other. Memories are the raw material of human identity. Shared remembrance is the fundamental fabric of community.

There are three water towers in St. Louis, two of them on the north side. They are architecturally distinct. There is a Corinthian column that soars hundreds of feet straight up in the middle of a traffic circle. Another is a soaring ornate Victorian monolith. Rama and I drive to the column and park as close as we can. The water tower is a spectacular architectural statement built by the city’s waterworks department more than 100 years ago. “The waterworks department?” you ask. Yes. In the late 19th century, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the United States. In such place people were figuring out how to build big cities that offered a tolerable quality of life. Plumbing, water lines, and sewers were crucial. So how to take that brown soup out of the Mississippi River and make it flow clearly and consistently from faucets was a major concern. Back then water pumps were pistons. Water propelled through pipes by pistons came through in spurts that mimicked the back and forth movement of the piston in the cylinder. The water towers were gigantic shock absorbers. Instead of letting the water gush sporadically out of the faucets, the pumps pushed the water up and down in the towers. The towers are obsolete now because turbines that do not oscillate pump the water. Once, though, these spectacular towers were a remarkable innovation, the most modern technology of the time embedded in a soaring Corinthian column.

A one-story brick building on St. Louis Avenue in Old North St. Louis has two doors in front. The letters on the cornice above the doors read “City Bath House Number 6.” This was a public bathhouse, one of many once operated by the city and used by those who lived in tenements without indoor plumbing. Although motivated by intrusive paternalism, the bathhouses served a serious public good, especially as the contagion of diseases such as cholera were understood to be related to sanitation. But the bathhouse is just one reminder of an enormous commitment on the part of citizens of my place 100 and more years ago to make provisions for the common good. This commitment is exemplified not just in bathhouses, but in the dozens of parks around the city set aside as urban oases uplifting for both spirit and body; in the public library system given a number-one rating in a recent study; in the imposing copper-domed insane asylum, the mariners hospital down by the Mississippi River, and the short-lived Social Evil Hospital for the treatment of venereal diseases, created as the centerpiece of a brief 19th-century experiment with legalized prostitution. The old segregated City Hospital and its long delayed counterpart for African Americans, Homer G. Phillips, exemplify repellent aspects of 19th and early 20th century life in my city, the blatant discrimination based on race, class, gender, ethnic origin, and religion. They tell us that St. Louis was a place of dirt and grime, short, painful lives, poor living standards. But in the bathhouses, public buildings, and parks is evidence of a different understanding of the social contract that I think we ought to heed as proof that our current interpretations are just interpretations. It could be different.

Until I moved to St. Louis 17 years ago I was a rural boy. I knew the craggy shores of Lake Superior, the Sangre de Cristo mountain range of New Mexico, and the Rocky Mountain foothills around Helena, Montana. Like a lot of rural people, I was both attracted and frightened by cities. Rama asks me why I moved to St. Louis. I have thought about this often. The primary reason is that the future happens in cities. People work on their big problems in cities. Our tour around St. Louis is really about how the future was worked out in the big 19th-century immigrant industrial city.

A manufacturing building on North Grand Avenue near Dodier is dull, dark red brick, and it is huge. It is surrounded by acres of deteriorated asphalt parking lots with dips and ridges and ubiquitous weeds. This was the main factory for Carter Carburetor Corporation, once a primary manufacturer of carburetors in the United States. There are generations now who have no need to know what a carburetor does. It mixes air and gasoline before it is sucked into the cylinders of internal combustion engines. Some of us recall the exasperation of a “flooded engine,” chokes, misfires, and stuck carburetor floats. The demise of carburetors and their replacement with fuel injection systems eliminated a great source of frustration for those who lived automobile-dependent lives. But for Carter Carburetor and thousands of employees, it was unemployment and a severe disruption in life. There are thousands of abandoned industrial buildings in my city where beer was brewed, shoes manufactured, dresses made, and cars built. The abandoned Carter Carburetor factory, the vacant lots, and the abandoned houses are proof that the 19th-century vision of the city ran out of steam and suffocated on obsolescence, just like Carter Carburetor.

The 19th-century dream of the city is over. Despite the demise of the old vision, it is still incontrovertibly true that the future happens in cities. Cities are where we work out the terms of our engagement with each other and with the places we inhabit. Cities are where in the best of circumstances we honor and sometimes overcome the past while we create our very own menu of burdens, legacies, and ambiguities that will be left for others.

Of all places on the planet, I care most about St. Louis. I care about the people, the culture, the history, the future, and the children. I listen to Miles Davis, a neglected native son of my place. I enjoy St. Louis–style barbecue, and I walk in my neighborhood park every day. Last week just at dawn a fox ran in front of me, right here in the midst of the city. When the hot humidity comes in June, I just tell myself that it is “a big warm hug.” I have lived here for 17 years, and I am home. Although I work in a museum, my very first loyalty is to the welfare of my place. But I think that is what museums are for too.

I visit a second-floor classroom at the Missouri Historical Society. Leaders of the St. Louis Jewish community sit around the table. They began meeting more than a year ago to discuss placing historical markers on Jewish sites around the city. They meet every few weeks, and the conversations are rich. While they still plan to erect markers on important sites, the scope of their work has broadened. Now they are constructing a website with more sites and more information than could ever be included in a marker program. They are planning for narrated tours with maps that can be downloaded to MP3 players and iPods. But the discussions are what are most important. Conversations about what to mark and what to include on the website have really been about memory, about what matters, about how a Jewish identity in St. Louis was created and sustained. Even more importantly, the discussions have really been about how to sustain a Jewish identity in the future in the face of the onslaught of homogenizing forces. And how to pass a sense of identity to the next generation. Their work is not about history or markers. It is about sustaining community. It is about sharing the story, not just among Jews but with the whole community.

Our stories about ourselves are not fixed, and there is no single true story. Every generation rewrites them to explain themselves and their places. How we write the stories determines what we will do next. Rama Lakshmi tells me of the current struggles in India over the content of history books. Hindu people who are the majority are attempting to write the story to elevate their own significance and to minimize discussion of divisive topics like caste. In 2002 Rama wrote an article on the conflict for the Washington Post. “Several historians and secular activists took the matter to the Supreme Court and asked for a stay on the exercise, but the court ruled recently against them and upheld the new school syllabus,” she reported. “Overnight the new history textbooks started arriving at the bookshops. . . . On a recent morning, the children in a government-run school in New Delhi sat hunched over their old history books. ‘We are confused,’ said Sakshi Walecha, 11, looking up from her book. ‘Now my teacher tells us we have to buy new books because history has changed.’” Rama Lakshmi wants to establish a museum on caste in India because she knows that the future of India hangs in the balance.

The future hangs in the balance for all of us and for our descendents. For me museums are means, not ends. And urban museums are special because they are precisely positioned in those places where we make the future. As I told Rama at the end of our tour, we in museums that are preserving the pasts of our cities are vitally concerned with future.