Finding a meaningful lens through which to see a new place.
Northwestern Missouri isn’t a resort destination. It boasts no skyscrapers or deep harbors. Its rolling hills have never been featured in Condé Nast Traveler. The closest major airport is Kansas City. The #wanderlust crowd on Instagram doesn’t seem to know it exists, and neither did I. Of all the places I’d never been, St. Joseph, Missouri seemed to top the list of places I was least likely to see in my lifetime.
But when a work assignment took me there, I went – without any real expectations. Despite several midwestern cities topping the Forbes lists of best places to live, best cities for young professionals, etc., my experience of the midwestern states has been very limited. Missouri… what was Missouri like, anyway? I had no idea.
St. Joseph, Missouri, colloquially known as St. Joe or St. Joe Mo, is a town with a long and interesting history. It gained significance as a trading post where westbound pioneers stocked up on supplies. The Pony Express began its route there. Outlaw Jesse James died in his home there. It’s the home of five notable museums – high density for a town with a population of 76,000.
Another notable figure from the town may surprise you: Eminem grew up in St. Joe. The hip hop star is getting older, but he’s still alive – presumably why he doesn’t yet have a museum in his honor. But he did spend years of his childhood in Missouri before moving to Detroit. And interestingly, he attended Hall Elementary School.
That last fact is interesting because at my new work project in St. Joseph, a developer with a fantastic architectural imagination took an old school and turned it into a tiny community of exquisitely designed luxury lofts. I usually work with hundreds of thrown-together, paper-thin apartments near some bougie new shopping mall. Here I found instead a sturdy midwestern historic building repurposed and surrounded by a respectable, salt-of-the-earth residential neighborhood. Number of lofts? 39. Name of the school? Hall Elementary.
That’s right – Eminem’s old elementary school has been converted to luxury lofts.
Luxury lofts… An old school? Isn’t that kind of creepy? I imagine you asking. Well, yes – no – maybe. Yes, because it’s so quiet in the halls, and the high ceilings feel a little institutional and intimidating. No, because designers hung warm, modern paintings along yellow accent walls and parked attractive new furniture in convenient places; the vibe is upscale, professional, and welcoming. But also maybe… maybe creepy isn’t the right word. Maybe the place could be better viewed as simply historic.
History carries a lot of weight, even in a school. (This company that renovates schools has also renovated a hospital building for senior living spaces, which is even heavier, but I digress.) For me, this adjective – “historic” – that became a sort of lens, not just for my experience of HL29 (short for Hall Lofts on 2509 Duncan Street) but for my experience of St. Joseph itself. I’ll get back to Eminem, but first, a little about this old school building.
Before I knew apartments could be built in developments of hundreds, before I jumped into the property management world, this was the kind of place I had envisioned working. It took three years, but I finally made it. All in one building, each loft unique, historic details preserved alongside beautiful new luxury finishes like quartz countertops and energy-efficient appliances… okay, I’ll quit nerding out on the features of the apartment (although I WANT to, because they are fantastic). As I said above, it’s in a residential neighborhood. It’s a big square brick building and it’s up on top of a little rise, so it can be seen from pretty far down the street.
There are double metal doors leading into foyers which lead into spacious hallways with classrooms off to all sides. It feels like I always imagined an old-fashioned boarding school would. There are three main floors in the building connected by tricky similar stairways. On the lowest floor there’s a gym, and in the supply closet beside the gym, the construction team lifted off a back wall panel and showed me a tunnel running between the walls from that closet to the gym. They told me that in one apartment (already rented, sorry), under someone’s fridge is a trapdoor leading down to a bunker space. Other supply closets lead far back into the building’s underbelly and then end in sealed doors construction may or may not have ever opened.
These are just some material architectural facts. But they’re based on historical facts, on decisions that seemed reasonable when made. The facts have only become uncomfortable as time has passed, some of those decisions turned obsolete, and their reasons have been forgotten. (Why did someone make that bunker space, anyway? We can no longer remember.) To me, this forgetting is the most uncanny part of history. The building was a school that was used routinely for years and year and years. Thousands of kids of all descriptions walked the hallways and used the classrooms. Now, walking through the refinished corridors and stroking the beautiful wood doors, I would have never imagined a young Eminem here, lost in his transient lifestyle.
But he and many others are part of the place’s history. I started thinking: if Hall Elementary could forget Eminem, how much more could St. Joe forget its common men, the ones that didn’t grow up to spew shocking amounts of vitriol? And if common men are forgotten, how easily could America forget a place like St. Joe, as significant as it was in the country’s history?
Hall Elementary is now HL29 Modern Flats. Time and renovation has erased all signs of the disenfranchised little boy who grew up to be a hip-hop star. But he stood on these same wide black staircases a long time ago. As I work on this project, I want to remember him and all the other people who have given this building historic interest. Otherwise, the school would just be a renovated old building full of functionally obsolescent quirks… meaningless, vacuous, maybe even creepy.
The same goes for St. Joe. I want to be mindful of its continuing significance in America and discover value in that. This place is one where interest is found by pulling back the layers of time one by one, starting with the one on top – the day we call today.
~ The Dauntless Princess ~
