Design: New Gilded Age Grandeur

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Not many years ago, downtown St. Louis was, like most old American downtowns, a void, dreary and disheartening, a place where respectable people worked, bums lived and almost nobody strolled. Given that lifelessness, the city's attempt to create a heroic modern monument to itself in 1965, Eero Saarinen's arch beside the Mississippi, came to seem like self-mockery: a pure, gorgeous steel span rising from a dying downtown and a forgotten riverfront, a giant logo erected as a wishful substitute for authentic urban reconstruction.

Lately, however, the core of St. Louis is being redeemed for real. The Old Post Office, a grand Second Empire concoction, has been converted to shops and offices. Louis Sullivan's 1891 Wainwright Building, a prototypical skyscraper, was saved and refurbished. Laclede's Landing, nine cobblestoned blocks of 19th century brick commercial buildings, is suddenly thick with stores and boites.

This week St. Louisans will celebrate the opening of the most ambitious of all their proliferating preservation projects. The ornate Union Station and its glorious steel train shed, abandoned by Amtrak seven years ago, have been restored and turned into a complex of restaurants, promenades, 80 shops and a 550-room hotel. Under the far end of the shed, a boat pond and beer garden (Did someone say Budweiser?) are to be ready soon. The project cost $135 million.

It seems worth it. The depot's main building, finished in 1894, is a massive, lovable quirk. The local architect, Theodore Link, was obviously under the influence of Henry Hobson Richardson: rough limestone blocks, big arched doors, Romanesque bulk. But inside and out, he and Louis Millet, the interior decorator, wildly mixed and matched styles. The west wing has its odd Gothic outcroppings, the Grand Hall some rather Moorish nooks and ornament; an intimate dining room seems Viennese; and, of course, the steel-truss roof built to cover trains and tracks is pure 19th century Industrial Age.

The restoration is sensitive and, for the most part, scrupulous. Always there are quibbles: Why have the hoteliers covered the tile walls of a main hallway with cheesy green felt? In the 65-ft.-high barrel-vaulted Grand Hall, however, the strict preservationists were indulged. The gilt is real gold leaf. Artisans worked 3,000 hours fixing up the large pictorial stained-glass window. The marble for the floors is from the same French quarry used by the station's builders. Indeed, to the modern eye, accustomed to cleaner colors and lines, the period hues and ornamental density of this main interior space may seem too authentic: the muddy green and stained-glass glow and riot of gold are, all together, extremely rich. The room's Gilded Age swank is gorgeous, not inspiring.