This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon:A shiny, gold bow wraps around the skinniest part of the hyperparaboloid that sits in Forest Park, celebrating the golden 50th for the James S. McDonnell Planetarium.
The bow, like the shape of the building, stands out as a symbol of St. Louis, at least at the holidays.
Usually red and reserved for Christmas time, it's festive, massive, and a sign of the season. But the bow's unveiling, in 1966, wasn't meant to be the start of a tradition.
It was, instead, a good and thorough punking.
"We didn't think of it as a prank," says Allen Levin, who says he was then a 19 or 20-year-old architecture student at Washington University. “We thought of it as a cool idea.”
Here’s how it all happened:
The students in the architecture school somehow had access to Gyo Obata’s plans, Levin can’t say how for sure. But thanks to that, they had the plans for the building itself. And so they knew, Levin says, what the space was like inside and out.
They also knew that the security guard was locked in the building.
If they could avoid being seen, they could tie a giant red Christmas ribbon around that building. So, they gathered their supplies: ladders, wood, cables and red fabric.
Sometime late Christmas Eve or early Christmas morning, the students set out into the foggy night, parking on Oakland and creeping across the walkway that connected that street to Forest Park.
Five or six of what Levin remembers were maybe 10 students climbed atop the building, got the fabric, and scooched on their backsides up to the skinniest part. It got steep, but they managed to connect the ends.
They scooched back down and, once on the ground, were spotted by a puzzled security guard.
“He couldn’t figure out what we were doing,” Levin says. “And we just walked away.”
Back over the walkway, to their cars, the building faded in the fog. They drove into the park, this time up to the planetarium, passing police cars as they went.
The young men left, quite pleased with themselves. And one of them called a radio station to tip them off. On the building, they’d also left a calling card, according to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story recounting the events.
It read: “Merry Christmas, St. Louis, Washington University School of Architecture.”
The next year, the planetarium called the school to see if the students would put the bow up again, but they declined. And so the James S. McDonnell Planetarium took over the role, making trick into tradition.
But it really wasn’t meant to be a trick, Levin says, not one to cause harm or offense anyway. The students in the architecture school loved that building.
“We thought it was splendid. We all thought it was just a fantastic piece of architecture.”
It was, perhaps, more of an adolescent tribute, carried out on a dark, foggy night and kept up ever since.
Today, Levin works as a printmaker. Until very recently, his studio sat two blocks from the planetarium, now he passes the building each day on his drive to work. And from his home, Levin can see the building itself.
He’s not moved by seeing the bow now, he says. It was just something he and his friends did a long time ago. Then, they thought it was charming.
Now, it still is.