Brickline Greenway - Pillars of the Valley
St. Louis, MO
2022
Where the City Begins to Remember
Mill Creek Valley was home to thousands of St. Louis residents — a dense, self-sustaining Black neighborhood in the heart of Midtown. In the late 1950s, the City of St. Louis demolished it. Buildings came down. Families were displaced. And for more than half a century, the neighborhood existed only in the memory of the people who had lived there.
The southwest corner of the new St. Louis CITY SC Stadium sits in that footprint. When the Brickline Greenway — Great Rivers Greenway's proposed 14-mile network connecting Forest Park to the Gateway Arch and beyond — identified this as the location of its first completed segment, it created an opportunity that demanded more than infrastructure.
Client
Great Rivers Greenway
Size
1 Mile
Photogrpahy
Nic Smith
Suzy Gorman
Great Rivers Greenway
Acknowledgement
Work Completed by the Kanopi Gap team while Employed at LJC Design & Engineering
Damon Davis, a St. Louis-based artist with national recognition, was commissioned to create Pillars of the Valley. The installation occupies the stadium's southwest corner — the most visible point of the Brickline's first build. It does not decorate the space. It anchors it. The pillars honor the displaced residents of Mill Creek Valley by name and in form, giving the neighborhood a presence in the city it was taken from.
The Brickline Greenway begins here. That is not incidental. It is a statement about what this network is for — not just movement and connectivity, but the kind of public realm that holds a city's full history, including the parts it would rather forget.
