Over the past two years, an area of Forest Park the size of more than 15 football fields has been transformed into the Anne O’C. Albrecht Nature Playscape. It opened to the public earlier this week, sporting a colorful range of native and diverse plant species and curiosity-sparking play elements made out of everything from limestone to willow branches.
On Dec. 12, 2019, near the corner of Bates and Virginia in St. Louis’ Carondelet neighborhood, 24-year-old Cortez Bufford died after being shot multiple times by St. Louis police Officer Lucas Roethlisberger. The case, like that night, has remained shrouded in darkness, as investigative journalists Alison Flowers and Sam Stecklow detail in their newly published Intercept deep dive.
Published May 21, 2021 at 5:16 PM CDT Missouri Historical Society Garment workers inside a Starr Company factory look toward the camera in this image from the early 1900s.
Valerie Battle Kienzle & Reedy Press Valerie Battle Kienzle (at left) spent about five years completing her new book on St. Louis fashion history.
Valerie Battle Kienzle has researched and written all sorts of things over the course of her career, penning everything from newspaper articles to corporate communications to books.
But at heart, the Weldon Spring, Missouri, resident admits, she’s “a history nerd.”
“Anything that’s history, I will go down a rabbit hole,” Kienzle told
Fifty-four years ago this month, three boys went missing in Hannibal, Missouri, and were never seen again. The cold case, situated as it is in the boyhood home of Mark Twain and beloved fictional characters like Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, has been the subject of attention and speculation in the decades since.
May and September are peak migratory months for songbirds.
It often takes a camping trip or a nighttime drive along a quiet stretch of highway to remind us just what a striking presence the moon and stars are. In metropolitan areas, the night sky just doesn’t look the same, especially because of all of the artificial lighting within the built environment.
But for winged creatures making their way through the sky, those lights in the universe provide more than mere scope for the imagination. It’s an important piece of how they navigate their path. And when artificial lights and skyglow from below interfere, that can create real problems, especially during May and September, the peak migratory months for songbirds.