Thursday 03/28 Off the Top Ropes
The tragic story of the Von Erich family was memorably chronicled in last year's Zac Efron film The Iron Claw, an A24 production that was a near-universal hit among critics upon its release, even being named one of the top 10 films of the year by the National Board of Review. The true story behind the arthouse film is just as gripping as the one on the silver screen, and this week Gateway City Slam is here to tell — and show — you all about it.
The Beer: Double Dry Hopped Fallen Flag Hazy IPA
The Brewery: Narrow Gauge Brewing Company The label art on Double Dry Hopped Fallen Flag, a Hazy IPA straight out of north St. Louis County, reveals a history of connection between city and county. The connection was physical — and steamy.
The last legal piece of the Russian-roulette style killing of one St. Louis police officer at the hands of another was settled yesterday in St. Louis Circuit Court — a quiet close to an incident that fueled scandalous headlines in early 2019. Yesterday’s hearing in front of Judge Bryan Hettenbach ended the civil lawsuit filed by the mother of police officer Katlyn Alix against former officer Nathaniel Hendren, two other officers and the city.
Thirty-eight years ago, the man who more than anyone else invented rock & roll left it all on a stage in Austin, Texas. It was April 27, 1986, and Chuck Berry, then 59, was on the final night of a tour that had him headlining a bill of legacy acts that included Chubby Checker, Martha and the Vandellas, the Shirelles and others. In this era, when Berry was on the road, his typical backing band consisted of "whatever underpaid local rockers the promoter rounded up," as one biographer put it.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones is considering building tiny homes for St. Louis’ unhoused population at the former site of the city’s Medium Security Institution, better known as the Workhouse. Her spokesman suggests she has little choice — that the Board of Aldermen have effectively blocked homeless shelters from going just about everywhere else in the city. Activists who Jones once consulted on a future use for the Workhouse say she’s not wrong about that.
Daniel Riley, who was found guilty of multiple assault charges earlier this month, is seeking a new lawyer. Riley, 22, was the driver responsible for the February 2023 collision in downtown St. Louis that trapped visiting athlete Janae Edmondson between two vehicles. Edmondson had to have both legs amputated.Â
The 11th annual St. Louis Theater Circle Awards ceremony was held at the Loretto-Hilton Center on the campus of Webster University on Monday. The awards recognize locally produced, professional theater with 125 nominations in 33 categories, representing 24 St. Louis companies and 55 productions out of more than 100 eligible shows. The categories and winners are listed below, in order of presentation.
Ben Poremba’s Bengelina Hospitality Group opened a second location of AO&Co. at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) at 3750 Washington Boulevard in Grand Center in early March. The new AO&Co. serves coffees from Quarrelsome Coffee, loose leaf teas from Firepot Tea, and a menu of salads and sandwiches featuring items from Poremba’s other restaurants, including Olio and Deli Divine. Poremba says the idea to bring AO&Co. to CAM came about partly thanks to his business partners’ long-term involvement with the museum.
Playwright Arthur Miller is considered one of the 20th century’s great American dramatists, and the pointed and heartbreaking All My Sons is arguably his most profound work. Set just after the end of World War II, the drama examines culpability and the true cost of war while raising questions about our collective responsibility to each other. The New Jewish Theatre’s riveting production captures all the tension and searing pain of the story with a naturalistic approach that finds understated grace in an untenable truth.
Earlier this year, a nonprofit research center determined that in just the past six years, the tax breaks given to developers have cost St. Louis city and county public schools more than $260 million. While the tax increment financing, or TIF, districts granted by the city have become less common in recent years, many developers have shifted to tax abatements instead. NorthPoint Development, a Kansas City-based commercial real estate developer, recently applied to the St. Louis Development Corporation for tax abatement on a property halfway between Barnes-Jewish Hospital and the Grove district.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a lawsuit today against a left-leaning media watchdog group that he says is guilty of defaming Twitter (now X) and Elon Musk. The lawsuit, however, is not a defamation suit — but rather a “petition for order to enforce civil investigative demand.” Back in November, Bailey's office began investigating the nonprofit Media Matters for America, which Bailey believes manipulated Twitter's algorithm to create a report showing advertisements for normal companies on the platform appeared next to not-normal content, or what Bailey calls "contrived controversial posts."
The City of St. Louis launched a new website today to track the use of federal COVID-19 relief funds. The city was awarded more than $498 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding, with plans to use it on 223 projects, according to a news release from the mayor’s office. So far, the city has approved the use of $272,519,142.08, which is approximately 54.7 percent of these funds.
In a first for the sport, the organizing body that oversees all professional eating competitions is inviting some of the best in the business to gather in Uranus this weekend for an event that will see them wolfing down fudge in the pursuit of a world record. Dubbed the 2024 Inaugural Eating Uranus Fudge Galactic Championship and set to take place Saturday at the Uranus Fudge Factory in St. Robert, Missouri, the competition is the first of its kind, and is now one of 70 events on Major League Eating's roster, which also includes the annual televised hot dog eating contest held on July 4 each year on Coney Island. Its competitors will face off for a grand prize of $2,500 and the title of the first-ever Eating Uranus Fudge Galactic Champion.
St. Louis city prosecutors filed a drug trafficking charge this morning against a 50-year-old busted last week with fentanyl at the City Justice Center. Prosecutors with the St. Louis Circuit Attorney's Office filed a drug trafficking charge against Jason Gipperich, who was booked into the city jail Wednesday on a probation violation. The following day, as he was being moved from the first floor of the facility to the second, Gipperich began acting erratically, according to a police probable cause statement.
Beloved sushi burrito spot BLK MKT Eats (9 South Vandeventer) has closed its doors. That’s tragic, we know. But before you get too upset, know that they closed the Central West End eatery in the Gehardt Lofts building to open in a new, bigger location at 7356 Manchester Road in Maplewood.
A pair of AirPods and what lawyers say was some shoddy police work resulted in an innocent middle-class Ferguson family having their front door smashed in by the St. Louis County SWAT team last May. Around 6:30 p.m. on May 26, Brittany Shamily was at home with her children, including an infant, when police used a battering ram to bust in her front door. “What the hell is going on?” she screamed, terrified for herself and her family.
When Heather Roth’s daughter, Margaret, asked to have cotton candy at her sixth birthday party instead of cake, she knew she had to make it happen. “I had to figure out how the hell I was going to make cotton candy,” she says. “That’s basically how Rosie Cheeks and the whole concept of the cart started — by being an experience for her and her friends.”
The conservative outrage express is barreling hard toward the school board governing the Lindbergh School District, courtesy of a political action committee run by Martin Bennet, a Des Peres man who is the regional manager of an Internet services company that markets to schools. Direct mail flyers began appearing in the mailboxes of Lindbergh voters last week that were paid for by the St. Louis County Family Association Political Action Committee, which Bennett launched in January. The flyers promote the candidacies of David Randelman and David Kirschner, who are among the four candidates vying for the two seats on the eight-member board at stake in the April 2 election.
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