RFT 📰

Is Metallica the biggest band in the world? It sure felt like it when the metal giants and their fans stormed St. Louis over the weekend.

Last fall, what began as a column about LaSalle Park’s unique history morphed into a cover story as I learned about its equally fascinating present. In a region too often known for its racial and socioeconomic divides, the residents of LaSalle Park’s Historic District and the bordering affordable housing community LaSalle Park Village were putting in the work to operate as one neighborhood.

“I want to be someone that inspires others,” Kaylee, a second grader at Lift for Life Academy in St. Louis, recently wrote. Both Kaylee and her classmate Camryn hope to change the world. 

A good Samaritan in Overland attempted to thwart a burglar this past weekend by throwing the burglar's getaway bicycle in a dumpster. According to Overland Police, a man named Eduardo Salazar broke the front window of an apartment on Page Avenue and nabbed $2,800 in cash from a nightstand.

This story was produced in partnership with the River City Journalism Fund. St. Louis City SC turned heads after a record-breaking five consecutive wins began its inaugural Major League Soccer season.

Rev. Larry Rice's years-long battle with the city has made its way to the courts. Again.

Leaves are drooping, temps are dropping and last year’s thermalware is looking pretty fetching. It’s time to head … inside, with strangers in the dark, before a sublime stage that blinks with light. No, I’m not talking about midnight mass, but the annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival, better known as SLIFF.

A Tower Grove South storefront that has sat unused for almost two years will soon see new life.  Manileño, a restaurant serving authentic, homestyle cuisine from the Philippines, aims to open its doors at 3611 Juniata Street late this month or early December.

More than 75 activists have locked arms and blocked entrances to a Boeing plant in St. Charles, where activists say the aircraft company manufactures bombs used in the Israel-Hamas war. The protest began early Monday morning when workers would have normally arrived at work to Boeing Building 598, located on Highway 94 just north of 370. There, according to a release from one of the groups involved in the protest, Boeing manufactures small diameter bombs, or SDBs, and joint attack munition, or JDAMs.

St. Louis businessman Mohammed Almuttan had a lot to lose, and lose it he has. In 2017, Almuttan was one of 35 individuals indicted in Missouri for their roles in a criminal conspiracy involving the trafficking of synthetic marijuana and cigarettes.

The Umbrella Shop is not yet open for business on South Grand, and there’s certainly no sign suggesting otherwise. Yet when the doors are open to the street, people just keep stopping by. 

Theater impresarios Colin Healy and Bradley Rohlf opened their new dive bar/community theater in the space that previously held the late, great Way Out Club, and while the place is still but a few months old, they're already using it to solve one of St. Louis' enduring problems: Where to find some action on Monday night? Hence Stool Pigeon, a night of open-mic comedy hosted by Joshua Slobe each Monday beginning at 8 p.m.

Andy Karandzieff has seen all kinds of chaotic driving in front of his restaurant, Crown Candy Kitchen. There have been people chasing each other at high speeds as they fly past a stop signs and a driver who hit a school bus. Once, two drivers decided to run a stop sign and collided in front of the historic Old North restaurant.

A Missouri woman has filed a lawsuit against the Kroger Company, which operates locally as Ruler Foods, over what she alleges is the mislabeling of their Smoked Gouda Cheese. Bridget Coburn’s lawsuit alleges that the gouda being sold at Ruler and Kroger is a violation of the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act because the cheese being labeled as “Smoked Gouda” with a “Distinctive, Smoky Flavor” doesn't disclose that the flavor is partly due to liquid smoke flavoring, not an actual smoking process. 

A St. Louis County man is being held in jail after allegedly threatening a fast food employee who got his order wrong. James Demetrius Jackson IV had placed an order at the Penn Station sandwich shop in St. Ann. But when he got home, he apparently realized the order was wrong and called to complain.

A St. Louis County woman is facing a felony charge for stealing an 83-year-old man's car. But she says she has a good excuse for taking the 2008 Chevy Uplander.

Russell Jackson's Central West End mansion is the kind of St. Louis home that people on the coasts have to see to believe. It's roughly 13,000 square feet and, from the outside, makes the White House look like a low-rent hovel. And here's what to people in Los Angeles or New York might be the most amazing part of it — Jackson bought it for just $1.1 million.

One glance at the pot stickers, and it’s clear that the recently reopened King & I (8039 Dale Avenue, 314-771-1777) means business. Served steamed or fried and arranged like soldiers in formation, they emanate rising steam.

Describing Alexander Payne as underrated clearly exaggerates the case: After all, among his many laurels, he’s shared a pair of Oscars for Best Screenplay and earned three nominations as a director.  But Payne never quite receives the fannish adulation showered on such filmmaking contemporaries as Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson.

Janet Evra was born on the Fourth of July, a bit of poetic irony for a British gal singing and playing American jazz music. Then again, jazz is an international language, and Evra is a transcontinental artist — a world-hopping UK-born St. Louis transplant in love with bossa nova and French jazz.