Happy Chaos on Art Hill

In the winter of 1904 to 1905, St. Louis was in a state of exhausted satisfaction. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the massive World’s Fair that had preoccupied the city for years, had closed on December 1, 1904, with ceremony and congratulations. It was time for St. Louis to return to normal.

One important task remained: restoring Forest Park, the fair’s site. The contract between the city government and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company, the fair’s organizers, required them to “fully restore” the park within a year. As soon as the fair closed, workers began removing the immense but temporary buildings that had housed its exhibitions. Only the Palace of Fine Arts was built to last, part of it destined to become the Saint Louis Art Museum.

But the park could not be restored to its former condition. Before the fair, the park was primarily rolling hills of forest and shrubland. Now it was cleared and landscaped, its wild areas tamed and its streams channeled.

Next to the Palace of Fine Arts stood Festival Hall, and below the hall was Cascade Gardens, a series of waterfalls that cascaded down terraced steps to the Grand Basin, also called the lagoon. Chief of design Emmanuel Masqueray and landscape architect George Kessler, who designed the fairgrounds, included several fine vistas in their plan, and the sweeping view from the top of this slope was the finest. After the fair, Festival Hall and Cascade Gardens were removed, leaving the slope known today as Art Hill.

The Start of Sliding Down Art Hill

It’s unclear exactly who first looked out over that slope on a snowy day that winter and had the idea to slide down it. But it is clear that it was a great idea. Emmanuel and George didn’t just design a pleasant overlook for fairgoers and photographers; they inadvertently created what is arguably the best-loved public sled run in the United States.

Conveniently for Art Hill’s first sledders, Mrs. S. T. Rorer’s restaurant was being demolished after the fair, and its folding wooden chairs were stacked nearby. The chairs, which folded flat, were quickly improvised into sleds. An article in the January 15, 1905, edition of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat featured a frontpage photograph of 17 young people lined up to slide down the hill, each on a folded chair, with the headline, “World’s Fair Girls Coasting Down Cascade Hill.”

“The employees at the administration building have jolly times these slippery days sliding down the hills near Festival Hall,” the caption read. “A few rough sleds have been put together from pieces of the debris, but the popular method is to use one of the folding chairs, a pile of which was found conveniently near. The start is made near the front of the East pavilion, and unless there is a spill, the slide ends at the edge of the lagoon. Some times several chairs are placed in a row and a number go down together usually ending in a tumble half way down. The girls tried to persuade President Francis [David R. Francis, the fair’s president] to go down and try his luck and have a photograph taken, but he reluctantly declined.”

David Francis might not have wanted to slide down the hill, but his wife, Jane Perry Francis, had no such reluctance. Ten days after the photograph appeared in the Globe-Democrat, a short front-page article reported that Jane had participated in “a Forest Park coasting party” more than a week earlier: “They were coasting on a heavy bobsled. It was overturned at the foot of the hill, and Mrs. Francis’ right ankle was broken in two places and several tendons were torn.” Jane was recuperating at home, and her recovery was expected to interfere with the couple’s planned trip abroad.

The Innumerable Ways to Sled

By 1905, two St. Louis traditions were established. The first is sledding with whatever material is on hand. Art Hill is no place for sled snobbery. College students from nearby universities have used laundry baskets, baking sheets, and the perennial favorite, a cafeteria tray. Every December, local merchants advertised their Flexible Flyers as the ideal present for children, but kids were just as likely to show up with something handmade or pulled from the scrap pile. Inner tubes offered more comfort but no steering.

Roger Berry, a supervisor with the St. Louis Parks Division, has worked at Forest Park for 47 years. “Young people want to go down the hill as fast as they can, and they’ll use all kinds of objects,” Roger says. “In the past, they even used car hoods. This is America! People will think of all kinds of contraptions to use. You hardly see actual sleds on the hill anymore.”

“Last year, I saw somebody going down in a kayak,” says Amanda Clark, a public historian and community tours manager for the Missouri Historical Society, who regularly speaks about sledding on Art Hill as part of the society’s See STL program.

The 1960s were the heyday of car hoods used as sleds, perhaps the wildest conveyance ever used to make the trip down Art Hill. Car hoods back then were made of heavier steel than they are now; they were readily detachable and large enough to hold four or five speed demons at once.

John Corbett of St. Louis recalls, “In the early 1960s, on the west side of Art Hill away from the crowd, a few of us corner boys from Dogtown went down the hill at night clinging to a hood of a 1957 Chevy. There were five of us, and we just jumped on the hood, which was clinging to the very top of the hill, pushed off, and away we went, carefully hanging onto the edges of the rapidly moving hood. We were terrified!”

The second tradition is the free-form approach St. Louisans take to sledding on Art Hill.
“ ‘The happiest chaos’ is how I describe it,” Amanda says. When snow starts to fall, residents head to the park, and once there, the rules are pretty much whatever they make them. No one designates sliding or climbing lanes, and no one acts as a traffic cop on the slope. What is always present is the spirit of fun.

Sledders also share an unspoken understanding of who sleds when. Since the sled run gets faster as evening approaches, when the temperature falls and the snow packs down, families and kids favor the earlier hours of the day, while thrill-seeking teenagers and young adults gravitate to later times.

The Consequences of Speed

Jane Perry Francis’s ankle was the first in a long line of injuries suffered while sledding Art Hill. When people slide on random slippery objects down a long, snow-covered hill, accidents happen. Only one death has been reported: Wilson P. Hunt, who died in 1920 after crashing into a gangway at the bottom of the hill.

Many sledders’ most vivid memory of Art Hill involves some kind of catastrophe. Michelle Sprick of St. Louis recalls a friend spraying cooking oil onto the bottom of her saucer sled. “The increase in speed was crazy,” she says. “I ran into a guy carrying a wooden sled up the hill, and it set him in a straight-line vertical somersault. It hurt me as much as it hurt him. I didn’t realize how bad I was hurt until I became dizzy cheerleading at the basketball game that night. Went to the ER and vomited all over the floor in a dark room while radiology was taking pictures. I apologized to the technician. I’m still sorry.”

Occasionally, authorities have tried to impose some order onto the happy chaos. In 1960, a heavy late-February snowfall on a Sunday brought an estimated 5,000 sledders to Art Hill, and the crowd overwhelmed the available space. “An undetermined number of children were struck by sleds speeding downhill,” the St. Louis Globe-Democrat said.

Parks Commissioner Palmer Baumes told reporters he would not institute sledding lanes. “People wouldn’t pay any attention to them anyway,” he said. This response did not sit well with his boss, Virginia Brungard, the city director of Parks, Recreation, and Forestry. Virginia told park police to create uphill and downhill lanes. She also banned youngsters from using “dishpans or old cartons.” But Virginia’s reforms didn’t last, and soon people were sliding down the hill in anarchic splendor again.

In the early decades of sledding on Art Hill, the Parks Division actually worked to make the slope faster for sledders. In February 1912, newspapers reported that the fire department flooded the slope with water to create an ice base under the snow. Nowadays, when snow is forecast, Roger and his crew with the Parks Division check the slope for anything that might injure sledders.

John Corbett remembers sledding going awry while riding the hood of a car toward the Grand Basin. “During sledding season, the Parks Division placed black chat [a type of crushed gravel] at the bottom of Art Hill to slow down fastmoving sleds so the folks wouldn’t end up in the frozen lake. When we hit the chat, it didn’t slow down the heavy hood, and we all jumped off into the snow while the hood went into the lake. It didn’t travel far but hit into the stone wall on the other side of the Grand Basin about 30 feet away.” The young men snuck back later that night and retrieved the sunken hood from the basin.

John and his friends are not the only ones who have found themselves sliding into the Grand Basin after careening down the hill. As early as 1920, newspapers reported that a “slush bath” awaited sledders who picked up too much speed going down the hill. Over the years, the Parks Division has tried various methods to keep sledders out of the Grand Basin. A cinder road once ran between Art Hill and the basin, and Roger and his team would grade it, roughening the surface to help stop sleds before they reached the water’s edge. That road is now a paved sidewalk, and the department has added hay bales and fences in strategic locations to help stop sledders’ momentum. Even so, unlucky sledders still end up wet sometimes. To warm sledders, the City of St. Louis Parks Division keeps two firepits burning at the top of the hill.

Beyond these safety measures, the sledding experience at Art Hill is much the same today as it was in 1905. People from every corner of the region continue to come together for pure, unorganized fun in the snow. “It really underscores how Forest Park is the city’s backyard,” Amanda says. And backyards are meant for playing.