Dogtown

March 11

Dear Pat,

The St. Louis neighborhood known as Dogtown is not far from Forest Park and the St. Louis Zoo but hides, like many St. Louis neighborhoods, behind the wide concrete chutes that carry much of the city's traffic. I'd only seen Dogtown in the movie "White Palace." I didn't know Dogtown.

In the film, a burger restaurant waitress played by Susan Sarandon begins seeing a much younger, rich executive played by James Spader. Both Nora and Max live with the kind of emotional pain perhaps only the other could touch, pain everyone else avoids talking about. They find each other in a bar one night. Every night's a lonely night for them.

She lives in Dogtown, in a tiny unkempt house many worlds removed from his meticulously upscale life elsewhere in St. Louis. That was my Hollywood impression of Dogtown as I drove in. It would dissolve at the intersection of Clayton Road and Tamm Avenue.

On the way I passed a Catholic church and houses of many different sizes. It is working class, a neighborhood where you expect people go to Mass every morning at St. James the Greater Catholic Church, read the morning Post-Dispatch to relive the St. Louis Cardinals game they watched on TV the night before, drink a daily pint or two of Guinness for their health and know their neighbors' names and family history.

Seamus McDaniel's, an Irish pub and restaurant, occupies the largest commercial building in the neighborhood. Cars filled its parking lot at 11 a.m. Nearby is Acme Guitars, a small shop where classic guitars hang from the walls, and the floors are stacked with the kind of vintage tube amplifiers that make real guitarists drool. I walked around inside and tried not to say anything dumb.

Missouri's Civil War Heritage Foundation does business on the same side of Clayton Road. Across the street, The St. Louis Strings Violin Shop makes and repairs violins, violas, cellos and basses. A small lumberyard operates a few doors down. Dogtown appears to be a boutique-free zone. Everything's real.

I lunched at a Tex-Mex restaurant called Latitude 26. A massage and yoga studio across the way reassures that the neighborhood is keeping up with the times.

That's Dogtown 2010. The question, of course, is why is Dogtown called Dogtown? It's not the name a chamber of commerce might prefer and yet has its own cachet. Who'd mess with someone from Dogtown? I would want to go hear a band named Dogtown.

Natalie, who works at a Cape Girardeau coffeehouse I frequent, used to live in St. Louis, so I asked if she knew anything about Dogtown. She said she used to live in Dogtown and liked it. But she didn't know the origin of the name. It appears nobody does for sure.

One theory is that the coal miners who lived there in the 1800s kept guard dogs. Another is that tribesmen from the Philippines who lived there around the time of the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis thought dogs tasted better than they guarded. My favorite story is that the miners didn't have sophisticated mining techniques, so they extracted coal by digging small holes in the earth. Like the holes your dog might dig in your backyard.

"White Palace" is a pseudonym for White Castle. The smell of the burger grease on Nora almost wafts off the screen, and the disarray of her life naturally repels Max. His family and friends disapprove of her. But those things don't matter. What matters is that Dogtown and Nora don't pretend.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.