News Coverage of Meeting Louis at the Fair, by Carol S. Porter

Carol Porter

Writer * Editor * Speaker
Member, Amherst Writers & Artists

News Coverage for Meeting Louis at the Fair

National Public Radio

Visit this link to hear The Ephemeral Fair's Master Architect, as KWMU's Matt Sepic interviews Carol about her book.

Gateway

Meeting Louis at the Fair is the carefully researched biography of the brilliant and romantic architect Louis Spiering, whose creations for the Fair reached beyond his time and seemed to foreshadow the future. His base building for the De Forest Wireless Telegraph Tower is pure Buck Rogers, straight out of science fiction.

Spiering is the star of the book, but the Fair runs a close second. Chock-full of photographs, the book visually transports the reader right back to the Fair, to its magic and its dreams. How could one's heart not beat a little faster at the sight of those fanciful and elegant buildings-or, as the author calls it, "the splendid lost city in Forest Park"? Some of the most interesting photos are those from Spiering's own album, published here for the first time.

Spiering died at a tragically young age, a few months shy of thirty-eight, just as his best-known post-Fair public building, St. Louis's Sheldon Memorial, was under construction. But this book is its own kind of memorial. The author's affection and admiration for the gifted young architect are so apparent, and his portrait so lovingly drawn, that I found myself ready to queue up to join the Louis Spiering Fan Club.

West End Word

Local author brings to life Louis Spiering, mysterious architect of the World's Fair
By Kara Beightel

Rock Hill native Carol Porter does not like talking about herself. A trained journalist and longtime freelance writer, she willingly admits that she's much more comfortable on the questioning side of the notebook.

Ask her about Louis (pronounced Lou-ee) Spiering, however, and Porter's eyes light up as if she were discussing her best friend. It is only in relation to Spiering, a 1904 World's Fair junior architect and subject of Porter's book Meeting Louis at the Fair, that bits and pieces of her own past come out.

As a child, Porter spent countless afternoons learning about the World's Fair while floating with her history buff father in the man-made waterways of Forest Park, waterways that Spiering helped design. Walking home from Webster Groves High School as a teenager, Porter passed within a stone's throw of the home on Sylvester Avenue where Spiering spent the last year of his life.

At the time, however, she was unaware of Spiering, who had at one time been a member of the elite in St. Louis. It was only through chance that Porter happened across Spiering while researching the history of the Sheldon Concert Hall in 1997.

"I was a member of a small a cappella choral group preparing a concert of early 20th-century popular music to be performed at The Sheldon," Porter writes in the preface to Meeting Louis at the Fair. "Needing a script, we wondered if we might find inspiration in the history of the building, its stunning auditorium and its architect."

Very little information turned up in her initial investigation of Spiering. But because of the connections Porter felt with Spiering - the World's Fair, music, architecture and the early 20th century, one of Porter's favorite eras - she decided to delve a little deeper.

Spiering was the only St. Louis architect to hold a degree from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the Paris-based school of architecture that was considered the most elite design school in the world at the time. Only 20 architects from the United States held degrees from the school when Spiering began working on the World's Fair. Both his mother's family, the Bernays, and the Spierings were prominent intellectuals and members of the St. Louis aristocracy. Despite all of this, however, information about Spiering was scarce.

"I was fascinated by this family who had such a cosmopolitan life and was so influential in society and vanished so completely," Porter said. "If you said 'Bernays' or 'Spiering' back then, almost everyone would've known who you were talking about. They were verging on becoming household words."

"A year into my research I had read more about [Louis' older brother] Theodore Spiering because he had a higher-profile career," Porter said. Having trained with one of the best violin instructors in the world at the time, Theodore was "arguably the best classical musician St. Louis ever produced." Theodore later went on to become the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1909.

After stumbling across a 1996 German biography of Theodore and having a friend translate it, Porter realized that Wilma, the younger of his two daughters, might be the key needed to unlock the mystery of Louis Spiering.

After tracking down then-92-year-old Wilma, the sole living Spiering relative, Porter made a trip to Burbank, Calif., where Wilma shared "piles and piles of treasures" and cooked dinner for Porter each night during her stay.

"Her mind is so alive," Porter said. "She was very inspiring to me. I was just a sponge for everything she had for me."

It was Wilma who made Porter aware of an album of Spiering's photographs from the fair. The album - which is preserved by the Missouri Historical Society and unavailable for paging through - became a focal point for Porter's book, where the photographs are published for the first time.

"By the time I met Wilma, I knew there was a book of some sort in all this and the fair kept coming back as the centerpiece," Porter said, recalling a note to herself that simply says, "It's the fair, stupid."

Porter was then faced with the problem of combining Spiering's biographical information with the facts of the fair and its architecture. To solve it, she interjected fictional accounts of events in Spiering's life as bookends to different sections of the book.

"I took a big risk and got inside the heads of my subjects," Porter said, noting that fiction is not her line of work. "Through my many meetings and conversations with Wilma and staying around all of these things that belonged to Louis and Theodore … I felt so familiar with the family. I wanted to impart a sense of who they were that went beyond reporting."

Through this method, Porter was able to bring back the essence of a man who was on the verge of becoming a supernova in the field of architecture. Tragically, Spiering died of cancer at age 37, just as construction of the Sheldon Concert Hall was being completed.

"He refused to be enslaved by tradition, and his smaller structures did give 'expression to the feeling of time'-the new time just ahead that he anticipated, embraced, but did not live to see," she writes in her book.