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A Whole New Ballgame

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All in all, not an obvious choice to conceive a baseball-centric development. And in point of fact, Gehry couldn't care less about the sport. In one spirited e-mail joust with DeWitt, the architect freely admits he's not enamored of the American Pastime. "Not even close," he writes. "It's such a silly sport, don't you think? I appreciate its linear nature and lack of time constraints. But I much prefer watching ice hockey."

Gehry and DeWitt do, however, agree on one thing: It's about the fans.

"Watch how the little red people exit the stadium and wend their way around the site," Gehry urges DeWitt — "the site" being the fenced-in crater he has been retained to fill. "That's more interesting to me than any game. I see The Village as an extension of these patterns, a more refined version, where baseball fans can find sustenance in a more sophisticated atmosphere.

"Baseball is fine for the so-called boys of summer," Gehry's e-mail concludes, "but what St. Louis needs is something for the men — and women — of fall, winter and spring."

Mike Shannon, meanwhile, has bigger things to worry about than the "goddam opera."

September was an up-and-down month for the former Cards third baseman and longtime radio play-by-play man, what with his team nearly blowing a six-and-a-half-game lead in the season's waning weeks. Shannon's also got a steakhouse to run, and when he got wind of the new Ballpark Village concept, he was livid.

"It's a knuckleball, thrown by a knucklehead," begins one e-mail missive from an incensed Shannon to DeWitt. Shannon proceeds to remind the Cardinals honcho that his decision to relocate his restaurant to its current address was predicated largely on Ballpark Village as originally proposed: ten acres of mixed-use development with 300,000 square feet of office space and 1,200 condos, plus 360,000 square feet of restaurant and retail space.

"Where's Geery's ESPN Zone?" Shannon fumes. "Alls that's left from the first plan is the goddam Bowling Hall of Fame. Where's the Border's [sic] bookstore and the grocery store? And this Elkin guy, I never heard of. Who did he play for?

"I dont get your thinking here, boss. It's a no-brainer: You put a baseball stadium here, and then you put all that other stuff across the street."

Of course, "that other stuff" costs money. Specifically, $650 million, according to the St. Louis Cardinals LLC and its development partner, Baltimore-based Cordish Company. The deal that gave rise to the new Busch only required the ballclub to sink $60 million into the site of the demolished Busch. And $60 million, as Bill DeWitt recently explained to the Post-Dispatch, won't buy downtown much of a Village at all. For an additional $590 million in taxpayer-subsidized capital, DeWitt said, the Cardinals and Cordish could transform the south end of downtown.

Enter Emily Pulitzer and Frank Gehry.

"She told me it's her 'love letter to the city,'" DeWitt responds to Shannon's eruption. "Think of it in terms of a [baseball] trade: Do we want to bank on a minor leaguer who may go all Rick Ankiel on us — i.e., the city — or do we want to line up a blockbuster multiplayer trade?"

When Shannon continues to demur, DeWitt tells him, "Swallow it like a man."

The thread ends with Shannon's curt reply:

"I'm not fuckin' hungry."

Undeterred, Pulitzer and Frank Gehry have been sketching out an ambitious construction schedule. If Ballpark Village comes in on time — and Gehry is well known for adhering to deadlines — the doors will open in June 2009, just in time for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis' 2009 season.

"This is something that never in a million years did I think was possible," an exuberant Charles MacKay, Opera Theatre's general director, informs Pulitzer in one of the e-mails. (Indeed, when the invitation to relocate downtown arrived, MacKay was working feverishly to complete a $4.5 million rehearsal hall near Opera Theatre's current performance space, the Loretto-Hilton Center on the Webster Groves campus of Webster University. The opera company does not intend to abandon the newly constructed space.) "Ballpark Village is going to transform Opera Theatre in ways we can hardly imagine. It will allow us to improve our administrative, artistic and educational facilities, attract the finest artists and continue to balance the budget."

According to an e-mail to Pulitzer and Gehry from Opera Theatre communications director Maggie Stearns, the company is "leaning toward inaugurating our wonderful new home with a performance of John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer."

That controversial 1991 work recounts the hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985 by Palestinian terrorists, who killed passenger Leon Klinghoffer, a disabled Jewish retiree who was celebrating his wedding anniversary on a cruise with his wife.

Engineer Larry Stubbs spent much of last month in the basement of Kiel Opera House, wearing a hard hat.

According to his e-mails to Gehry, the founder and president of Long Lake, Minnesota-based Stubbs Building & House Movers has "never seen anything like Kiel's support system.

"Never in a million years would I have guessed what lay beneath this structure," he writes. "It's almost like [architects Louis] LaBeaume and [Eugene] Klein knew it would someday be moved!"

Stubbs, who serves on the board of the International Association of Structural Movers, brings more-than-adequate experience to this job. In 1999 he and his team moved Minneapolis' 2,900-ton Shubert Theater off the site of a planned entertainment complex in the city's center. He recently submitted a proposal to relocate Ernö Goldfinger's London masterpiece, the eleven-story Carradale House, a half-mile north — and up a 4 percent incline — to a new site overlooking the city. And next year Stubbs and company are slated to hoist Mies van der Rohe's masterful Farnsworth House, move it 55 miles on a jumbo flatbed truck and set it down gently on the outskirts of Chicago.

The company's motto: "If you want it moved, we will come."

One of Stubbs' e-mails alludes to having led Gehry and Emily Pulitzer on a tour of the long-vacant Kiel.

"Hope you got the pix you needed," Stubbs writes, apparently concerned about Gehry's malfunctioning digital camera.

(That wasn't the only bump the entourage evidently encountered beneath the opera house: Stubbs inquires about "Mrs. P's slacks & blouse," apologizing for "that dang accordion lift" and offering to "knock off the dry-cleaning [from the final invoice].")

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