News

Fuck Frank Gehry

The icon of postmodern architecture has a sense of humor. Who knew?

By Tom Finkel 

Ah, sweet memories!

The Talk of the Town section of the June 4 New Yorker contains a piece called "Your Name Here," in which Lauren Collins relates the tale of one Barnaby Harris.

Harris struck T-shirt gold in 2001, when he came up with the slogan "Fuck Yoga." It took a while to come up with a worthy follow-up, Collins writes, but Harris did. The magic words?

"Fuck Frank Gehry."

You might know Gehry as the icon of postmodern architecture who designed the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis.

I know Gehry as the spoilsport who sicced his general counsel, J. David Bournazian, on me last October, after we piggybacked our pie-in-the-sky Ballpark Village satire on Gehry's notoriety.

According to our story, which carried Randall Roberts' byline, the crater that persists where the old Busch Stadium stood would not be turned into a shlocky tourist trap as St. Louisans had previously been led to believe. Rather, thanks to the intervention of local philanthropist Emily Pulitzer, the twelve-acre site was to be transformed into a mecca for art and culture, designed by a marquee architect.

"Erstwhile media magnate Emily Rauh Pulitzer has entered into an agreement with the St. Louis Cardinals to develop the downtown site known as Ballpark Village, Riverfront Times has learned..." Roberts' story began. "World-renowned architect Frank O. Gehry has signed on to design the project. Estimated price tag: $765 million."

The "facts" of the story were based on our own architectural renderings and fictional e-mails. It was populated by flesh-and-blood human beings, but everything behind the façade was pure fantasy: the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis moving downtown along with the Stanley Elkin Archives, a Richard Serra sculpture garden and the Kiel Opera House. (The Opera House was to make a grand entrance, "unhitched from its Market Street foundation, towed one-half mile east and re-anchored across the street from Mike Shannon's Steaks and Seafood.")

The day the story went live on riverfronttimes.com, St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Jake Wagman called. After apologizing for having to ask "a stupid question" (he blamed his editor, naturally), Wagman asked if our story was true.

We made it up, I told him. Funny, I said, we've barely even started distributing the print version around town and the cat's out of the bag.

You think you've got it bad, Wagman shot back. I get to call and try to get a comment from Emily Pulitzer.

The next day I got a telephone call from J. David Bournazian, general counsel for Gehry's Los Angeles-based company.

We'd published a story that wasn't true, Bournazian said. If the attorney sounded peeved (and he did), that was nothing compared to the mood of his boss, who was, Bournazian informed me, hopping mad.

Through Bournazian, Gehry was demanding a retraction.

I hooked Bournazian up with our corporate attorney, so the two of them could talk about whatever it is that attorneys talk about. I also posted a note online alerting readers that the Ballpark Village story was satire. We published a similar note on the Letters page of our next issue.

And that was that. Sort of.

Our Ballpark Village package contained three elements. One was the newsy story by Randy Roberts. Story element number two was entitled "Frank Gehry's Ballpark Village: An Appreciation." This was an encomium penned by Robert Duffy, who had recently joined RFT as the paper's visual arts and architecture writer. His imprimatur brought another layer of verisimilitude to the project, seeing as how he'd put in three decades-plus at Pulitzer Inc.'s Post-Dispatch before taking a buyout when the company was acquired by Davenport, Iowa-based Lee Enterprises, Inc. (He also was a student of my father at Washington University many years ago. After my mother died in 1996, he wrote the obituary that appeared in the Post. I consider Bob a personal friend.)

Duffy based his assessment on a series of abominable renderings we'd commissioned from a local architect — made all the more hideous because (at Duffy's urging) we'd changed course midstream to make Gehry the purported architect, rather than our initial choice, the eccentric Daniel Libeskind. The RFT's newly minted arts writer extolled the design's fishlike form and hailed the fictional Gehry plan as "bold, courageous and eager to involve itself in the city with dynamism and good humor."

The day after the story appeared, Duffy checked in via e-mail to say it looked "great" and to ask how it was being received. But between that evening and the next, he had a change of heart. Friday night he wrote again, this time to say:

"Having my name associated with the hoax is likely to damage the reputation I've built as a reliable, serious journalist over a long career. As you'll remember, I expressed discomfort to you about participating in the Baseball Village project, particularly in regard to having my byline on the sidebar.

"Therefore, please accept this e-mail as my formal and immediate conclusion to my association with the RFT."

I thought he was joking. He wasn't.

These days, of course, Duffy is busy preparing to launch Platform, an online-only local news publication that's being put together by former Post-Dispatch writers and editors. He says they're working on bankrolling the project. The name Emily Pulitzer comes to mind, but Duffy says rumors to that effect aren't true, and that she hasn't been asked.

On the topic of Web sites, the third element that made up our Ballpark Village story was www.ballparkvillage.com. Like the e-mails and the architectural drawings (both of which were posted there), it contributed an element of realism.

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