Last week, 40 young urban leaders from around the country rendezvoused in St. Louis, Mo. with the Next American City staff and a handful of enthusiastic local boosters. The purpose was Next American Vanguard, NAC’s annual 40-under-40 conference.
We attended workshops in which we solved hypothetical traffic problems and geeked out over housing policy. We saw the skyline from both a private rooftop bee farm in Downtown and from a hotel’s rooftop bar on the Delmar Loop. A bus tour took us from some promising new developments in the gutted Old North neighborhood, to the urban forest where the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects used to stand, through the posh Central West End and the expansive Forest Park, and past the start-ups and street musicians along Cherokee Street. Those of us awake on Saturday morning got to tour the Trestle, a derelict elevated rail line planned to become the city’s own High Line.
Several times over the course of the conference, we hit up the remarkable City Museum, a former shoe factory and legacy of late St. Louis sculptor Bob Cassilly, to plunge 10 stories down a repurposed shoe slide.
Check out the slideshow below to see more from this year’s Vanguard.