(gentle music) - [Jim] Getting the Loop Trolley running again?

Check.

Getting people to ride it?

Well, that's a work in progress.

- I think we need to think about the trolley a little bit differently.

- [Jim] How Loop business owners are adding value to the free ride.

- We're back here in the warehouse.

We have boxes of clay.

- [Jim] His creations start in his South City studio.

But Kahlil Robert Irving's evocative sculptures are being seen in museums far and wide.

And she lived for years out of the public eye in an alley residence north of downtown, and Harriet Scott's death went unnoticed, unreported.

But today, the wife of Dred Scott is getting far more attention and credit for who she was and what she did.

- She had the perseverance to keep going.

- Harriet was the real boss of Dred.

- [Jim] It's all next on "Living St.

Louis."

(soft music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music fades) - I'm Ruth Ezell.

It's not unusual for large-scale projects to experience a few unforeseen complications, but the Delmar Loop Trolley has had more stops and starts than most.

As Anne-Marie Berger shows us, with a little incentive, the trolley and the local businesses along the route will see a little boost this season.

(trolley rumbling) - [Anne-Marie] The Loop Trolley opened for the 2024 season at the end of April.

The season concludes on October 27th, just weeks shy of marking six years since it opened for passenger service.

- Welcome to the dedication of the Loop Trolley, a 2.2-mile fixed-track vintage trolley system that runs from the library in University City through the Delmar Loop- - [Anne-Marie] There was excitement that the Loop Trolley was finally going to be up and running.

For years, before it even hit the tracks, the trolley had already derailed a few times.

There were long construction delays and it went over budget.

After it started running, its expected ridership of almost 400,000 passengers per year failed to materialize.

Its operations were suspended by the end of 2019 and it has been the center of much debate and fodder.

- It's not running, it cost in excess, well in excess, of $50 million.

Why should we expect it to be air-conditioned?

It should have its own little reality show, in my opinion.

- I agree.

- [Anne-Marie] The trolley reopened in 2022 under Bi-State's operations.

It's now free to ride, but there are efforts to get people to ride the train and turn it into the little trolley that could.

You call yourself the cheerleader.

- The cheerleader.

- You're trying to change the narrative, (Samantha laughs) and it's to get people here to be excited about it.

- Yeah, so the Trolley Cheerleader, if you will.

I think we need to think about the trolley a little bit differently.

We have something that's really special.

- [Anne-Marie] This is Samantha Smugala.

She's the executive director of the East Loop Community Improvement District.

The district begins on Delmar at the city limits and runs to DeBaliviere.

- Our focus is economic vitality, safety and security, and maintenance.

- [Anne-Marie] The Loop Trolley Garage is located in her district, and the trolley runs straight through the district.

Smugala sees increasing ridership on the trolley as a tool to spark economic vitality throughout the entire Delmar Loop, a concept that was always the intention but failed.

Her idea?

If you offer incentives, they will ride.

- So the Trolley Passport is a website.

You can access the Passport through a QR code in the trolley.

It's password protected, so you have to ride the trolley to get the password.

And once you're on the site, you'll be opened up to a lot of different coupons, promotions from local businesses, entertainment venues, restaurants, shops.

- So it's a double.

It's support local businesses and get riders on the trolley.

- Right, so we're looking to incentivize people to come out to The Loop and ride the trolley, experience it.

A lot of people haven't ridden the trolley in St. Louis yet, so bringing some new riders on board to just have a good time and support the Delmar Loop.

- [Anne-Marie] And she might just be onto something.

- We lived in U.

City for, what, 43 years?

- Yeah.

- And so we were here before the trolley came and still have never been on it.

So we said, hey, it was on FOX 2 News or something that they were doing the promotion, and we said, okay, so that's why we're here.

We'll probably stop at the History Museum and look in there and then come back and get back here, go to The Loop and eat lunch.

- What would success mean to you?

What would show you that this effort to increase ridership work?

- Sure.

So what's great about the Trolley Passport is that I get all of the data on the backend.

So I can see who's scanning, how many times a coupon is redeemed, when it was redeemed, you know, it's all cell phone data, so we can see where that individual is from.

And we're starting at zero, I think that a successful year for us would just to be seen, you know, that these coupons are being used, and we can then use that data to make this program even better in the future.

15% off, 10% off, free drink with purchase of beans at Blueprint.

But here's the one that we're going to redeem, the buy one get one root beer.

- (laughs) Oh, God.

- Looks so good!

- Yes, yes, yes.

- Awesome.

- This is a hard day at work for me.

(Samantha laughs) - [Server] Oh yeah.

You gotta figure out how to get- - [Anne-Marie] What's the hardest part about your job, trying to get positive reactions to the trolley?

- Perfect.

- Oh, we got it!

- Redeemed.

- Great job.

- The hardest part, I think, is really just, you know, trying to create an open-mindedness, you know?

I think a lot of people have made their decision and they're kinda sticking to it, but the reality is the trolley's not going away.

So we do need to change the narrative and start to talk about the trolley in a different way and start to celebrate it because it really is a unique thing, as I mentioned before, that we have that not a lot of other cities have and can take advantage of.

- Next we have the story of a St. Louis artist and Washington University graduate who's made quite a name for himself in a fairly short period of time.

I got a chance to meet him and see one of his two solo exhibits running simultaneously at museums in Kansas and at his alma mater.

(soft music) The opening of "Kahlil Robert Irving: Archaeology of the Present" marked a full circle homecoming moment.

The internationally acclaimed artist, that's him in the middle, is a St. Louisan and a 2017 graduate of Washington University's Master of Fine Arts program.

Exhibit curator Meredith Malone of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

- During his MFA program, Kahlil was making incredible work.

He was already kinda getting renowned for his work in ceramics, and I think that this exhibition really just shows how he's continued in that vein, but expanded his practice through a variety of different media since his student work.

- [Ruth] Irving's layered ceramic sculptures explore the extent of what can be accomplished with clay that is fired and glazed.

The sculptures appear at first glance to have been excavated from the remains of an ancient civilization.

But a closer look reveals shapes more reflective of contemporary life.

Irving's work can be found in a number of distinguished museum and private collections, and he's exhibited in some of the world's most prestigious museums.

Among them, New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney.

It's quite an ascent for an artist who received his MFA a mere seven years ago.

Is it a little mind-boggling for you or?

- I mean, a lot of things, it shows, like, it shows that seven years is, like, not that long, but then it also, with how many things that have happened in the world in the last seven years, it shows that seven years can hold a lot of things.

- [Ruth] We visited Irving at his South St. Louis studio prior to the Kemper exhibit's opening.

There we saw one of his most recent sculptures, and to date the largest.

- This is made in four or five walls, and those walls hold the material as I build it from the bottom up.

So this started down here, and I started to add things, and that's how it came to be.

A lot of the work started in cardboard, cardboard boxes, 'cause the cardboard would absorb the water through the clay and it would slowly dry it out.

And then on the outside, it would start to have the impression of the cardboard surface.

- Oh, gotcha.

- You can feel it.

- Oh yeah!

- Yeah.

It feels like the corrugation.

- Sure does.

- Well, back here in the warehouse, we have boxes of clay, we have crates of sculptures, we have tiles that are being glazed, we have things being packed, we have the kilns over there.

We have sculptures, sculptures here that are being, like, sitting aside, being waited to be finished.

- [Ruth] Irving's expansive facility, which he purchased in 2020, totals close to 14,000 square feet.

And he needs that space to accommodate the depth and breadth of his various projects.

He worked with a theatrical scene painter to create this boulder made from foam.

His collaboration with a set designer resulted in this miniature landscape.

- It is a reconstruction of an area north of Kansas City called Platte City.

- [Ruth] It includes a smartphone mount for taking pictures.

- It's a way for the audience to interact with the artwork.

This isn't necessarily about them capturing that image necessarily.

It's about them, just the action of it.

- [Ruth] Platte City, along with the boulder, are part of another solo exhibit running simultaneously with the Kemper's.

That exhibit is at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas.

It's titled "AnticKS & MOdels + My theater to your eyes."

- At the end of AnticKS is KS.

The museum's in Kansas, but I'm from Missouri.

The installation is about 7,000 square feet with a series of different objects in three different rooms.

And then this, this will be the first picture you see when approaching the platform ramp in Kansas City.

- [Ruth] A platform ramp is also a feature of Irving's Kemper exhibit to make it more accessible for people with mobility issues.

In the case of three of the works, viewers are actually invited to touch them.

Other pieces are embedded in the platform or reached toward the ceiling or beckoned from a wall.

There's an excitement in experiencing the work of an exceptional artist whose journey is still in its early stages.

Even better, Kahlil Robert Irving, who could live and work anywhere in the world, chooses for now to remain right here in St. Louis.

- I have projects in Los Angeles coming up in 2025.

I have a video project in Hong Kong in the fall.

And from there, we'll just see where it goes.

(people chattering) - Police officers these days wear a lot of protective gear, but Leah Gullet's story is not about physical protection but about the need for helping cops deal with stress and other mental health issues that too often come with the job.

(pensive music) - [Leah] The St. Louis County Police Department has served its community through the most turbulent decades.

In the high-pressure career of law enforcement, the mental wellbeing of those who serve in this profession is often overlooked.

It's for this reason that in 2021, the St. Louis County Police Department announced the creation of a new Wellness Unit, and Lieutenant Scott Roach is one of the driving forces behind this.

In 1994, he began his career as a police officer in North County.

In 2011, he was promoted to sergeant and quickly saw a need of his officers that wasn't being met.

- I saw a side of our employees that I didn't realize existed, which is basically employees that need help, that needed general wellness help, some mental health assistance.

So I found myself teaching officers, especially the officers in my charge, how to use the EAP.

And once they started using it, they realized how effective it was and how helpful it was.

- [Leah] According to Health Psychology Research's study on mental health and public safety, first responders have twice the prevalence of PTSD and depression and are associated with a lower quality of life than the general population.

Lieutenant Roach was faced with this crisis in his everyday work.

After facilitating and attending a conference about wellness and law enforcement, he came across some inspiration that would help him cultivate this new unit.

- And one of the specific things that we talked about was how to make a notification of a horrible, horrible incident.

So, we call it the knock when we have to go to somebody's house, knock on their door, and give them the worst news they'll ever gonna hear in their life, which is, you know, maybe a loved one was killed in a crash or something like that.

And we talked about what kind of effect does that have on the officer that made that notification.

Because, again, people sometimes think we're robots and we can make that notification and get back in our car and go to dinner, and that's absolutely not true.

So we brought in an expert from the East Coast, from the Connecticut State Police, his name is Sergeant Troy Anderson, and he educated us on how we can better serve ourselves and stay resilient after making that sort of notification.

- Working in law enforcement requires not just physical strength, but a large mental capacity as well.

From traffic patrol to petty or violent crime, a lot of resilience is needed for officers to serve their communities.

But nothing would prepare St. Louis Police for what they would face in the summer of 2014.

On August 9th, civil unrest began after the officer-involved shooting death of Mike Brown in the St. Louis County town called Ferguson.

- Well, that morning, we were at an incident in South County, I don't remember what it was.

It was either a barricaded subject or something that our tactical operations unit was dealing with.

Well, then later that day, we get the call that something had happened in Ferguson, and we didn't know what it was, and we just were told to be at a specific location.

We were there at a command post.

And that kind of, you know, led into, you know, I forget how many, 16 consecutive days or whatever it might be that we were on scene and, you know- - Yeah, - What you saw.

(people sobbing) (protestors yelling) - [Leah] Tensions grew thicker between everyone on the ground, both law enforcement and protestors.

But there were many officers on the front line whose mission was also to listen to the people and try their best to bridge the gap.

One of them was Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Lohr.

- I think what happened in 2014 in the city of Ferguson was really just kind of an eye-opening moment to address a lot of the societal issues that we've been neglecting to address.

It exposed a lot of the warts that we have in American society.

So we wanna talk about educational disparity, socioeconomic disparity, geographical disparity, racism.

Ferguson exposed those things.

And while a lot of the attention got thrust upon law enforcement because it was a law enforcement event, the reality is is the conversations that started because of that were much greater in nature.

And I think it ultimately has probably helped change the way that we view each other, it's probably helped improve our communities.

And again, none of these things change quickly, change takes time, and to have realistic expectations that we're making generational change, and that should be the long-term goal.

We tell officers, you know, understand the ripple effect that you have.

Every interaction has a ripple effect.

So when you meet one person, you have the ability to change that one person's life.

But understand that you have the ability to change a community too.

- [Leah] And according to Lieutenant Roach, the ability to change a community starts with self-care.

- We want you to be the best version of yourself.

As a citizen, I would want an officer coming to my house to investigate a crime to be the best version of themselves.

But we know that it's not 100% gonna, because life, right?

I mean, we all have something going on.

So we teach them how to be resilient, we teach our employees how to deal with mental health issues and how to navigate the resources that are available to them.

(soft music) - Our This Week in History segment with Jim Kirchherr is about something that happened 148 years ago, the death in St. Louis of a key figure in American history that went unnoticed by the general public.

And it would be a long time before Harriet Scott would get the attention and credit she deserved.

(typewriter clacking) (upbeat music) (soft music) - [Jim] Harriet Scott died in St. Louis on June 17th, 1876, for the most part, forgotten, her passing unacknowledged.

She'd never been a household name, not like her husband, Dred Scott.

But the Dred Scott case, the Dred Scott ruling, was just as much about Harriet Scott.

It took time, a lot of time, but she is no longer just a historic figure.

She's emerging as a living, breathing person, Lynne Jackson's great-great-grandmother.

- I think the important thing I wanna share with you about her is that she was a woman that had probably a whole lot of, mm, grit, I guess we could call it grit.

- [Jim] In a 2009 biography, "Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery's Frontier," legal scholar Lea VanderVelde helped fill in a lot of blanks in Harriet Scott's story.

- She had the perseverance to keep going when it looked like all was lost and at every turn.

- Is she the person who you think is holding the family together through all of this?

- Absolutely.

- [Jim] The family included two daughters, Eliza and Lizzie.

Legally, the status of enslaved children was tied not to their father but to their mother.

- And that's why she had filed a lawsuit the very same day with the very same lawyer that Dred did, to get the daughters free.

- Both their cases, which were eventually combined, hinged on their being brought to Fort Snelling on the frontier in what is now Minnesota, where they met and married.

This was the Northwest Territory, where slavery was outlawed, which they claimed made them free then and forever.

They won in the St. Louis County Courthouse.

But the case dragged on in appeals for 11 years until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against them and said African Americans, slave and free, could not be citizens and had no rights.

After the ruling, they were purchased by the Taylor family in St. Louis, who set them free.

Dred Scott was a famous man.

"Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper" put the entire family, Dred and Harriet and Eliza and Lizzie, on the cover of the national publication.

But it took some doing to convince them, or rather convince Harriet, to agree to let Dred sit for a portrait.

The article says Harriet, described as smart and tidy-looking, at first told the reporters to mind their own business and let Dred alone.

There were a lot of people who wanted to meet, interview, or take advantage of Dred Scott.

interview, or take advantage of Dred Scott.

Harriet becomes sort of the gatekeeper.

Would that be an accurate description?

Would that be an accurate description?

- Yeah, I think it would.

And we have that from two or three sources.

And Harriet said that they were offered a lot of money for Dred to go on tour.

Harriet didn't want Dred to go on tour.

She says that in part because there was still the possibility that he'd be kidnapped.

- Dred Scott worked for a time at a downtown hotel, officially as a porter, unofficially as a celebrity attraction.

But he was in ill health and died in 1858 at the age of 58 or 59.

He had lived as a free man for just a year and a half.

(gentle music) Harriet Scott was 20 years younger than her husband.

And after he died, she lived right around here with or near her daughters in what had been a crowded area north of downtown.

In an old city directory, you will find Harriet Scott, widow of Dred, colored, laundress.

The address?

An alley near Carr between 6th and 7th.

It might've looked something like this, when social workers years later were documenting St. Louis's rundown housing conditions.

She continued to work very hard as a laundress, a washerwoman, working just as hard as she always did as an enslaved person, but for herself.

- Now the wages are paid to her.

Now she can decide how she's going to spend her Sunday, how she's going to spend her Saturday night, what she's going to use the money for.

- [Jim] Harriet Scott would live to see the Civil War, the end of slavery, the passage of constitutional amendments giving her rights the Supreme Court denied.

The Dred Scott case was old news when she died in 1876, and it would take generations for her story to come to light.

Today, it is Dred and Harriet Scott who are acknowledged and honored.

Their stories are being researched and told by their descendants, like Lynne Jackson, who heads up the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation.

She was in Calvary Cemetery last year to unveil a new larger monument at Dred Scott's grave.

The family that freed him had him buried here.

- They've always told me he was the most asked for, or at least in the top three most asked for grave sites or at least in the top three most asked for grave sites in this cemetery that hosts 300,000 people.

- [Jim] But for a long time, Harriet Scott's grave site was unknown.

It took modern-day researchers to discover that she had been buried with one of her grandsons in the African American Greenwood Cemetery.

The family will keep her there.

Last year, there was finally a headstone for this strong-willed woman.

- Harriet was the real boss of Dred.

That family trait has continued on to this day.

The spirit of tenacity and the spirit of gumption and the spirit of can do, will do, must do comes through Harriet as far as we can tell, and we're grateful for that because in this day and age, we need something like that.

- [Jim] Downtown at the Civil Courts Building, there is now a memorial to the hundreds of other St. Louisans (people clapping) and their lawyers who sued for (people cheering) and often won their freedom.

(people clapping) But none was as famous as Dred Scott.

When he died in 1858, it was reported in "The New York Times," which called him worthy of honor, truly eminent.

It said the name Dred Scott would live on.

18 years later, Harriet's passing would be unreported by even the local press.

The public had simply lost track of Harriet Scott.

- So, at the end of her life, she was unknown, but I think that's what she preferred.

She had had her turn in the public eye, and I think she was happy to stay with her family and to live out a good life.

- [Jim] A life that came to an end 148 years ago this week in St. Louis history.

(soft music) (lively music) - And that's "Living St.

Louis."

You can reach out to us anytime at NinePBS.org/LSL I'm Ruth Ezell, thanks for joining us.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - [Narrator] "Living St. Louis" is funded in part by the Betsy & Thomas Patterson Foundation and the members of Nine PBS.