Kiener Plaza & The Runner
The history
The block between Broadway and Sixth, Market and Chestnut, laid out so that the Old Courthouse dome and the Arch line up behind the water. Harry J. Kiener was a St. Louis businessman who ran for the United States track team at the 1904 Olympics — held here, in Forest Park, the first Games outside Europe. He died in 1960 at eighty and left money in his will for a fountain with an athletic figure in it. His trustees went to Alexander Calder first. Kiener's will carried a five-year deadline, Calder could not be pinned down inside it, and the money would have lapsed, so they turned to the Lithuanian-born sculptor William Zorach, who gave them a bronze runner striding off a cresting wave. The model was a young man named Peter Rubinstein, later a rabbi in New York. The eastern half of the plaza opened in 1965 with the fountain at its centre and the runner facing west. The plaza closed in February 2016 and reopened in May 2017 after a rebuild that came with the Arch grounds work. At night the jets are lit and cycle through colour, and from the west rim you get the whole city in one frame: the fountain, the courthouse, and the Arch standing over both.
My photos
