This Weekend...

The wide range of events happening this weekend in the City of St. Louis represent the incredible diversity of the community as a whole, despite the problems and fragmentations we suffer.

The "May Fiesta" is a slightly delayed Cinco de Mayo scheduled for this Friday May 14 at Kiener Plaza. It is a prelude to the Greater St. Louis Hispanic Festival scheduled for August 13 to 15 at Memorial Plaza.

Also in downtown St. Louis is the ACT II Street Festival and Downtown Housing Tour, which will be on 10th Street between Olive and Locust, adjacent to the chain-link fencing around the Syndicate Trust Building. The tour is a self-guided tour with tickets priced at $10; the music festival is free. Both are ongoing Saturday and Sunday.

Just north of downtown, the Old North St. Louis House Tour starts off 10 am Saturday, across the street from Crown Candy Kitchen, and offers a self-guided tour of 10 houses in the up-and-coming but still affordable neighborhood north of downtown. Tickets are also $10.

On Sunday, you can travel a little further north to Natural Bridge between Union and Vandeventer, to watch the Annie Malone May Day Parade an annual celebration of pride for this institution and for North St. Louis.

Also on Sunday, is the Windermere Place House Tour, a peek into the homes on one of St. Louis' less prominent private streets, just off Union Blvd. in the Visitation Park neighborhood. The tour goes from 2 to 5, starting from West End Community Center. Tickets are $10.

Finally, as we get to the western reaches of the city, the Delmar Loop Street Fest "East Meets West" concludes this weekend, a celebration of the continuing growth of the success of the Delmar strip eastward.