There was a time in St. Louis history when taking a bath was a communal experience. Public bath houses were important features of turn-of-the-century cities where coal smoke filled the air, covering anyone who stepped outside. Those few St. Louisans lucky enough to own bathtubs had to repeatedly fill them using water brought in from outside and were usually forced to share the tub’s water with other members of the family.

Public Bath House #1 opened near Carr and 10th streets in 1907 and was the first of six bath houses that would dot the city. Bathers could choose tubs or showers and were expected to bring their own soap and towels.

St. Louisans flocked to the bath houses. About 500,000 people took a soak at Bath House #1 in its first eight years, and one located in Soulard recorded more than 230,000 visitors in its first year alone.

As technology advanced, the number of bath houses dwindled, but Bath House #6, the last to be built, did not stop operations until 1965. That building can still be seen at 1120 St. Louis Avenue.

As St. Louis grew in the mid-19th century, so too did the number of bodies needing burial. The cemeteries were then located along Jefferson Avenue, which was becoming valuable real estate near the western edge of the city. In 1849, a group of notable St. Louisans in the Rural Cemetery Association sponsored a common burial park in north St. Louis. They named the new rural cemetery Bellefontaine, the name of the old military road bordering the property that formerly led to Fort Bellefontaine.

It was the 14th great rural cemetery built for a major American city, and the first west of the Mississippi. Soon after, Archbishop Peter Richard Kenrick purchased a 323-acre plot of land just west of Bellefontaine to serve Catholics and named it Calvary.

The designs of Bellefontaine and Calvary cemeteries were part of an international movement to transform burial grounds into serene Victorian-style rural parks. The artistic, expressive burial monuments in quiet natural surroundings transformed cemeteries from morbid and gloomy to meditative and beautiful. Those interred at both cemeteries would be included on any “who’s who” list of St. Louis notables. Throughout the 20th century, both cemeteries were among the most visited sites in St. Louis. Today they remain beautiful outdoor museums, with priceless displays of memorial art and sculpture.

St. Louis was once known as Mound City, but it’s now hard to see why. Only one Native American mound remains in the city, and when most St. Louisans think of such mounds, they think of Cahokia. There was a time, however, when about 40 mounds dotted this side of the Mississippi River. The biggest of these was known as Big Mound.

Created by the Mississippian Indian culture between ad 900 and 1300, Big Mound was impossible to miss. At about 30 feet tall and 150 feet long, it rose above all else on the horizon.

Big Mound’s fate is a sad reminder of a less culturally respectful time. City administrators decided to level Big Mound to make way for factories, houses, and railroads in north St. Louis. In their haste to develop the area, work crews dismantled the mound without conducting any archaeological work, using the mound’s dirt and clay for backfill and bricks. Thomas Easterly, who captured many scenes of St. Louis life in the 1850s, created a few daguerreotype pictures of the ancient marvel’s shrinking size as it came down.

The only present-day clue to Big Mound’s existence is a small stone memorial at Broadway and Mound Street near its old location. Sugarloaf Mound in south St. Louis, the city’s only remaining mound, is currently preserved by the Osage Nation and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. 

If you wanted to have a boxing match, cockfight, or duel to the death, early St. Louis offered no better location than Bloody Island. Sitting in the middle of the Mississippi River just off the levee, Bloody Island was outside legal regulations and used often by the rough-and-tumble inhabitants of early 19th-century St. Louis.

In 1817, future Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton met his rival, Charles Lucas, for a highly publicized duel on Bloody Island. The men took ten paces and turned to fire; both were hit but neither killed. After their second meeting on Bloody Island, only Benton would walk away. They were not the first or last to duel there—Missouri would not outlaw dueling until 1822. It was said of St. Louis attorney John Scott that he “dispensed duels as casually as he had breakfast.”

Beginning in the late 1830s, engineering projects began to reshape the Mississippi River. By the time of the Civil War, these engineering projects merged Bloody Island with the Illinois shoreline, where today a rail yard sits atop its remnants.

When the Civil War broke out, St. Louisans were divided over which side to join. Battles between the Union and Confederate forces in the east had been raging with increasing ferocity during 1861, and tensions in St. Louis were mounting. The governor of Missouri at the time, Claiborne Fox Jackson, refused to respond to President Lincoln’s request for volunteer soldiers. Sensing the impending encroachment of Union forces in St. Louis, the privately pro-secessionist Governor Jackson ordered the militia into a state of alert. He chose an encampment just west of Grand Avenue for paramilitary minutemen to muster “maneuvers.” This site, known as Camp Jackson, became a source of considerable angst for pro-Union forces in St. Louis. 

When Union captain Nathaniel Lyon learned that some of the weaponry at Camp Jackson had actually been pirated by Confederate forces, he marched approximately 6,000 men to the camp. On May 10, 1861, he and his troops easily overwhelmed the state guard there, but an angry crowd hurled insults at Lyon’s men, many of whom were German volunteers. When someone fired at the volunteers, Lyon’s militia returned several volleys. The “Camp Jackson Affair” made national news—more than 30 dead and dozens wounded. Missouri had entered the war. About 115,000 Missourians fought on the Union side and 40,000 with the Confederates. St. Louisans remained conflicted about Missouri’s involvement in the Civil War and who was to blame for the Camp Jackson Affair.

Surrounded by parking lots and high rises, the lone house on the 1500 block of Locust Street looks like it was dropped there by mistake. The Campbell House has watched over this stretch of road since 1851, even as everything around it changed. It formerly anchored Lucas Place, built as St. Louis’s first “suburban” neighborhood for its wealthiest citizens.

St. Louis in the 1840s was a noisy, crowded, and often dangerous city of tightly packed buildings. Wealthy citizens looked for a way to escape the close row houses and congestion, and they found it in Lucas Place, located from 13th to 16th streets at the city’s edge. The Campbell House was the first mansion built on Lucas Place, but even it would appear small compared to some later castles.

Lucas Place became the model for the “private place,” a street set apart from the public that is controlled by its wealthy residents. Many private places would appear soon after in St. Louis, including Benton Place (1867), Westmoreland and Portland Places (1888), Compton Heights (1889), and dozens more.

Lucas Place began declining in the 1880s, and its mansions were turned into boardinghouses or torn down. When the last Campbell family member died in 1938, the Campbell House was the last Lucas Place home left standing. It became St. Louis’s first house museum in 1943.

Every St. Louisan seems to have “a friend of a friend” who once stumbled across a long-forgotten cavern hidden under the bustling city. Cave stories are a piece of St. Louisans’ shared folklore, but they are also an important part of our factual history. A secret world of caverns crisscrosses underneath the streets, parks, and homes of St. Louis, and they have been used in a number of imaginative and profitable ways.

The best-known use of St. Louis caves is as cool storage for lager beer in the mid-1800s. German brewers’ lager would spoil quickly in St. Louis’s often hot and humid weather, but a chilly cave made a perfect undisturbed refrigerator. Brewing giants Lemp and Anheuser-Busch both made use of the caves—St. Louis may never have become a beer capital of the world without them.

Caves were also used as bowling alleys, ice-skating rinks, mushroom farms, and wine cellars. Transformed into beer gardens (Uhrig’s Cave) and amusement parks (Cherokee Cave), caves offered heat-weary St. Louisans relief from brutal summer days. Caves were also used as clubhouses for school skipping, garbage dumps, gambling dens, and Prohibition-era illicit whiskey stills. Most famous are the legendary cave systems beneath Benton Park and Soulard, but caves also run beneath Hyde Park, Compton Heights, Market Street, Washington Avenue, and the Old Post Office.

Many a St. Louisan daydreamed away an afternoon on the green shores of Chouteau’s Pond. The curving, calm pool, named for Auguste Chouteau, who purchased it in between 1778 and 1779, was a much-loved recreation retreat for early St. Louisans. Native Americans camped on its banks, livestock drank, families fished, preachers baptized believers, and the whole town turned out for annual summertime fireworks. Cleaner and safer than the Mississippi River, the pond’s cool waters rippled just a short walk from the village, peacefully tucked away in rolling agricultural fields.

In the 1830s, town expansion saw those fields bought up for real-estate tracts. Factories soon surrounded Chouteau’s Pond, and the pond proved a convenient dumping ground for the rotting garbage of butcher shops, flour mills, and hide tanneries. By the mid-1840s the former “beautiful fairy lake” was a sinkhole of pollution.

When cholera struck St. Louis in 1849, killing nearly 10 percent of the city’s population, Chouteau’s Pond was one of many sources blamed. Local doctors demanded the pond be drained immediately, and it was declared a public nuisance. The land that was once covered by Chouteau’s Pond eventually made a perfect valley for Union Station’s rail yards.

In 1876, area voters authorized “the Great Divorce,” declaring that St. Louis City would become independent from St. Louis County. They had long existed as a single entity, but by the 1860s the city saw itself at odds with the county’s farms and small towns. St. Louis City still occupies the footprint decided in that vote.

The Great Divorce would prove disastrous. Three reunification attempts in 1925, 1930, and 1962 all failed, and plentiful, cheap suburban tracts in St. Louis County left the city with dwindling caretakers. St. Louis City’s 1950 population peak of 856,000 fell below 320,000 by 2010, a harrowing 62 percent loss. Outside of Virginia (where all cities are independent), St. Louis, Baltimore, and Carson City, Nevada, are the only three independent cities in the United States.

The city-county line has diminished cooperation between the city, which has faced economic challenges unforeseen in 1876, and the county’s 93 fractional governments. St. Louisans across the region often use the line to divide and define themselves. Recent years have included signs of city revitalization and increased talk of cross-border cooperation, but whether the city and county can ever truly reconcile is a question for the future. 

The nickname “River City” barely does justice to the amount of water flowing past St. Louis every single day. It comes from 13 states and two Canadian provinces. The confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, North America’s two largest, just north of St. Louis has drawn people to the fertile lands of the region for thousands of years.

Native American groups have occupied this strategic location for centuries. The Mississippian city of Cahokia, directly across the river from modern St. Louis, was larger than any European city at its population peak in the 1200s. When Europeans arrived in the 1600s, they immediately saw its trade potential and began settling the Mississippi Valley. St. Louis, founded as a fur-trading settlement, would use the confluence to become the fur-trading capital of America. Trappers would send their furs down the Missouri River directly to St. Louis.

The abundant lands around the confluence are natural wonders also, hosting thousands of plant and animal species. Nearly 40 percent of North American waterfowl travel along the Mississippi River Flyway migration route each year, and in wintertime bald eagles flock to the area. The Confluence Conservation Area continues to work to ensure the future of the precise spot where the “Mighty Mississippi” and the “Big Muddy Missouri” meet.

The history of the Delmar Loop has followed a circular route not unlike the streetcar line that gave it its name.

In the early 1900s, packed Delmar streetcars cruising out from the city would make a giant turn and “loop around” to carry new passengers back into the city. The Delmar Loop’s earliest attractions included Delmar Gardens Amusement Park and its gravity-defying roller coasters, as well as the Delmar Racetrack. St. Louisans spent their time strolling past Delmar Boulevard’s many shops, restaurants, and theaters. By 1914, the businesses had become so profitable that the amusement park and racetrack were torn down and replaced by high-end shops and restaurants.

For the first half of the 20th century the Loop remained an exciting center of social life, but by the early 1960s the Loop was falling out of fashion. The area’s shops and restaurants followed residents farther out to the suburbs, and the streetcars stopped running. For the first time in 50 years, the Loop was quiet, more often frequented by troublemakers than tourists.

But the area started a new chapter in 1972 when local restaurateur Joe Edwards and several other business owners began reopening shops and restaurants in the Loop. By the late 1980s, the Loop was home to dozens of restaurants, shops, and attractions, and in the early 1990s added the St. Louis Walk of Fame to its sidewalks. In 2007, the Delmar Loop was named one of “the 10 Greatest Streets in America.” 

East St. Louis lives as much in the collective imagination of the city and country as it does in history or reality. Repeatedly named the "Most Dangerous City" in the United States, East St. Louis has largely become a place to be feared by those outside its borders. But that is just part of its story.

East St. Louis once believed it was the superior of the two cities named St. Louis and boasted an industrial might that was envied by cities on both sides of the river. In 1959, it was named an All-America City by the National Civic League. It has also served as an incubator for African American artists including Chuck Berry, Miles Davis, and Katherine Dunham.

Race, however, has also played a dividing—and sometimes deadly—role in the city’s history. A white-on-black riot in 1917 resulted in between 40 and 200 deaths. The city’s population is now about 98 percent African American, and while its fate is tied to complex post–World War II industrial decline, many use that statistic either as an explanation of the decline or as an explanation of the country’s lack of concern about the city's fate.

Simple stories of East St. Louis are often told, and countless St. Louisans have grown up with a fear of ending up on that side of the river. But the city’s past, as well as its present and future, are more complex—and more interesting—than these simple stories allow.   

The 1904 World’s Fair in Forest Park would bring nations to St. Louis, but for nearly half a century St. Louisans had already been holding fairs of their own. Around 1855, the St. Louis Agricultural and Mechanical Association began hosting the annual St. Louis Exposition Fair. On 50 acres of land at Grand Avenue and the Natural Bridge Plank Road, fairgoers attended horse races, livestock shows, invention and mechanical displays, and performances at the country’s largest amphitheater with more than 12,000 seats.

In the 1880s the exposition saw nearly 40,000 daily visitors. Two U.S. presidents—Ulysses S. Grant and Grover Cleveland—were said to have visited the nationally acclaimed event. Despite its popularity, the fairgrounds hosted its last St. Louis Exposition Fair in 1902 as attention shifted to plans for the 1904 World’s Fair in Forest Park. The gates to the Bear Pit are the only remaining structure from the Exposition Fairs, once the liveliest events in the city.

The fairgrounds were sold to the city and renovated into Fairgrounds Park in 1908. The amphitheater was transformed into the nation’s first municipal swimming pool. In June 1949, racial tensions boiled over into riots when the city desegregated its facilities and opened the pool to black swimmers. Attendance plummeted after the riots, and the park was never again the destination that it had once been, but it continues to be a neighborhood park to many St. Louisans. 

What defines “historic significance?” Does it apply to an unadorned concrete disc whose former incarnations were a gas station and fast food taco dive? In summer 2011, St. Louisans decided it did. The midcentury building at 212 S. Grand (lovingly dubbed “the Flying Saucer”) began life as a Phillips 66 automotive service station, its 120-foot cantilevered concrete roof a streetside attraction.

When a June 2011 plan proposed demolition to make way for a strip mall, protesters quickly assembled under its canopy, brandishing signs declaring “Save our saucer!” The Board of Aldermen deferred the bill, and the structure’s future teetered in uncertainty. After months of debate about how the structure’s tiny footprint and lack of parking could be repurposed, a plan was put forward for the building to be split between a Starbucks café and a Chipotle restaurant. On September 28, 2012, morning sunlight flooded the world’s only “Starbucks in a spaceship.”

The National Trust for Historic Preservation named it among “Ten Remarkable Preservation Wins of 2012,” and it was moved from the list of the Landmarks Association of St. Louis’s 2011 Most Endangered Buildings to the 2013 Most Enhanced Buildings. The Flying Saucer’s strong defense expands the definition of historical significance as we examine the role of unique, irreplaceable buildings in vibrant cities. 

50,000: spectators at the Forest Park dedication ceremony on June 24, 1876. They were told, “there will be no notice put up—Keep Off the Grass.”

1,371: acres—larger than Central Park in New York City, Grant Park in Chicago, and Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

20,000,000: estimated number of visitors who came to the 1904 World’s Fair, held on the western portion of the park.

400,000: people who packed Art Hill for the Pageant and Masque, an outdoor play celebrating the city’s 150th anniversary. Its success inspired the creation of the Muny.

6,000+: children who donated pennies to bring an elephant to the Saint Louis Zoo in 1916.

32,000: pounds of marble in the Thomas Jefferson statue at the Missouri History Museum.

33,000: pieces in the Saint Louis Art Museum collections.

9,000+: stars featured in the McDonnell Planetarium show at the Saint Louis Science Center.

18,000+: trees.

12,000,000+: annual visitors to Forest Park today. There’s still no notice to keep off the grass.

One thing that can’t be quantified is how much the park has meant to St. Louisans and visitors from near and far. Since its dedication in 1876, it has been home to celebrations big and small; to first kisses and weddings; to vigorous exercise and lazy naps in the shade; to spring flowers, scorching summer heat, walks on fallen leaves, and epic sled runs. New memories are being added every day, ensuring that the park will remain the city’s crown jewel for years to come.

Some St. Louis places claim significance simply by being the “first” located west of the Mississippi River. In Fort Bellefontaine’s case, the distinction matters, and matters a great deal. It was the first United States military installation west of the Mississippi River. Located on a strategic site near where the Missouri River meets the Mississippi, 15 miles north of downtown St. Louis, it was initially a Spanish outpost meant to protect New Spain’s interests as an intense imperial struggle for control of North America raged in the late 18th century. With claims contested by various indigenous groups, as well as rivaling European powers, the land was eventually sold to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

In 1805, the U.S. military created a fort on the site, eager to protect its new western border from continued English and Native American challenges, as well as increasing fears of a slave rebellion at home. Many of these fears never materialized, and by 1826, a new installation at Jefferson Barracks, located south of St. Louis, would become the key regional military outpost. Fort Bellefontaine’s replacement is still the oldest operating military installation west of the Mississippi. Meanwhile, remnants of the original Fort Bellefontaine are still visible on the landscape, monitoring the northern entrance to St. Louis as they have for centuries.

In the summer of 1904, thousands of fans and hundreds of elite athletes gathered at Francis Field for the first Olympic Games ever held in the United States. Up to 19,000 spectators could watch archery, weightlifting, cycling, gymnastics, and even tug of war from the stands.

Only the third Games of the modern era, the 1904 Olympics at St. Louis had many complications. The Games were often overshadowed by the concurrent 1904 World’s Fair. Only 12 countries sent athletes, and many of the events were poorly organized. Most widely remembered was the marathon. Fans roared as American Frederick Lorz raced into Francis Field to claim the gold medal, only to find out that he had covered nearly half the distance in a car.

The legacy of the 1904 Olympics was further tarnished by the “Anthropology Days.” Also held at Francis Field, the Anthropology Days had indigenous peoples from the World’s Fair compete against one another in Western sports in which they had no training. The Days were claimed to be a “science experiment” as their results were compared against the results of white athletes.

Despite the controversies and complications, Francis Field still holds an important place in Olympic history. After the Olympics, Francis Field was given to Washington University in St. Louis, and it still serves the university’s soccer, football, and track teams.

The buildings along Washington Avenue have always brought thousands of people to the street. Where they now come for nightclubs, cigar lounges, and steakhouses, they used to come for feather-pinned hats, Buster Brown shoes, and Rabbit Brand jeans. Every garment type imaginable was made in the manufacturing warehouses stretching down Washington Avenue for nearly 20 blocks. These “castles of commerce” housed thousands of workers and propelled the St. Louis economy.

Garment manufacturing in St. Louis became one of the first employment opportunities widely available to women, and it would be important in early women’s rights struggles. Tired of long days in dangerous working conditions, a 1909 strike led by the all-female Local 67 would last 25 months before successfully negotiating shorter hours, higher pay, and tighter safety regulations.

In the first decade of the 1900s, garment production was a massive portion of St. Louis’s economy, nearly equaling the sales volume of industrial manufacturing. Substantial production would continue through the 1940s, but suburban sprawl’s effects on urban areas would see most downtown production end by the 1960s. Since the 1980s, Washington Avenue’s spacious, well-lit buildings have been transformed into one of the city’s hottest streets, offering both residential living and myriad nightlife options. It remains one of St. Louis’s great revitalization success stories.

“You just had to be there.…”

This is what you often hear when you ask people to describe the magic of Gaslight Square in the early 1960s. They find it difficult to put into words exactly what made this eclectic two-block stretch of art studios, bars, restaurants, and small theaters near the intersection of Olive and Boyle a magnet for entertainers and St. Louisans looking for a good time. Walking down the gas-lamp-lit street, the 20,000 people there on average weekend nights could hear the jazz of Miles Davis, the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, or the comedy of the Smothers Brothers. Upscale dining establishments serving the finest French cuisine existed comfortably next door to coffee shops and burger joints.

Unfortunately, the good times of the Square were short lived. By the late 1960s, crime and fear of crime made the area a less desirable hangout. Those fears mixed with suburban flight were too much for Gaslight Square to overcome. By 1972, the bars that had made the square so special were gone. Eventually, all of the buildings were demolished. Today, condominiums and houses stand on the old site of legendary clubs. Gaslight Square’s flame may have died quickly, but it still burns brightly in St. Louisans’ memories. 

It seems impossible to imagine anything but the Gateway Arch standing in front of St. Louis, but it was just one of 172 design options to come out of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial’s 1947 architectural competition. With it, St. Louis would gain a timeless, internationally recognized icon. It is a symbol of pioneering Americans, standing on the same spot where 200 years earlier French pioneers founded the tiny settlement of St. Louis.

In 1764, 14-year-old Auguste Chouteau stepped onto the muddy western bank of the Mississippi River to construct a fur-trading outpost for Pierre Laclède. Laclède christened it St. Louis after 13th-century king Louis IX. Three blocks wide and nineteen blocks long, the settlement occupied the same grounds where the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial now stands. That small settlement would grow into a dense area of riverfront businesses and residences, but a push for land clearance in the 1930s erased almost all signs of the settlement or what it had become. The Old Cathedral (built in 1834) is now the only evidence of St. Louis’s original footprint, as the rest was covered over with thousands of tons of fill dirt.

The timeless, gigantic portal of Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch draws millions to the same riverside slope where Lewis and Clark brought back wonders from the American West, and where thousands once lived and worked. Its simple shape carries a complex, fascinating story of loss and renewal, of the past and the future.

In the 1920s and 1930s, a blinding white light glowed at the center of St. Louis’s nightlife—the Grand White Way. Located on Grand Avenue between Delmar and Lindell, this arts and theater district once boasted nine massive theaters and ornate movie houses. The largest of these was the Fox Theatre, which was the second-largest movie house in the country when it opened in 1929. St. Louisans could walk or take the streetcar to one of the many restaurants or cafes in the area after seeing a show.

But no show goes on forever. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the bright lights of the Grand White Way dimmed. St. Louisans increasingly moved to the suburbs and preferred theaters closer to home. Many of the old theaters were torn down. But, in recent years, some of the old lights of the Grand White Way have flickered back to life. The two remaining theaters—the Fox and the St. Louis (now Powell Symphony Hall)—were renovated and reopened. The lights may not be as bright, but St. Louisans are coming back to the Grand White Way. 

At the turn of the 20th century, the Central West End became the ultimate destination for St. Louis’s elite. They would use the popular “City Beautiful” design philosophies in the neighborhoods they built. The City Beautiful movement used monumental urban planning and classical architectural styles to create social order and civic pride, in contrast to St. Louis’s aged and crowded inner sections.

“Holy Corners,” at N. Kingshighway and Washington, is the best example of this City Beautiful planning. This intersection comprises three Protestant churches, a Jewish synagogue, a Masonic temple, an athletic club, and a residential hotel. Together, the seven individual structures contain some of the city’s finest early 20th-century architecture, and one is greeted by classical columns and monumental stairways from every approach.

The western movement of St. Louis’s upper class was partially responsible for this architectural marvel. Four of Holy Corners’ institutions had relocated from “Piety Hill” near Jefferson Avenue, which once boasted opulence but had seen a downturn with the building of Union Station. Six different St. Louis architecture firms designed the buildings at Holy Corners, but exquisite materials, refined style, and coordinated street setbacks make them all seem connected.

Maybe there’s a certain smell you get when you walk in the door, or a certain sound the house makes in its quietest hours. Maybe it’s simply the feeling of being surrounded by loved ones, or of being left alone to your thoughts. Maybe it’s the sense of rest when you’re there, the ease with which you slip into some comfy clothes and curl up with a pet or a warm cup of coffee. It’s the unmistakable feeling of being at “home.”

Home might be a surprising candidate for a list of St. Louis’s most historic places, but it just may be the most important of all places. Sure, it might lack the symbolism or biographical power of a place like the Old Courthouse or the Arch grounds, but home is undeniably where some of our most important memories and experiences take place. The city’s landscape and history complement and lend significance to what happens there, but it’s at home where we often sort out what it all means. Home, wherever it might be, is where our stories begin. 

Among the swarms of immigrants that flocked to St. Louis in the late 1800s, it is easy to forget that not all came from Europe. For over a century the center of St. Louis’s Chinese community was Hop Alley, a tight corridor of boardinghouses, hand laundries, and tea shops stretching between Market and Walnut from 7th to 8th streets. Most Hop Alley residents were common laborers raising large families on little pay. The primary livelihood was the hand laundry, requiring endless backbreaking work but little start-up capital. Chinese women worked at home or managed boardinghouses where they cooked, cleaned, and mended for up to a dozen men.

Hop Alley gave Chinese immigrants a community anchor and support system, while it gave outsiders a target of curiosity, suspicion, and rumor. To non-Chinese, Hop Alley was one of St. Louis’s most threatening and mysterious places. The Chinese were highly distrusted, as their culture was considered “unassimilable” and only useful for peculiar entertainment.

When multiple land-clearance projects swept across downtown in the 1960s, Hop Alley was declared just another “blighted” spot needing removal. Citing eminent domain, the Civic Center Redevelopment Corporation condemned Hop Alley. In August 1966, the former center of the Chinese community in St. Louis became a surface-level parking lot for Busch Memorial Stadium. 

Love it or hate it, St. Louis–style pizza means a cracker-thin crust, covered with creamy, melted provel cheese and cut into squares. Outsiders may say it pales in comparison to the Chicago-style deep dish or the New York–style slice, but many St. Louisans are enthusiastic lovers. Imo’s Pizza, the symbol of St. Louis–style pizza, started in 1964, when Ed and Margie Imo opened their first pizza parlor at Thurman and Shaw avenues in the Shaw neighborhood of south St. Louis.

Having little experience in the restaurant business, Ed Imo worked as a tile setter by day. At night he would become a pizza chef, while Margie answered the phone and made salads. The first Imo’s featured none of the commercial-grade, shining appliances seen behind the counter today, as Ed and Margie operated with a used oven, two refrigerators, and a pizza stove purchased for $75. They used an old tackle box for a cash register.

Residents especially loved Imo’s dinnertime home delivery. The concept caught on quickly, and within nine months of opening their first store, they opened a second location. Demand was so high that by 1985, they owned 30 stores and opened the business to franchisers. Today, Imo’s has more than 90 locations throughout the St. Louis region.

In the 1890s, St. Louis schools were in bad shape. Many of the schools were three-story brick cubes with poor ventilation. The classrooms were dark, dank, and crowded—many didn’t even have windows. Locals thought of the schools as prisons.

To solve this problem, the school board turned to local architect William B. Ittner, who had developed what he called an “open plan” for school design. This plan would revolutionize St. Louis—and American—education. It stressed that each classroom have windows for natural light and air, and that each school have a gymnasium or auditorium for school and community gatherings. Ittner’s designs also called for grand exteriors of intricate brickwork and picturesque groundskeeping to make schools as inviting to children as possible.

Over the next 17 years, Ittner designed 50 schools in and around St. Louis, including Soldan, Sumner, Central, and McKinley. They earned national praise from architects and educators alike. Eventually, school districts around the nation began asking Ittner to design buildings for them, and in 1915 he left the school board to open an architectural firm that specialized in school design. At the time of his death in 1936, Ittner had designed over 500 schools nationwide. Today, 48 Ittner schools are still standing in St. Louis, and 13 are on the National Register of Historic Places. 

The employment discrimination protests at Jefferson Bank had been going for two days when nine protesters, including St. Louis alderman and future congressman William Clay, were arrested. Their sentences ranged from 60 to 270 days, but instead of slowing the demonstration, this event fueled the fire. Their actions ignited the largest civil rights struggle in St. Louis history, one that would see violent clashes, more arrests, and hundreds of protesters demanding equality.

CORE (the Committee on Racial Equality; later known as the Congress of Racial Equality) organized the August 1963 protest to tackle the problem of job inequities. Jefferson Bank, whose record on hiring was no worse than most businesses, adamantly refused to even consider employing African Americans in jobs other than menial positions. During the course of the protest, an estimated 500 people were arrested and 19 movement activists were singled out as examples, given unusually lengthy sentences and heavy fines.

The bank eventually relented by hiring five black tellers in March of the following year. But the legal battle to vacate the sentences dragged on for four years. In the process, Jefferson Bank became a rallying point for demonstrators and a potent symbol of racial injustice. The Jefferson Bank protest was a milestone. Movement leaders believe that it led to increased opportunities, as well as signaling a shift in strategies, tactics, and mood.

KMOX

For much of the 20th century, no matter where you were in the United States, your radio dial could always turn to the voice of St. Louis—KMOX. Located at 1120 AM, KMOX began as the brainchild of several St. Louis businessmen who felt that the city needed a radio superstation. On December 24, 1925, KMOX sent out its first broadcasts from its Kirkwood station. The station proved so popular that CBS bought it in 1929. During radio’s golden age of the 1930s, KMOX became one of CBS’s flagship stations and began broadcasting on a frequency that could be heard as far away as Antarctica.

And people did tune in. From California to Maine, from New Zealand to South Africa, listeners thrilled to hear the station report on such things as Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic and the jubilant reopening of the Anheuser-Busch plant following the end of Prohibition.

The station also had outstanding sports coverage, launching the careers of such luminaries as Jack Buck and Harry Caray, while also helping the Cardinals cultivate one of the largest fan bases in the nation. Today, KMOX does not broadcast as powerful a signal, but it remains an important place for many St. Louisans to get their news, sports, and weather. 

An old horseracing track nestled among northwest St. Louis County farmlands provided the perfect spot for balloon launches in the early 20th century. That spot would become the Kinloch Airfield and later the St. Louis Flying Field before becoming the place where most of us now go to arrive in or depart from the city by plane.

The year 1910 was one of the most exciting in the airfield’s history. Thomas Benoist became the first St. Louisan to fly an airplane there in September of that year. And in October, the field hosted the International Aeronautic Tournament, which drew thousands of spectators from around the country to see competitions, displays, and stunts. One of those spectators was Theodore Roosevelt, and when he agreed to a ride with pilot Archibald Hoxsey, he became the first U.S. president to fly in a plane.

The Aero Club of St. Louis expanded and renamed Kinloch the St. Louis Flying Field in 1920, and Albert Bond Lambert purchased it in 1925. Three years later, he sold it to the city of St. Louis, and it became Lambert Field, the first municipally owned airport in the United States.

Lambert Field was a magnet for the World War II military manufacturing of Curtiss-Wright, Robertson, and the McDonnell Aircraft Company. In 1956, Minoru Yamasaki would grace Lambert Field with an iconic four-domed terminal that revolutionized airport design, becoming the direct influence for New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and Paris–Charles de Gaulle Airport. Once the hub of Trans World Airlines and the debated potential center of a Chinese cargo hub today, Lambert–St. Louis International Airport is vital to America’s aviation history. 

Cities tend to erase their darkest secrets. On the grounds of Busch Stadium, at the corner of Broadway and Clark, used to stand Bernard M. Lynch’s “slave pen,” what some St. Louis residents dubbed the “Hotel de Lynch.” Bernard Lynch and Corbin Thompson, the city’s most powerful slave traffickers, often ran advertisements for their services in local papers and directories before the Civil War.

In the “pen,” enslaved men and women, adults and children, were shackled and held prior to being sold. A complex system of windows, bolts, locks, and chains ensured nobody could escape. The slaves would be sold at auctions, including ones at the Old Courthouse, and would often be taken to other parts of Missouri or farther down the Mississippi River.

For Lynch and Thompson, the work won them few friends and much hatred, but these resentments were often deeply hypocritical. Many white antebellum St. Louisans recognized that slavery was the backbone of the economy before the Civil War. Loathsome as they claimed to find Lynch’s line of employment, most whites knew it benefited them somehow.

In 1963, one hundred years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, St. Louis planners at last destroyed the physical remnants of the site. 

Organizers of the Mercantile Library hoped the institution would introduce St. Louis citizens to literary greats and would keep area youth on the straight and narrow. The library, established in 1846, would be the place "where young men could pass their evenings agreeably and profitably, and thus be protected from the temptations to folly.”

The oldest library west of the Mississippi River, the Mercantile Library was originally located at Pine and Main streets but moved to the corner of Broadway and Locust in 1854. That building included a 2,000-seat auditorium, the largest such space in St. Louis and the site where Missouri voted to stay in the Union in 1861 and to abolish slavery in 1865.

The Mercantile Library became the one-stop location for St. Louis’s entertainment, learning, and cultural needs. Lecturers at the Mercantile Library included Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The St. Louis Symphony performed its first concerts there. A young Joseph Pulitzer used the library to learn the English language, law, and rules of chess.

Once the St. Louis Public Library became free of charge in 1893, the Mercantile shifted its focus to collecting major historical collections and artworks. The Mercantile moved to the University of Missouri–St. Louis in the 1990s, where it houses remarkable collections of art and manuscripts documenting the history of St. Louis and the West. 

Mill Creek Valley was home to 20,000 residents and 800 businesses in 1959, when it was officially declared a slum to be acquired and demolished by the City of St. Louis. About 95 percent of its residents were black. What civic leaders referred to as an “urban renewal project,” the NAACP labeled a “Negro removal project.”

Stretching for more than 450 acres across midtown St. Louis, Mill Creek Valley was the site of many important buildings. The Booker T. Washington Theatre was one of the nation’s first theaters built and operated by blacks. The People’s Hospital on Pine Street was the only place in the city where black physicians could treat private patients. The People’s Finance Building was the first commercial building in the country built entirely by African Americans. All would be demolished.

The Mill Creek Valley slum clearance was one of largest urban renewal projects ever sponsored by the federal government. The buildings fell quickly beginning in 1959, with bulldozers making quick work of “the city’s number one eyesore.” The bare land gained the nickname “Hiroshima Flats.”

The Mill Creek Redevelopment Project attempted to bring new life to an increasingly impoverished and crime-ridden area, but the expected interest never materialized. The idea of “starting over” through land clearance never solved the problems of urban deterioration. The empty land of Mill Creek Valley has now been covered by Saint Louis University’s sports fields, Harris-Stowe State University’s campus, and Interstate 64.

Organic wasn’t always a special designation. In 1883, a St. Louis family named the Muellers first acquired and began farming land organically in present-day Ferguson. At the time, nearly everyone living in St. Louis County grew at least some of their own food, but as the urban area expanded and more and more land was bought for buildings, families like the Muellers were put under increasing pressure.

Al and Caroline Mueller, descendants of the original owners, insisted on keeping the farm intact and organic. Between the time Al inherited the farm in the 1930s and Caroline’s death in 2010, they never used synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or other non-natural materials.

The Mueller Farm has now begun a new chapter that likely would have seemed unthinkable in 1883. It is run by EarthDance, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the organic farm and using it to educate a new generation of growers. The farm continues to operate much as it always has, but a large part of its mission is to now reintroduce people to the places their food comes from through tours, camps, and apprenticeships. 

Some buildings can tell the entire story of a nation. The Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis is such a building. A courthouse of some form or another has been on the grounds at 4th and Market streets since 1828, but the land itself once belonged to some of the city’s founders, who hoped it would one day be used in the service of the city.

The building arose and took shape along with the young republic, becoming the site where decisions famous and infamous were argued, including a number of landmark citizenship and civil rights cases. Most notable was the freedom suit brought by Dred and Harriet Scott. That suit resulted in the landmark decision of Scott v. Sandford in 1857, the Supreme Court ruling that African Americans were not citizens and leading the country closer to Civil War.  

Over the years, the Old Courthouse became a symbol for repeated challenges to inequality, including an important 1870s case involving suffragist Virginia Minor and the struggle to ensure women’s right to vote. After need for a larger space led St. Louis to find a new location for its courthouse, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order that the Old Courthouse be declared a national monument. It remains an important landmark to this day. 

For more than three decades the center of African American political, social, and commercial life was the People’s Finance Building, located on the corner of Jefferson and Market in Mill Creek Valley.

According to the St. Louis Argus, People’s Finance was the first commercial building in the United States built entirely by African Americans.It had its origins in the ambitions of seven prominent black business and professional men who in 1923 formed People’s Finance Corporation, billed as the “largest finance company among Negroes in the world.”

In 1925, the seven laid plans to erect a building and solicited community stockholders to raise funds. When completed a year later, the stately construction attracted a crowd of more than 5,000 to the formal opening, including dignitaries from around the country. For African Americans, People’s Finance was a “race enterprise” representing the fulfillment of black aspirations and a monument to black achievement.

With 81 offices, an assembly hall, a rooftop garden, and seven stores, the five-story building bustled with activity. Dubbed “the Hub,” it housed many of the vital voices representing the city’s black population including the St. Louis American newspaper, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and the local March on Washington Movement. It was demolished in 1959 with the rest of Mill Creek Valley in the name of “progress.”

A “living display” was what organizers called 1,100 indigenous Filipinos housed on 47 acres of artificial villages, one of the most popular attractions offered at the 1904 World’s Fair. Thousands flocked to witness the Philippine Reservation and be scandalized by the “peculiar,” shocking habits of an unknown culture. The Philippine Islands had become a United States colony after the 1898 Treaty of Paris, and the U.S. government used the World’s Fair to advertise its new possession.

The Philippine Reservation was created to demonstrate that Filipino peoples were doomed without U.S. leadership, while simultaneously advertising the untapped economic wealth of the islands. Ten Filipino groups were organized by “stages of mankind,” from most primitive (the Negrito pygmy tribe) to most advanced (the “Christianized” city of Manila). By portraying Filipinos as barbaric primitives who were also capable of civilized behavior, officials hoped to gather support for continued colonization efforts. The Philippines’ rich precious metal, forestry, and coal resources were advertised to potential investors who might open factories.

This justification of western expansionism as a noble responsibility was summed up by President Theodore Roosevelt: “It is our duty toward the people living in barbarism to see that they are freed from their chains.” The Philippine Reservation demonstrated the cross-global interactions possible in the industrialized world, as well as the dark exploitation this freedom often carried. It’s also a reminder that the 1904 World’s Fair was much more complex than many of today’s romantic accounts acknowledge. 

Just the name “Pruitt-Igoe” is enough to get anyone who was alive during its brief existence talking. Located over 57 acres at Jefferson and Cass avenues, the 33 Pruitt-Igoe 11-story towers held more than 2,800 apartments. The development began life as an attractive vision of public housing’s possibilities, but by the late 1960s its crime and poverty were internationally famous.

Occupancy fell with each passing year, underscoring a lack of maintenance funds. Vandalism rose, and the broken buildings went forever unfixed. The buildings’ gigantic size meant the line between “resident” and “intruder” was endlessly blurred. Government cost cutting, racism, and expressionless architecture were all blamed for its failure.

The public housing system was meant to “modernize” urban living in the post–World War II era, but American cities were rapidly changing. As cheap suburban homes were just a short car ride away from downtown problems, many abandoned the city. Those who couldn’t afford to leave were stuck, and public housing’s meager resources offered them little hope.

Pruitt-Igoe’s demolition came less than 20 years after its 1956 opening. The startling image of its towers tumbling into dust is a permanent symbol in American memory. Its former setting has since returned to nature as a giant forest of native Missouri species. The site’s future remains uncertain, but interest in its stories, secrets, and future possibilities is higher than ever.

Looking at what now often appears to be a nearly dry concrete drainway, it’s hard to imagine the River des Peres as the wild and powerful waterway it once was. A short-lived settlement created near its mouth by a group of French Jesuits in 1700 gave the river its name, “River of the Fathers.” It was the first known European settlement on what is now Missouri soil.

The River des Peres ran from the southern edge of St. Louis to Forest Park until the 1930s. It was long used as a dumping ground as St. Louis expanded in the 19th century, and it would regularly flood the area with polluted, destructive water. By the 1904 World’s Fair it was so dirty that fair officials had it partially buried in wooden channels to avoid embarrassment.

River des Peres floods would strike again at the first performance on the Muny grounds, turning the 1916 production of As You Like It into a muddy mess. In a massive 1930s Works Progress Administration project, the entire length of the River des Peres was diverted underground into 50-foot-wide concrete pipes or channelized in concrete. Today, the 11-mile stretch of the River des Peres in St. Louis serves as the backbone of the city’s sanitary and stormwater systems.

Even though St. Louis boasts world-class attractions, stadium-filling sports teams, and remarkable historic sites, the place where you probably spend time every week is not so glamorous. Buying groceries is a part of every person’s routine whether you live downtown or out of town, and since 1939 many St. Louisans have bought their groceries from the Schnuck family.

Edwin H. Schnuck started the business in 1937 selling wholesale meats from his small north St. Louis store. Two years later, his wife, Anna, and their three children all opened corner stores as well, and they operated the five separate locations as a family. In the years following World War II, the Schnucks opened their first two large-scale stores. One was on Manchester Avenue in St. Louis and the other in the suburb of Brentwood. Schnucks continued to expand through the 1960s and inaugurated the “Price Revolution” campaign, in which redeemable vouchers rewarded customers for their loyalty. That campaign also inspired the grocery store’s corporate logo—the friendly, saluting soldier.

The Schnucks chain has expanded greatly and now has more than 100 stores in five states. It remains most dominant right where it began. The St. Louis stores, now operated by the third generation of the Schnuck family, grab about 28 percent of the local market share, beating their closest competitor by 10 percent. 

In the 1860s, civic leaders believed they had found a new way to make St. Louis a national leader. They would control vice with a policy that was sure to become a model for other cities. In 1870, after much discussion, St. Louis became the first city in the United States to legalize prostitution.

Prostitution was rampant in St. Louis by the late 1860s, and disease transmission was high. Rather than try in vain to ban prostitution, the city allowed prostitutes to legally go about their business as long as they registered with the city, worked in licensed establishments, and received weekly medical checkups. Civic leaders could declare St. Louis the only city with proven “clean” prostitutes.

In 1873, the city built a hospital dedicated to the treatment of prostitutes—the Social Evil Hospital. The experiment with legal prostitution, however, was nearing its end. Hundreds of prostitutes initially registered, but most immediately began ignoring the rules. Social reformers claimed prostitution was worse than ever, and in 1874, the city revoked the ordinance.

Afterward, the Social Evil Hospital became the Female Hospital, dedicated to treating women and children. In 1915 the city razed the building, erasing all reminders of one of the most interesting times in St. Louis history. The bare space where it stood became Sublette Park.

The giant copper-domed building that towers over south St. Louis on Arsenal Street has long reflected the city’s ongoing struggle to serve community members with mental health problems. What opened in 1869 as the crudely named St. Louis County Lunatic Asylum was one of the biggest public works ever undertaken in St. Louis.

Architect William Rumbold envisioned that the asylum, designed to accommodate about 250 patients, would rival the public works of ancient Rome in both scale and grandeur. Rumbold gave the facility its iconic dome, visible for miles around the city, as well as its marble columns and dramatic front portico. At the time of its construction, its location was on the very edge of the city, separate from the rest of society, but even as the city has grown up around it, the building continues to loom large over the landscape.

Many persisting stigmas, rumors, curiosities, and deep insensitivities have shaped descriptions of the place over the years. Nevertheless, the site has remained an important and active mental-health-care facility, with nearly 3,000 patients on site by 1948. Today, it is known as the St. Louis Psychiatric Rehabilitation Center, where it continues to serve some of the city’s most vulnerable inhabitants. As it did nearly 150 years ago, the facility will continue to reflect changing attitudes toward mental health. 

The long, narrow strip of land that slowly slopes upward from the Mississippi River might not seem important, but for much of the city’s life it was the heart of St. Louis’s economy. The St. Louis levee is the jumbled and noisy, endlessly busy cobblestoned embankment where the waters meet the city.

St. Louis’s geographic location would provide an unequaled destination for fur trading, and the levee was the city’s front door. An astounding armada of steamships, some nearing 300 feet long, belched plumes of smoke over St. Louis as they endlessly transported great cargoes of food, manufactured goods, clothing, furs, and slaves.

In 1849, the White Cloud steamboat burst into flames at the levee, starting a destructive game of tag with nearby boats. The great piles of merchandise along the levee soon caught fire, and flames jumped into the city. Nearly the entire levee would burn to the ground, only to be rebuilt in brick and iron. Just five years later, a riot between Irish laborers and anti-immigrant nativists would see 93 buildings damaged and the local militia called in.

The levee remained the city’s commercial center until locomotives slowly took trade away from waterways. The riverfront would begin to crumble and grow dusty with age by the 1930s. The cobblestones, worn smooth by thousands of laborers’ feet, still meet the waters in the shadow of the Gateway Arch.

Friedrich Ludwig Jahn created the first turnverein (“gymnastic society”) in Berlin in 1811, using communal exercise to inspire cultural identity among German working classes. Failed 1848 revolutions among those workers saw more than 1 million Germans flee to America, bringing the bond of turnverein culture with them to their new, unfamiliar home.

A small group of German men organized the St. Louis Turnverein in 1850 and later built their “Central Turnhalle” on 10th Street between Walnut and Market. It was truly a fortress, and its members were politically aggressive, fiercely liberal, and despised by anti-immigrant nativists. During the Civil War the St. Louis Turnverein transformed into a Union volunteer militia hall.

Turnverein societies gradually lost political intensity and became more like social clubs. They emphasized a lifestyle of festivals and fitness, washed down with brotherhood and ample beer. Turnverein societies also helped establish public school physical education in St. Louis. Six turnverein members worked without pay for the 1891 school year to prove the system’s worth, and the following year, physical education became a regular part of the school day.

The wrath of World War I’s anti-German attitudes, Prohibition’s disastrous effects on German culture, and neighborhood transformation rapidly damaged turnverein life. A substantial decline in attendance forced the merger of the South St. Louis and St. Louis turnvereine, and in 1940, the society that once boasted 800 members closed forever. The Concordia Turners still operate at 6432 Gravois Road today.

Fans looking for great baseball in St. Louis during the 1920s had only one place to go. No, not Sportman’s Park, the longtime home of the storied Cardinals and the hapless Browns—for the best baseball in St. Louis, fans needed to get to one of the most unique parks in baseball history: Stars Park.

One of the few stadiums built expressly for Negro League baseball, Stars Park opened in 1922 as the home of the St. Louis Stars. From the huge 10,000-seat grandstand, fans cheered as they witnessed lightning-fast James “Cool Papa” Bell race around the bases. They were dazzled by the acrobatics of the first wizard to play shortstop in St. Louis, Willie Wells. And they stood and roared as the power-hitting George “Mule” Suttles crushed home runs over the city trolley shed that served as the right-field wall, but was only 250 feet away from home plate. Suttles and the other Stars swatted so many balls over this shed that, for several seasons, the Negro National League forced the Stars to call any hit over the shed a ground rule double instead of a home run.

The Stars shone brightly in Stars Park, winning titles in 1928, 1930, and 1931. But the Negro National League disbanded in 1931, the stadium was torn down, and the Stars faded away. 

During the late 1800s, the “department store,” where a wide range of consumer goods could be purchased in one location, exploded in St. Louis. The Grand Leader (later renamed Stix, Baer & Fuller) became St. Louis’s third major department store when it opened in 1892. By 1920 Stix, Baer & Fuller encompassed the entire block of 6th Street and Washington Avenue. Customers wandered a dreamland of endless product displays, complete with a full-service restaurant, soda fountain, and the city’s first escalator.

In 1944, Stix, Baer & Fuller became a battleground in the St. Louis civil rights movement. African Americans were denied service at St. Louis department store lunch counters, so the Citizens Civil Rights Committee organized a series of sit-ins. Stix, Baer and Fuller refused to give in even after two months of unwavering protests, but the demonstrations provided some of the first civil rights activity covered by mainstream media outlets in St. Louis.

As suburban tracts exploded across St. Louis County, downtown-based department stores began opening branches in enclosed shopping malls. After decades of profit loss, Stix, Baer & Fuller was sold to Dillard’s in 1984. 

Tennis champion Arthur Ashe. Rock and roll legends Chuck Berry and Tina Turner. Social activist and comedian Dick Gregory. Opera singer Grace Bumbry. Missouri congressman William Clay. These are only a few of the prominent figures who attended Sumner, one of the most storied high schools in St. Louis.

Founded in 1875, Sumner was the first African American high school west of the Mississippi River and quickly became a source of pride for the St. Louis African American community. Named after abolitionist senator Charles Sumner, the school included a staff of mostly African Americans who fought to ensure that students received a world-class education even in the face of segregation, harsh discrimination, and nearly nonexistent funding.

In 1910, after protests from parents about its poor location and lack of amenities, Sumner moved to a state-of-the-art, William Ittner–designed facility in the Ville. Sumner would be recognized as a top-performing school with a powerful curriculum, located at the heart of African American life in St. Louis.

Sumner has faced a number of challenges in recent years in the wake of population decline and continuing school-system-wide struggles. The city contemplated shuttering the school in 2009, but Sumner’s alumni, staff, and students continue fighting to improve it. 

At age 33, Lillie Pearson found herself unexpectedly widowed. Pearson, known as “Miss Tillie,” faced an uncertain future with six children to care for, limited opportunities, and few resources. Undaunted, she risked her $247 in savings and purchased a small grocery store at Garrison and Sheridan avenues. For the next 40 years, her business would be a successful mainstay of her community.

Located in the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood, Tillie’s Food Shop slowly expanded into three adjacent buildings and became known to everyone in the neighborhood as Tillie’s Corner. Tillie’s Corner was located in what is today known as a “food desert,” an urban area where healthy, nutritious food is difficult to obtain. Pearson refused to close the store, demanding that the community have access to fresh produce and quality goods. Tillie’s Corner became a gathering place and a neighborhood institution, and Pearson, a respected entrepreneur with a social conscience, was involved in sustaining and strengthening her community.

Pearson passed away in 2006. While awaiting approval for placement on the National Register of Historic Places, a December 2012 ice storm partially collapsed Tillie’s Corner. Pearson’s granddaughter Carla Pearson Alexander and her husband, Miguel, who long dreamed of renovating the original structures, are still determined to see the site utilized for community service to honor “Miss Tillie.” 

When Union Station opened in St. Louis in 1894, it was the largest railroad station in the world. New York City’s Grand Station was only a third as large. Lead architect (and former railroader) Theodore C. Link modeled his masterpiece after a castle in southern France, designing one of the grandest and most ornate terminals in the country. The Grand Hall featured gold leaf, Romanesque arches, stained-glass windows, and a towering 65-foot, barrel-vaulted ceiling.

Union Station made St. Louis, then the fourth-largest city in the United States, highly accessible by connecting the region’s train lines directly to the heart of the city. Union Station pumped lifeblood into St. Louis’s economy—handling over 100,000 passengers a day during its heyday in the 1940s.

Union Station’s decline would be as dramatic as its architecture. Train traffic dwindled, so badly that by 1978, the last train departed. The building fell into a state of disrepair so haunting that it was used as a set in the 1981 dystopian film Escape from New York. Union Station reopened as a shopping mall in 1985 after a $150 million renovation, making it the largest adaptive reuse project in the United States. The shopping mall was not able to sustain the crowds it saw when it first opened, however, and now there are new plans for imagining the space once again. 

On 7th Street in downtown St. Louis stands a 10-story red brick building that is easy to miss among the modern-day steel and glass buildings that surround it. Passersby on the street probably don’t realize that they’re walking past one of the most important buildings in the world.

What makes the Wainwright Building so special is its groundbreaking design. When the famed architect Louis Sullivan designed the Wainwright Building in 1891, he believed a skyscraper needed its own unique style, with every aspect of the building emphasizing its great height. He envisioned the Wainwright like a column, with straight vertical accents that made the building soar into the heavens above. The Wainwright’s trimmings were also unique—Sullivan created his own decorative elements based on geometry and nature. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright called it “the very first human expression of a tall steel office building.”

Sullivan’s design was a runaway success. Other architects praised—and copied—Sullivan’s plans. In fact, every steel-and-glass skyscraper you see today is a distant relative of the red brick building in downtown St. Louis. The Wainwright continues to be noted for its architectural importance; in May 2013, PBS recognized it as one of the “10 Buildings That Changed America.”