St. Louis was founded on Feb. 15, 1764, and the birthday is traditionally celebrated on Feb. 14.
1904 · Forest Park · the city proper
We hosted the world.
Seventy-nine official neighborhoods in the independent city — I count seventy-seven in the living fabric. The Great Divorce was 1876. The Fair and the Olympics were 1904. The brick is still here.
Forest Park opened in 1876. The 1904 Fair reshaped much of it, and the Saint Louis Art Museum building and the Flight Cage are Fair survivors.
1876
Great Divorce
City leaves the County. Independent city.
1904
World's Fair + Olympics
Forest Park. Same ground. Same year.
79
Official neighborhoods
City planning map. I count 77.
~1,300
Acres of Forest Park
City parks lists 1,370.
1904
The Olympics were here too.
The night I saved the Fair pages, I kept going. The Olympic Games came to St. Louis the same year, and I saved what I could find.
The Games of the III Olympiad were held here from July 1 to Nov. 23, 1904, alongside the Fair. They were the first Games held outside Europe. The Games were first awarded to Chicago, then moved here.
The marathon was run in heat and humidity, and several runners suffered heat exhaustion. Fred Lorz crossed the line first and was then disqualified, after it came out that he had ridden in a car for part of the race.
One picture I saved is captioned Zuschauer, German for spectators, watching the tug-of-war.
1876
The Scheme of Separation
The City of St. Louis voted itself out of St. Louis County — the Great Divorce. The city proper became an independent city. Everything that follows, including the Fair, sits inside that split: a dense historic city on one side of the line, eighty-eight municipalities on the other.
1904
Louisiana Purchase Exposition
The World's Fair opened in Forest Park on April 30, 1904, and ran through December 1. Palaces of plaster and staff. Cascades. The Pike. It is why the city's civic memory still talks in gold leaf.
1904
The Games of the III Olympiad
St. Louis hosted the Olympics the same year, in and around the Fair. They were the first Games held outside Europe.
about 1,300 acres
Forest Park
Forest Park is about 1,300 acres (city parks lists 1,370), larger than Central Park's 843. The Fair's footprint. The Art Museum is on Art Hill, and the Flight Cage is still standing. The water tower on Compton Hill still stands east of the park — a standpipe from the Gilded Age, not a metaphor.
The house-stock
Million-dollar bones. Waiting.
Nowhere else in America, I'd say, do you find three-story entire brick houses with parlors, dining rooms, basements, attics, five bedrooms, three bathrooms, kitchens, sun porches, and wrap-around fronts — and they are everywhere. Restoration, not erasure.
- Three-story brick
- Parlors and dining rooms
- Basements and attics
- Five bedrooms, three baths
- Kitchens and sun porches
- Wrap-around fronts
The city's papers
Who kept the city's story.
The papers I had saved name the Post-Dispatch, the St. Louis American, and the Argus. The Riverfront Times ran as an alt-weekly from 1977 until it folded in 2024. The St. Louis Beacon merged into St. Louis Public Radio in 2013.
The man who led the 1904 exposition company later served as a U.S. ambassador. A sports field still carries his name.
Those lines are paraphrased from my own screenshot inventory. The photos on this page are mine.
How the neighborhoods were named
A city of parishes and private streets.
French colonial
Soulard
One of the oldest surviving fabrics. Brick, alleys, the farmers market. Named for Antoine Soulard, surveyor of Upper Louisiana.
Gilded mansions
Lafayette Square
Victorian houses around Lafayette Park. Torn by the 1896 tornado, rebuilt, then neglected, then restored. The restoration argument in miniature.
Private streets
Compton Heights
Compton Hill Water Tower, 1898. Private places, brick palaces, three stories, parlors, attics. The house-stock I'm talking about.
After the Fair
Central West End
Portland and Westmoreland Places. Mansions built when the Fair made this the front door of the city. Million-dollar bones, still.
Immigrant parish
The Hill
Italian St. Louis. Baseball in the blood. Firebrick and bakeries. A neighborhood that kept its name and its table.
Garden city
Shaw / Botanical Heights
Henry Shaw's garden became the Missouri Botanical Garden. Tower Grove Park is the Fair's cousin — Victorian landscaping with brick around it.
Black professional city
The Ville
Homer G. Phillips Hospital. Sumner High. A self-built professional class inside a segregated map. Redlining did not invent this neighborhood. It starved it.
Deutsch town
Dutchtown
German south side. Gravois. Brick every direction. The name is an American ear mishearing Deutsch.
River wards
Carr Square / Old North
North of downtown, against the river. The architecture is still there. The disinvestment is the later story.
Park and ward
Fairground Park
Named for the old fairgrounds. Water tower geography. North-side park city, not the 1904 Fair itself.
City landmarks I saved
The buildings I'd walk you past.
I saved these from the city's own landmarks pages. They're paraphrased. The pictures on this page are still mine.
Eads Bridge
After the Civil War, St. Louis needed a bridge across the Mississippi. In 1867 a group of city bankers hired James Buchanan Eads to build one. He had taught himself engineering, and he had never built a bridge. Granite-faced piers hold three arches and two decks. Dedicated July 4, 1874. City Landmark #1. It was among the first U.S. bridges to use pneumatic caissons at that depth, the first to depend entirely on cantilever construction for its superstructure, and the first major bridge to use steel extensively: a three-span ribbed arch, with railroad tracks on the lower deck.
The Art Museum
Built as the Palace of Fine Arts for the 1904 Fair and designed by Cass Gilbert, at One Fine Arts Drive in Forest Park. City Landmark #21, a landmark since 1969. It has had several additions since the Fair, the most recent in 1987.
The Meeting of the Waters
Louis Aloe chose Carl Milles to design the fountain. It stands in the 1800 block of Market, in Aloe Plaza, completed in 1939. Fourteen bronze statues. The lighting and landscaping came in 1954.
Jack Buck
Harry Weber's bust of the Cardinals announcer. To St. Louis fans he is the Voice of the Cardinals. Dedicated Aug. 20, 1998, first outside the old Busch Stadium and now by the new one on Clark. It became a City Landmark after his death in 2002.
World's Fair stops I saved.
Five stops from the city's Fair itinerary are still open. You can still walk into the Fair through them.
Scott Joplin House
Joplin's rag “The Cascades” was inspired by the Fair's Forest Park fountains. The house was his home in some of his most productive years.
Missouri Botanical Garden
Founded in 1859, the oldest continually operating botanical garden in the United States. Stone lanterns from the 1904 Fair stand in Seiwa-En, its Japanese garden.
Grant's Farm
Ulysses S. Grant's hand-built log cabin was shown at the Fair. August A. Busch Sr. bought it afterwards, in 1907, and moved it to the Busch land on Gravois Road.
Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion
A mid-19th-century house, begun about 1848–49 and later expanded, with more than 1,200 pieces of World's Fair memorabilia on view.
Central Library
Cass Gilbert's 1912 building, the same architect as the Art Museum. Restored for its 100th birthday and reopened in 2012. It is the system's Central Library, plus 14 neighborhood branches.
My words. Not a finding against a named private person.
“This city is beautiful. They just need to get rid of the corruption, the racism, the systemic gentrification, redlining, zoning, and impoverished communities they have had forever. It is time to do something new. I said it and I didn't stutter.”
Civic demand on public issues. Not a finding of fact against a named private person. Redlining, zoning, and gentrification are the public record of this city. The sentence is mine.
The city years, and my own, are on the timeline.