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Saint Louis.
St. Louis (English /seɪnt ˈluːɪs/, French 
/sɛ̃ lwi/) is an independent city[3] in the U.S. state of Missouri. It is bordered by the Mississippi River on the east and by St. Louis County on the north, south, and west. St. Louis is the largest metropolitan area in Missouri. Sometimes written as Saint Louis, the city is named for King Louis IX of France. St. Louis is famous for its multiple French and German influences as well as having a Victorian past. Two events at the beginning of the 20th century, the 1904 World's Fair and 1904 Olympic Games
(the first ever held in the United States) are of particular pride to
St. Louisans. In the 21st century, St. Louis has transformed from a manufacturing and industrial economy into a globally known locus for research in medicine, biotechnology, and other sciences.
The city has many nicknames,
the most popular being "Gateway City", as it is seen as the
Eastern/Western US dividing mark. St. Louis is also called "Gateway to
the West" on behalf of the many people who migrated west through St. Louis via the Missouri River (first leg of the Oregon Trail) and other wagon trails. St. Louis is also called "Mound City"[4]. This term originated with the Native American
burial mounds that once were common in the city. These were largely
destroyed to level the ground as the urban area grew. The most popular
abbreviation for St. Louis is "STL" in reference to the airport code for the city and the long-standing use of an interlocked S, T, and L by the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team (the St. Louis Browns also used an interlocked STL).
The City of St. Louis lies at the heart of Greater St. Louis, a sprawling region of nearly three million people in both Missouri and Illinois. The Illinois portion is commonly known as the Metro-East. The Greater St. Louis area was the 18th largest Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) area in the U.S. as of the July 2006 US Census estimate, with more than 2,800,000 people.
History
"The City of St. Louis has affected me more
deeply than any other environment has ever done, I consider myself
fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York,
or London."
T. S. Eliot on St. Louis |
-
Prior to the arrival of French explorers in 1673 the area that would become St. Louis was a major center of the Mississippian mound builders.
The presence of numerous mounds, now almost all destroyed, earned the
later city the nickname of "Mound City". European exploration of the
area had begun nearly a century before the city was founded. Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette, both French, traveled through the Mississippi River valley in 1673, and five years later, La Salle claimed the entire valley for France. He called it "Louisiana" after King Louis XIV; the French also called their region "Illinois Country."
In 1699 the French established a settlement at Cahokia, across the
Mississippi River from what is now St. Louis. They founded other early
settlements downriver at Kaskaskia, Prairie du Pont, and Fort de Chartres, Illinois, and Sainte Genevieve.
In 1703, Catholic priests established a small mission at what is now
St. Louis. The mission was later moved across the Mississippi, but the
small river at the site (now a drainage channel near the southern
boundary of the City of St. Louis) still bears the name "River Des
Peres" (French Rivière des pères, River of the Fathers).
In 1763, Pierre Laclède, his 13-year-old "stepson" Auguste Chouteau, and a small band of men traveled up the Mississippi from New Orleans to found a post to take advantage of trade coming downstream by the Missouri River.[5]
In November, they landed a few miles downstream of the river's
confluence with the Missouri River at a site where wooded limestone
bluffs rose forty feet above the river. The men returned to Fort du
Chartres for the winter, but in February, Laclède sent Chouteau and
thirty men to begin construction at the new site, laid out in a grid
pattern as an imitation of New Orleans.
St. Louis was a river city, and it therefore developed in response
to its relationship to the river. Development, particularly economic
development, clustered around the settlement’s Mississippi River
bank on what was called "the levee" and is now called "the landing."
This long, smooth bank of land, which would later be paved with
cobblestone, sloped into the river at an incline that was gradual
enough to permit the river vessels of the time to beach onto it in
order to be unloaded and loaded. All products at this time were shipped
to and from New Orleans, orienting St. Louis' 18th-century trade
north-south.
The settlement began to grow quickly after word arrived that the 1763 Treaty of Paris
had given Britain all the land east of the Mississippi. Frenchmen who
had earlier settled to the river's east moved across the water to
"Laclède's Village." Other early settlements were established nearby at
Saint Charles,
the independent village of Carondelet (later annexed by St. Louis and
now the southernmost part of the current City), Fleurissant (renamed
Saint Ferdinand by the Spaniards and now Florissant), and Portage des Sioux. In 1765, St. Louis was made the capital of Upper Louisiana.
From 1766 to 1768, St. Louis was governed by the French
lieutenant governor, Louis Saint Ange de Bellerive, who was appointed
not by French or Spanish authorities, but by the leading residents of
St. Louis. After 1768, St. Louis was governed by a series of governors appointed by Spanish authorities, whose administration continued even after Louisiana was secretly returned to France in 1800 by the Treaty of San Ildefonso.
The town's population was then about a thousand. During the period when
commandants appointed by Spanish authorities governed St. Louis,
meetings of leading residents were also held from time to time, and
"syndics" were sometimes elected to carry out certain governmental
tasks.
In 1780 St. Louis was attacked by the British during the American Revolution.[6] A combined Spanish and French Creole force protected the city.
Apotheosis of Saint Louis, a
bronze statue of the city's namesake on horseback, was widely used as a symbol of the city before construction of the
Gateway Arch.
St. Louis was acquired from France by the United States under President Thomas Jefferson in 1803, as part of the Louisiana Purchase. The transfer of power from Spain was made official in a ceremony called "Three Flags Day." On March 8, 1804, the Spanish flag was lowered and the French one raised. On March 10,
the French flag was replaced by the United States flag. Until the 1820s
French continued to be one of the major spoken and written languages in
St. Louis, along with English.
St. Louis first became legally incorporated as a town on November 9, 1809, though it elected its first municipal legislators (called trustees) in 1808. The Lewis and Clark Expedition left the St. Louis area in May 1804, reached the Pacific Ocean in the summer of 1805, and returned on 23 September 1806. Both Lewis and Clark lived in St. Louis after the expedition. Many other explorers, settlers, and trappers (such as Ashley's Hundred) would later take a similar route to the West.
After Missouri became a state in 1821, St. Louis was incorporated as a city on December 9, 1822. A U. S. arsenal was constructed at St. Louis in 1827.
The steamboat era began in St. Louis on July 27, 1817, with the arrival of the Zebulon M. Pike.
Steamboats signified significant progress in river trade, as steam
power permitted much more efficient and dependable river
transportation. Unlike the hand-propelled barges and keel boats that
preceded the steamboat as the choice vehicle of Mississippi River
trade, steamboats could travel upriver, and against the current, just
as easily as downriver.
Rapids north of the city made St. Louis the northernmost navigable port for many large boats. The Pike
and her sisters soon transformed St. Louis into a bustling boom town,
commercial center, and inland port. By the 1830s, it was common to see
more than 150 steamboats at the St. Louis levee at one time. By the the
1850s, St. Louis had become the largest U. S. city west of Pittsburgh,
and the second-largest port in the country, with a commercial tonnage
exceeded only by New York.
In 1836 the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce was founded. It was one of
the oldest Chambers of Commerce in the United States. Along the way, it
has been involved with projects as diverse as securing funding for
Charles Lindbergh’s historic 1927 transatlantic flight (thus the naming
of the plane “The Spirit of St. Louis”) and rallying community support for the design, funding and construction of St. Louis’ famed Gateway Arch. The current chamber is now called the St. Louis Regional Chamber of Commerce, representing the Bi-State region. The Regional Chamber and Growth Association organization is directed by Richard Fleming.
Immigrants flooded into St. Louis after 1840, particularly from Germany, Bohemia, and Ireland, the last driven by a potato famine.
During Reconstruction, rural Southern blacks flooded into St. Louis as
well, seeking better opportunity. The population of St. Louis grew from
less than 20,000 in 1840, to 77,860 in 1850, to more than 160,000 by
1860. At this time, public transit developed in order to effectively
transport the numbers of new residents in the city. Omnibuses began to
service St. Louis in 1843, and in 1859, St. Louis' first streetcar
tracks were laid. Later in the 19th century, Italian immigrants began
to arrive in the city and farming areas. They helped expand winemaking
to the Rolla area.
Two disasters occurred in 1849: a cholera epidemic killed nearly one-tenth of the population, and a fire destroyed numerous steamboats and a large portion of the city. These disasters led to political
action: old cemeteries were removed to the outskirts of the town;
sinkholes were filled and swamps drained; water and sewer public
utilities started; and a new building code required structures to be
built of stone or brick. Particularly after the 1849 fire, St. Louis'
population decentralization westward accelerated, a pattern of
migration and development that continues today.
In the first half of the 19th century, a second channel developed in the Mississippi River at St. Louis. An island ("Bloody Island")
formed between the two channels, and a smaller island ("Duncan's
Island") developed below St. Louis. It was feared that the levee at St.
Louis might be left high and dry, and federal assistance was sought and
obtained. Under the supervision of Robert E. Lee,
levees were constructed on the Illinois side to direct water toward the
Missouri side and eliminate the second channel. Bloody Island was
joined to the land on the Illinois side, and Duncan's Island was washed
away.
Militarily, the Civil War barely touched St. Louis; the area saw only a few skirmishes, in which Union
forces prevailed. However, the war shut down trade with the South, as
Union troops blockaded the Mississippi River from 1861 through the end
of the war. Trade in St. Louis declined to about one-third its average,
as the economy of the South, one of the markets St. Louis depended on,
was devastated. Missouri was nominally a slave state, but its economy
did not depend on slavery.
It remained loyal to the Union throughout the Civil War. The arsenal at
St. Louis was used during the war to construct ironclad ships for the
Union, and shipbuilding continued at the Port of St. Louis even into
the latter half of the 20th century.
Eads Bridge, the first road and rail bridge to cross the Mississippi River, was completed in 1874.
On August 22, 1876 the City of St. Louis voted to secede from St. Louis County
and become an independent city. At that time the County was primarily
rural and sparsely populated, and the fast-growing City did not want to
spend its tax dollars on infrastructure and services for the
inefficient county; the move also allowed some in St. Louis government
to increase their political power. This decision later haunted the
City, as the results of that separation are still problematic today. In
1884, St. Louis hosted the first world fair.
Washington Avenue Loft District
As St. Louis grew and prospered during the late 19th and early 20th
century, the city produced a number of notable people in the fields of
business and literature. The Ralston-Purina company (headed by the Danforth Family) was headquartered in the city. Anheuser-Busch, the world's largest brewery, remains a fixture of the city's economy. The City was home to both International Shoe and the Brown Shoe Company. St. Louis was also one of the cities to see a pioneering brass era automobile company, the Success;[7] despite its low price, the company did not live up to its name.
Residents or natives notable in literature included poets Sara Teasdale, Marianne Moore, and T. S. Eliot; writers Kate Chopin and William Burroughs; and playwright Tennessee Williams.
St. Louis is one of several cities claiming the world's first skyscraper. The Wainwright Building, a 10-story structure designed by Louis Sullivan and built in 1892, still stands at Chestnut and Seventh Streets. Today it is used by the State of Missouri as a government office building.
In 1893 Nikola Tesla made the first public demonstration of radio communication here.
In 1896, one of the deadliest and most destructive tornadoes
in U. S. history struck St. Louis and East St. Louis, leaving a
mile-wide continuous swath of destroyed homes, factories, mills,
saloons, hospitals, schools, parks, churches, and railroad yards.
Killing more than 255, with damages adjusted for inflation (1997 USD),
it was one of the costliest tornadoes in U. S. history with an
estimated $2.9 billion in losses. Several other tornadoes have hit the
city, including in 1927 (79 killed, 550 injured) and 1959 (21 killed,
345 injured).
By the time of the 1900 census, St. Louis was the fourth-largest city in the country.[8] In 1904, the city hosted its second
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