St. Louis: Victorian Parks, Rock and Roll Sidewalks and the Gateway West
Stroll Tower Grove Victorian pleasure ground, catch a Chuck Berry tribute on the Delmar Loop Walk of Fame, climb City Museum extraordinary salvage art, stand where Dred Scott was tried, follow the literary trail of T.S. Eliot and Tennessee Williams, and trace Lewis and Clark Gateway to the West.
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Tower Grove Park and Victorian Pleasure Ground
Tower Grove Park, donated to the city by Henry Shaw in 1868, is a 289-acre Victorian pleasure ground designated a National Historic Landmark. Shaw personally designed the park based on his travels in Europe, creating a formal landscape with classical pavilions, ornamental gates, statuary, and a series of rectangular reflecting basins. The park contains original Victorian-era structures including three ornamental music stands and the 1872 Turkish pavilion. Four hundred species of trees grow in the park, which the Missouri Botanical Garden continues to steward. The park is surrounded by the Tower Grove South and Shaw neighborhoods, which retain one of the most intact collections of Victorian brick residential architecture in the American Midwest.
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Delmar Loop and University City
The Delmar Loop, named for the old streetcar loop at the end of the Delmar Boulevard line, is an entertainment district straddling the St. Louis city and University City border. The half-mile stretch of Delmar Boulevard concentrates restaurants, music venues, record stores, and independent shops including Blueberry Hill, the rock and roll bar and restaurant opened by Joe Edwards in 1972 that became the nucleus of the district development. Chuck Berry, a St. Louis native, performed his monthly residency at Blueberry Hill from 1996 until shortly before his death in 2017. The St. Louis Walk of Fame, embedded in the Delmar sidewalks since 1989, honors 150 St. Louis area natives including T.S. Eliot, Maya Angelou, Josephine Baker, and Tina Turner.
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City Museum
City Museum, opened in 1997 in a former International Shoe Company warehouse in downtown St. Louis, defies categorization as either a museum, a playground, or an art installation. Artist and entrepreneur Bob Cassilly and a team of collaborators converted the 600,000 square foot building using salvaged industrial and architectural materials including airplane fuselages, construction cranes, bridges, and gargoyles into an immersive environment of tunnels, slides, climbing structures, and caves. Cassilly was killed in a 2011 construction accident on the grounds. The building contains a ten-story spiral slide, a rooftop Ferris wheel, a shoelace factory where visitors can watch shoestring production, an aquarium, and an architectural museum of ornamental building fragments collected from demolished St. Louis buildings.
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Old Courthouse and Dred Scott Decision
The Old Courthouse in Gateway Arch National Park, completed in 1862 with a cast iron dome designed by William Rumbold, was the site of the first two Dred Scott trials in 1847 and 1850. Scott, an enslaved man, sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had lived in free territories. After losing in Missouri courts he appealed to the US Supreme Court, which issued its infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision ruling that Black people were not citizens and could not sue in federal court. The decision inflamed national tensions over slavery and contributed directly to the Civil War. The courthouse also hosted suffragist Virginia Minor trial in 1873, where she was denied the right to vote despite the Fourteenth Amendment. Both cases are interpreted in permanent exhibitions inside the building.
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St. Louis in Literature and Film
St. Louis has produced a remarkable concentration of American literary talent. T.S. Eliot, born at 2635 Locust Street in 1888, drew on St. Louis imagery in The Waste Land. Maya Angelou grew up in Stamps, Arkansas but was born in St. Louis. Tennessee Williams set his semi-autobiographical play The Glass Menagerie in a St. Louis apartment. Kate Chopin lived in St. Louis and set The Awakening partly in the city. Vincente Minnelli filmed Meet Me in St. Louis in 1944, starring Judy Garland, creating the most beloved cinematic portrait of the city. The film set its story during the months before and during the 1904 World Fair, cementing that event in American cultural memory. Jonathan Franzen set portions of The Corrections in a St. Louis suburb.
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Gateway to the West and Lewis and Clark
St. Louis earned its Gateway to the West designation as the departure point for the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which set out from Camp DuBois across the river in May 1804 and returned to St. Louis in September 1806 after covering 8,000 miles. The Expedition was commissioned by President Jefferson following the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, in which the United States acquired 828,000 square miles of territory from France for 15 million dollars, doubling the nation size. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark recruited their Corps of Discovery largely from the St. Louis area. The Missouri History Museum in Forest Park holds significant Lewis and Clark artifacts and interprets the Expedition in the context of Native American displacement that followed. The Gateway Arch commemorates this westward expansion legacy.