The Rise and Fall of America's Forgotten Metropolis: St. Louis, Missouri

In 1764, a French fur trader climbed a limestone bluff above the Mississippi and saw something no one else had — the makings of a great American city. Within a century, St. Louis would become the nation's fourth-largest metropolis, a steamboat capital, a railroad hub, and home to the largest brewery in the world. Its riverfront teemed with commerce. Its Union Station was the busiest rail terminal on earth. Its 1904 World's Fair drew nearly twenty million visitors. Fortunes were made in beer, shoes, steel, and real estate, and the men who made them built a city of grand hotels, ornate theaters, and architecture designed to last centuries. This is the story of how all of that came together — the deals, the construction costs, the bold bets and quiet miscalculations — and how a single administrative decision in 1877 set a slow fuse that would burn for generations. From Pierre Laclède's trading post to the Eads Bridge to the implosion of Pruitt-Igoe, this is St. Louis as it was, as it peaked, and as it let go.

Sources

Van Ravenswaay, Charles. St. Louis: An Informal History of the City and Its People, 1764–1865. Missouri Historical Society Press.
"History of St. Louis." Wikipedia, citing primary census data and municipal records.
"The Founding of St. Louis." Laclede's Landing Historical Archives (lacledeslanding.com).
"Eads Bridge Remains an Engineering Marvel." The Waterways Journal, July 2024.
"Breweries and the Commercial Growth of St. Louis." University of Missouri–St. Louis, Mercantile Library Online Exhibitions.
"A Brief History of St. Louis." City of St. Louis official website (stlouis-mo.gov).

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