🇺🇸 United States · Midwest and Great Lakes
St. Louis, on the banks of the Mississippi River in the state of Missouri, is one of the most historically important cities in the American Midwest. Known as the 'Gateway to the West', it was the great jumping-off point in the 19th century for the pioneers who set out to settle the American west. Today its undisputed symbol is the Gateway Arch, the elegant 192-meter stainless steel arch, the tallest monument of its kind in the world, presiding over the riverfront.
For the traveler, St. Louis packs in a surprising number of attractions, many of them free. Vast Forest Park, larger than New York's Central Park, holds a zoo, an art museum and a history museum you can walk into at no charge, a legacy of the 1904 World's Fair. The city is also a beer capital (the historic home of Anheuser-Busch), with a rich blues and ragtime tradition, a celebrated barbecue and ribs scene, and neighborhoods with real character such as The Hill (Italian) and Soulard.
This guide covers the essentials of St. Louis with a practical eye: the iconic Gateway Arch and its museum, the legacy of the 1904 fair in Forest Park, the Anheuser-Busch brewery, the mosaic cathedral, the local food and how to get around a manageable city where many of the best attractions cost nothing to enter.
Founded in 1764 by French fur traders and named after King Louis IX of France, St. Louis passed to the United States with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and became the great departure point for the west, the base of the Lewis and Clark expedition. It flourished on Mississippi river trade and, in 1904, hosted a celebrated World's Fair and the Olympic Games, which left a deep mark on the city.
Read the full history ↓The 'gateway to the West': a crossroads of rivers and trails, the starting point of the pioneers and of Lewis and Clark, cradle of Kansas City jazz and of the blues, with St. Louis and its Gateway Arch.
Read the history of Missouri →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
St. Louis was founded in 1764 by the French traders Pierre Laclède and his stepson Auguste Chouteau, who set up a fur trading post on the west bank of the Mississippi River, at a strategic point near the confluence with the Missouri River. The city was named after King Louis IX of France (Saint Louis), canonized in the 13th century. The region was then part of French Louisiana, though it soon passed nominally under Spanish control after the settlements of the Seven Years' War.
The settlement prospered thanks to the lucrative fur trade with the Native peoples and to its privileged position on the river network. In 1803, France (which had recovered the territory from Spanish hands) sold the whole of Louisiana to the United States in the historic Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the young country. St. Louis thus passed into American hands and became the gateway to the immense, newly acquired western territories.
It was from the St. Louis area that the Lewis and Clark expedition set out in 1804, sent by President Thomas Jefferson to explore and map the new lands all the way to the Pacific Ocean. That founding role as a departure point into the unknown shaped the identity of St. Louis as the 'Gateway to the West'.
Long before the French arrived, the region where St. Louis now stands was the heart of one of the most advanced civilizations in pre-Columbian America north of Mexico: the Mississippian culture, whose ceremonial and political center, Cahokia, rose just across the river, in what is now the state of Illinois. At its height, roughly between 1050 and 1200 AD, Cahokia reached an estimated population of between 10,000 and 20,000 inhabitants, which made it one of the largest cities in the world at the time, comparable to the London or Paris of that era.
Cahokia was defined by its monumental earthen mounds, built by hand over generations for ceremonial, funerary and residential purposes. The largest, Monks Mound, has a base bigger than that of the Great Pyramid of Giza and still stands today, protected as a UNESCO World Heritage site (Cahokia Mounds). St. Louis itself, before its modern development, had so many mounds of its own that it was nicknamed 'Mound City', though most were destroyed by the urban growth of the 19th century.
For reasons archaeologists still debate —possible droughts, resource depletion, internal conflict— Cahokia went into decline and was abandoned around the 14th century, long before the Europeans arrived. When the French founded St. Louis in 1764, the region was inhabited by peoples such as the Osage, but the great pre-Columbian urban center no longer existed. Today Cahokia Mounds, minutes from downtown St. Louis, is a reminder that the region was the cradle of a monumental Native civilization long before any European presence.
Through the 19th century, St. Louis grew explosively, driven by its role as the great departure point for westward expansion and as a hub of river trade. Thousands of pioneers, settlers, gold seekers and adventurers passed through the city to stock up before crossing the Mississippi and heading into the frontier, on routes such as the Oregon Trail and the Santa Fe Trail. St. Louis became a bustling center of commerce, supply and transport.
The steamboat era turned the Mississippi into a great commercial artery, and St. Louis prospered as a key river port, connecting the industrial north with the cotton south and the expanding west. The city also took in waves of European immigrants, especially Germans and Irish, who brought their culture, their labor and, in the German case, a powerful brewing tradition that would give rise to companies such as Anheuser-Busch.
By the end of the century, St. Louis was one of the largest cities in the United States. The arrival of the railroad and the construction of the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi (1874), an engineering feat, reinforced its importance. The city was reaching the peak of its economic and demographic power, positioning itself as one of the country's great metropolises as the new century approached.
The year 1904 was one of the most memorable in the history of St. Louis. The city hosted the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a colossal World's Fair marking the centenary of the Louisiana Purchase, which drew millions of visitors from around the world. That same year, St. Louis hosted the Olympic Games, the first held in the United States. The fair, laid out in Forest Park, left a lasting legacy in the city, both in cultural infrastructure (museums and institutions that survive to this day) and in the popular imagination, and it fueled legends such as the origin of the ice cream cone and other culinary novelties.
The first half of the 20th century kept St. Louis among the country's great industrial cities. However, like many other Midwestern cities, from mid-century on it suffered a steep decline: suburbanization, the loss of industry and population, and urban problems largely emptied out the central city. The population fell sharply from its peak.
In 1965 the Gateway Arch, designed by Eero Saarinen, was completed, becoming the city's definitive symbol and a monument to its historic role as the Gateway to the West. In recent decades, St. Louis has worked to revitalize its downtown, its riverfront and its historic neighborhoods, leaning on its rich heritage, its free cultural offering and its identity as a city of beer, blues and pioneers.
The second half of the 20th century was hard on St. Louis. Like many industrial cities of the so-called 'Rust Belt' (the declining industrial belt of the north and midwest), it suffered a massive flight of population and industry to the suburbs and other regions of the country: the city came to lose more than half its inhabitants from its 1950 peak, a phenomenon known as 'white flight' which, together with discriminatory housing policies (such as redlining), deepened the racial and economic segregation between the central city, largely African American and impoverished, and the suburbs.
Those historic tensions resurfaced forcefully in 2014, when the killing of the young African American Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, a suburb of the St. Louis metropolitan area, set off mass protests and put the region at the center of a national debate about police brutality and systemic racism in the United States, contributing to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. The episode laid bare, dramatically, the deep racial and economic inequalities the city had been carrying since the 20th century.
In parallel, since the start of the 21st century St. Louis has pushed various revitalization efforts: the renewal of the riverfront and the surroundings of the Gateway Arch (with a major remodeling completed around 2018), the restoration of historic neighborhoods such as Soulard and downtown itself, and the use of its free cultural heritage (Forest Park, its museums) as a tourist draw. The city still faces challenges of depopulation and inequality, but it also proudly claims its identity as the cradle of blues and ragtime, a brewing capital and the nation's historic departure point for the west.