St. Louis, Missouri: Gateway to the West.
I can’t say that I ever thought much about this place until a wedding landed me here for a long weekend. Congrats to Laura & Jeremy! And thanks for giving me a reason to leave the house after 14 months of COVID. This was literally the first normal-ish trip I got do since LA last March. 💀
I think that in the past I had a vague notion that St. Louis wasn’t the nicest city in the world, but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you why. In more recent years, when St. Louis somehow came up in conversation, there was usually somebody there to say “Ya know what—St. Louis is actually pretty ok.” And that’s about all I knew.
Oh, and then, of course, there were occasional things on the internet like this:
Well now that I’ve been here for myself, I have thoughts of my own share. And those thoughts are positive! But before I share them with you, I’m gonna give some general info on the city first.
A Brief Introduction to St. Louis, Missouri
With a metro area population of just over 2.8 million people, St. Louis is the largest city in Missouri and the 2nd largest city in Illinois. Why Illinois? Because you see, St. Louis sits right on the banks of the mighty Mississippi River, so it’s split between 2 states. And that location has played a defining role in making this city what it is today.
Walking around the streets of St. Louis, something struck me: this is a truly difficult place to categorize! Sure it lives up to its reputation as a Midwest city—it definitely has that vibe. But unlike many of its Midwestern cousins, like 85% of the buildings in this city are made of brick. It gives strong East Coast vibes. And in the oldest parts of the city, things can actually start to feel pretty colonial. But as soon as you say to yourself “this reminds me of Beacon Hill in Boston,” you’ll start seeing fleur-de-lis iconography everywhere you look, which is something that we Americans associate most closely with New Orleans. The NOLA connection feels kinds of random at first, but then you’ll walk past a black street vendor selling bayou shrimp and be like “ok, I officially don’t know what’s going on here.”
Well, a quick Google search will tell you that St. Louis was actually founded by the French, and modeled after the New Orleans street plan. 40 years later, this city fell into American hands with the Louisiana Purchase, and the rest is history. But even today, it does still maintain that transient, eclectic bayou energy. That energy just exists alongside a lot of other types of energy. This is a place where you can really see and feel the cultural crosswinds whistling around you if you pay attention. Here it is on the map for ya 👇👇
Soulard Farmer’s Market
We’re not gonna cover everything that St. Louis has to offer in this article—instead we’re just going to break off 2 choice spots and leave it there for today. And spot #1 is the Soulard Farmer’s Market.
Soulard is actually a really really cool little neighborhood. I stayed there during my time in St. Louis. If I had had an extra day in St. Louis, I probably would have just spent it just wandering around and taking pictures. It could have made for a cool “Camera Roll” article. But, alas, all I have to show you of this neighborhood at large are this vintage truck and this brick house. Hopefully, they help you imagine the vibe here. THIS is the neighborhood that really makes you feel like Boston, Charleston and New Orleans had a baby.
Everybody that we asked identified the Soulard Farmer’s Market as a point of interest. So we were sold.
Open more or less during business hours from Wednesday to Sunday each week, the Soulard Farmer’s Market occupies a classic open-air market building in the corner of the neighborhood closest to the Mississippi. There are cool coffee shops, bars, and restaurants around this area to indicate that the familiar winds of gentrification are blowing right now… but what we found inside the market itself was a bit surprising.
Walking through this market, I was struck by what a true cross-section of society was represented here. Socially, racially, economically—the vendors and people in here really covered the full spectrum of what St. Louis has to offer. And honestly what basically any city has to offer. And I was really refreshed by how many of these vendors truly seemed to be independent, D.I.Y. businesses. I think the place where this was really on display was the signs. There were some really nice, funny, clever, homemade signs up in this marketplace. I couldn’t help but snap photos of some of them. But there was also lots of cool items for sale in here. My lady-friend bought some uniquely scented incense as well as some difficult-to-find-in-your-normal-grocery-store spices, and I bought some homemade red pepper and squid ink pasta. It was delish.
Check out the signs in the gallery below…
The City Museum
Prior to coming to St. Louis, I asked around to see if any of my friends had ever visited. Without fail, every single person who had been here before instantly perked up and said “DUDE YOU NEED TO GO TO THE CITY MUSEUM.”
And I would respond “Okay… what is that?”
If I can give you a composite of all the answers I received, it would be this: “You know those McDonalds’ that have the playhouses inside them, with the slides, ball pits, etc? City Museum is like that, but huge and for adults.”
In reality, I think this was actually intended for children as well, but it’s hard to not enjoy yourself as an adult too. It is a VERY cool place. And I’d be surprised if there is anything else like it on planet earth. However, in spite of the fact that this would be a great place to BE a kid, I think that it’s clearly a pretty awful place to TAKE a kid. This is a 10-story warehouse that has been converted into a fun-house made of plaster and re-purposed junk, full of odd little details, nooks, crannies, and secret passageways to crawl through. You’d be well-advised to wear durable, flexible clothing. Inside, a treehouse gives way to a cave gives way to a bank vault gives way to an Egyptian tomb gives way to a door… and outside the wreckage of fire trucks, planes, and school buses are suspended high in the air, connected by a series of inter-connected ladders, staircases, and slides. Here’s the view when you first roll up:
The origins of this place are in the year 1993. According to their website, “Artists Bob and Gail Cassilly acquired a 10-story 600,000 square foot former shoe company warehouse in Downtown St. Louis. Their vision was to transform it into “a city within a city.” With a cadre of sculptors, welders, and painters dubbed the Cassilly Crew, they began work immediately but showed no one what they were doing.” It was first opened to the public a few years later but was steadily expanded and improved over the years. Bob died in 2011, but the organization that runs this place has kept things going, opening new attractions and areas of this place almost every year.
One of those attractions is a 10-story slide, all contained inside the warehouse. That might sound scary, but it’s not exactly a rollercoaster. They re-purposed and reinforced old factory shoots to be a slide. It’s completely enclosed and winds down like a corkscrew the whole 10 stories, so you never really process the height, You’re just winding for a REALLY long time. I did it. It was fun! I had a helluva wedgy by the time I got to the bottom, but love is a battlefield. 🤷🏻♂️❤️
Originally it was free to enter, but it now costs $16 per person to enter. You can snag tickets here if you’re in the neighborhood.
Most of the inside of this place is tiny, dark little passageways, so it was hard to really get any solid photos of the inside, but here are a few shots anyway. Most of them are from the outdoor sections.
Now I might not have done a great job capturing everything here, BUT check out this drone video from the City Museum’s website. The roof was closed while we were there unfortunately, but there are some other areas in this video that I think we just never found, even though we were here for hours. I’m not surprised—that places was a maze. Check this out:
Up next we’re going to do one of my favorite things… STREET ART. And I will say, in my driving all over this city, I found myself in some truly really nice places… and also some truly terrifying ones. This city has historically had a lot of blight—and while that does seem to be changing—it’s not changing in the way you usually see when a city begins to gentrify. It’s patchy. It’s organic. There’s not much “big money” flying around these neighborhoods to turn them into something they’re not. It’s cool.
We’ll get into all of that and more in the next article, but for now, here’s a song.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter was born & raised in Columbus, Ohio, and started this blog when he moved from Boston to Hanoi (Vietnam) in 2014. After years based in Nashville working on his band, The Great Palumbo, he now resides in London, UK.
