About the Great Metropolis

The decades following the Civil War brought an economy full of paradoxes. The period from 1873 to 1879 was known as America’s Great Depression until that title was usurped by a longer and deeper collapse fifty years later. Yet during this same time many cities saw explosive growth. In St. Louis, a safe, clean, and modern water system was established and gas lighting became available to large areas of our city. Our two largest parks (Forest Park and Tower Grove) were created, our school system was soon to become a model for the world, and our key industries (milling, machining, slaughtering, brewing, and tobacco processing) were thriving. Most importantly, the Mississippi River was bridged, linking the United States’ biggest west bank city directly to the country's original east coast cities by rail and road for the first time.

While we cannot physically walk the streets of 1875 St. Louis and see it thriving during this period of growth, the next best thing to a convenient wormhole in space is available online [Library of Congress panoramic]: pdf images of a book with the ponderous and somewhat pretentious title Pictorial St. Louis, The Great Metropolis of the Mississippi Valley: A Topographical Survey Drawn in Perspective A.D. 1875. Familiarly called “Compton and Dry” after its artist Camille N. Dry and its publisher Richard J. Compton, the book comprises 110 meticulously drafted plates that collectively form a twenty-four by eight foot aerial perspective map.    

Aerial perspectives, or bird’s eye views, of American cities were quite common in the last half of the nineteenth century.  Google searches for “Aerial Perspective Map of [insert your favorite city]” will yield several examples.  But the signature difference between Compton and Dry and other contemporaneous perspectives is its size and accuracy. Other examples are beautiful works of art, yes, but because they are usually constrained to a single sheet of paper one finds blurring and smudging of the detail, skewing of the perspective, and shortcuts to a complete and accurate representation. Many cartographers consider Compton and Dry to be the biggest and best aerial perspective ever drawn.

Looking beyond the artistry and accuracy of Compton and Dry, the audacity of its title is quaint and amusing to our modern ear. Yet somehow, it personifies the character of St. Louis: we are a city born of great expectations but grown to middle age self-conscious of our modest accomplishments. Our ancestors walking the 1875 streets depicted in Compton and Dry fully expected St. Louis to outpace Chicago and become the leading metropolitan center in the Midwest. The populations of the two cities were similar, with St. Louis edging Chicago for fourth largest US city in the 1870 census. It didn’t take long for St. Louis to lose that particular competition, which may explain why we savor and cling to our ancient baseball rivalry. Plate 84 of Compton and Dry, for example, depicts the ballpark where, on October 1, 1875, the Chicago White Stockings defeated the St. Louis Brown Stockings 13-9.

We are not burly broad-shouldered Chicago and never were destined to be. We are not cosmopolitan and full-of-flavor New Orleans, although our founders started out from there with nothing more than courage, ambition, and a few homemade canoes (and, not insignificantly, an iron-clad state-sanctioned monopoly of fur trade on the Missouri and the upper Mississippi rivers).  St. Louis has been described as the western-most eastern city; the Wild West truly does start at our cross-state neighbor Kansas City.  It is also called the eastern-most western city; crossing the Mississippi and founding a city on the west bank was a huge step for the development of this continent.  And although the quote stems from JFK and pertains to Washington DC, St. Louis too epitomizes the perfect mix of northern charm and southern efficiency.  Stuck in the middle of the continent and seen as a diluted mixture of the flavors of other regions, it is little wonder St. Louis tends to downplay its history and its accomplishments.    

But we have seen and done great things, significant things, and also unique things that are often neither great nor significant but merely quirky and fun. In 1927, a group of St. Louis businessmen meeting at the Racquet Club on Kingshighway took a leap of faith and funded Charles Lindbergh, ayoung aviator with a wild dream to fly the Atlantic solo.  Susan Blow founded the first free public kindergarten in America at Des Peres School in the Carondolet neighborhood of South St. Louis, starting a movement in education that endures today.  James Buchanan Eads, in the design and construction of the bridge that bears his name, revolutionized engineering through the pioneering use of pneumatic caisson foundations, steel structure, and cantilevered construction supports.  And, the ice cream cone, although not invented in St. Louis, entered the popular consciousness of America in Forest Park in 1904, at a World’s Fair attended by twenty million people.

 St. Louis's 250th birthday was last year and, like many older cities, much of our physical heritage has vanished to redevelopment and progress, or to disinterest and abandonment.  But all of the buildings and places mentioned in the above paragraph still exist and can be visited without a time machine. The Construction Specifications Institute (CSI), of which I am a member, will be having its annual convention, CONSTRUCT2015, in St. Louis from September 30 to October 3, 2015.  In future entries, this blog will look at some things that make St. Louis unique, at some places that give it historical or architectural significance, and occasionally at some of the oddities that color its character. And as for the blog’s name, the overblown nineteenth century language notwithstanding, I think the title from the Compton and Dry panorama is still a fit description for twenty-first century St. Louis – despite our ups and downs, we remain the great metropolis of the Mississippi River valley.