St. Louis

This article covers the city in the United States. For further meanings, see Saint-Louis .

St. Louis
Nickname : The Gateway City, Mound City
The Gateway Arch in St. Louis
seal	flag
Location in Missouri
St. Louis
Basic data
Foundation :	February 15, 1764
State :	United States
State :	Missouri
County :	District-free city
Coordinates :	38 ° 38 ′  N , 90 ° 12 ′  W Coordinates: 38 ° 38 ′  N , 90 ° 12 ′  W
Time zone :	Central ( UTC − 6 / −5 )
Inhabitants : -  Metropolitan Area :	311,404 (as of: 2016 estimate) 2,807,002 (as of 2016)
Population density :	1,941.4 inhabitants per km²
Area :	171.3 km²  (about 66 mi²) of which 160.4 km²  (about 62 mi²) is land
Height :	138.7 m
Postcodes :	63101-63199
Area code :	+1 314
FIPS :	29-40043
GNIS ID :	1669602
Website :	stlouis.missouri.org
Mayor :	Tishaura Jones ( D )

Gateway Arch

Gateway Arch

Construction of the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi River before 1874

Missouri Botanical Garden

St. Louis (written out Saint Louis ) [ ˌseɪntˈluːɪs ] is a city in the US state of Missouri on the western bank of the Mississippi . It has 319,294 inhabitants ( 2010 census ).

The city is home to a number of major colleges such as Washington University , Saint Louis University, and the University of Missouri-St. Louis . The city used to be a major railway junction ; however, passenger traffic no longer plays a role today. In East St. Louis , on the east bank of the Mississippi in the state of Illinois, there are two marshalling yards .

Saint Louis also bears the nicknames The Gateway City and Mound City as well as the scene names The Lou and Nellyville, made famous by the local rapper Nelly .

In 2006, St. Louis topped the list of the most dangerous cities in the United States because only downtown numbers were included and not the metro area numbers as well . From 2014 to 2016, St. Louis again topped the list of cities with the highest number of homicides in the United States. In a global comparison, St. Louis ranks 15th (2015). In the statistics, Baltimore , Detroit and New Orleans were listed as the most dangerous cities in the United States.

A total of 2.8 million people live in the Greater St. Louis metropolitan area . The region is thus the eighteenth largest metropolitan area in the United States (as of 2010). However, the metropolitan area is not part of St. Louis County , which is home to 998,954 people.

history

Pre-colonial

About ten kilometers east of today's city center, on the then course of the Mississippi, was the largest city in pre-Columbian North America: the city of Cahokia , founded in the 7th century and a center of Mississippi culture , reached a population in the 12th century for which Estimates range from around 8,000 all the way up to 40,000. This made Cahokia the largest city ever built north of what is now Mexico, and Philadelphia only had such a population around 1800 . The city was famous for its earth pyramids ( mounds ) , similar to those of the Central American civilizations; the largest preserved, Monks Mound, has larger sides than the Giza Pyramids . The city was abandoned by its residents around 1400 for unknown reasons. When the first Europeans reached the area in the 17th century, they found the settlement area deserted. The Cahokia site has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1982 .

18th century: colonization, city foundation

The French trader Pierre Laclède Liguest and his New Orleans stepson Auguste Chouteau founded Saint Louis in 1763 as a trading post. The actual founding of the city took place on February 15, 1764. After the French and Indian War (1754–1763), St. Louis was under Spanish control, but - along with the rest of Louisiana  - was returned to France in the Napoleonic War .

19th century: part of the United States from 1803

The United States acquired the city in 1803 under President Thomas Jefferson as part of the Louisiana Purchase . Later, Saint Louis became the starting point for many expeditions to the west such as the Lewis and Clark expedition, as well as for fur hunters. Many settlers also started west from St. Louis.

During the Civil War , the site became the site of the Camp Jackson massacre in 1861 .

At that time, St. Louis had a population of 310,000 after New York, Brooklyn (at that time still independent) and Philadelphia in fourth place of the US cities. Chicago was able to prove, however, that St. Louis had added 90,000 residents who did not live in the inner city area. At the turn of the 20th century, the Gateway City was predicted to have a bright future due to its favorable location as the gateway to the west.

In the 19th century, there was a large influx of German immigrants to Saint Louis. The German share of the population of St. Louis in 1860 was about 60,000 of about 170,000 inhabitants. The large brewery Anheuser-Busch was founded in 1870 by Eberhard Anheuser from Bad Kreuznach and his son-in-law Adolphus Busch from Mainz-Kastel . The Church of St. Frances de Sales was built for the German Catholic community between 1895 and 1908 based on designs by the Berlin architect Engelbert Seibertz . On November 13th, 1898, after three days of festivities, St. Louis Place Park was decorated with a copy of the Schiller statue from Marbach am Neckar created by Ernst Rau in 1876 . This foundation was made by the master brewer Col. Charles Stifel. The Schiller statue was later moved to the Memorial Plaza near the town hall, where it still stands today.

20th century: heyday until 1950, then decline

In 1904, St. Louis hosted both the Olympic Games and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition , the World's Fair , which ran from April 30th to December 1st .

The largest population reached St. Louis in the 1950 census with 856,796. Since then the population has been decreasing continuously. The move from the city center to the surrounding area is particularly noticeable in the area around St. Louis Place Park and around the formerly glamorous St. Louis Avenue, on which horse-drawn trams were already running in 1875. Complete historical blocks of houses have been demolished there since the 1950s or testify, mostly as neglected ruins, of the once neat splendor of this up-and-coming quarter, which was particularly popular with German immigrants, since the 1880s. There were German communities of all denominations and schools in which German was taught.

21st century

In 2010, St. Louis, with a population of 319,294, is unlikely to have reached its lowest point in population; by one estimate, its population has continued to shrink since then. The city today has a demographic plurality of African Americans (47.1%). Compared to the well-developing suburban communities, the urban area is not very inviting for residential purposes. To the east on the Mississippi bank, the industrial and commercial zone stretches for around 15 kilometers, only interrupted by the Jefferson Memorial Park with the Gateway Arch. This partially run-down area prevents citizens from accessing the river bank. The inner city is criss-crossed by railways and elevated roads and filled with large sports facilities, shopping centers and huge parking lots. In the residential areas close to the city center in the north and south, some abandoned house plots have been cleared and converted into small green spaces, so that the city can now boast of over a thousand parks.

flag

The flag of St. Louis was developed by Theodore Sizer ( Yale University ) and officially introduced in 1964. It symbolizes the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers near St. Louis. The intersection of the blue lines falls under a French lily ( fleur-de-lis ), symbolizing the city's French heritage. In a 2004 poll of the North American Vexillological Association website , the flag ranked fifth among American city flags.

Demographics

According to the 2010 census, the population was 42.2 percent white and 47.1 percent African American; 2.9 percent were of Asian origin. 3.5 percent of the population were Hispanics . St. Louis is thus one of the American cities in which African Americans form the largest population group. The median income per household was 2,015 at 35,599 US dollars . 25.5 percent of the population lived below the poverty line.

Population development

The population of St. Louis has been declining since the 1950s as people continuously move to the suburbs. A total of 2,845,298 inhabitants were counted in the Greater St. Louis metropolitan region . Missouri's population increased from 3,954,653 in 1950 to 5,988,927 in 2010. The population of St. Louis continues to decline. For 2011 it was estimated at 318,069 inhabitants. This is why the metropolitan region is of far greater importance, where slight population growth continues to be recorded.

year	Inhabitants¹
1810	1,600
1850	77,860
1900	575.238
1920	772.897
1950	856.796
1970	622.236
1980	452.801
1990	396,685
2000	348.189
2010	319.294

¹ 1810-2010: Census Results

Historical objects

There is a national monument in St. Louis , the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial . There is also a National Historic Site in the city , the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site . 15 places have the status of a National Historic Landmark .

Military experiments and nuclear waste disposal

In the 1950s and 1960s, St. Louis was a target for US Army military experiments with harmful chemicals and radioactive materials. The uranium fuel for Fermis Chicago Pile -1 was made from uranium ore by G. Mallinckrodt & Co in St. Louis. The resulting radioactive waste is stored, more or less kept secret, in a landfill there . There are protests from residents to this day against this landfill operated by the disposal company Republic Services , as an increased cancer rate has been recorded in the area .

Economy and Transport

The metropolitan area of ​​St. Louis generated a gross domestic product of 159.9 billion US dollars in 2016, making it 22nd among the metropolitan areas of the United States. The unemployment rate in St. Louis was 3.3 percent, below the national average of 3.8 percent (as of March 2018).

In a ranking of cities according to their quality of life, St. Louis ranked 70th out of 231 cities worldwide in 2018. In the US, only Detroit had a worse ranking.

Waterways / cargo handling

In the 20th century , St. Louis was a major trading post and the fifth largest deposit in the United States due to its location on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and the railroad junction area .

air traffic

St. Louis has two airports, Lambert-Saint Louis International Airport , next to which the works of the former McDonnell Douglas were located, and the smaller regional MidAmerica St. Louis Airport . Lambert International Airport was the seat and hub of the airline Trans World Airlines (TWA). The MidAmerica Airport was originally built to relieve the main airport. However, after its bankruptcy in April 2001, TWA was bought by American Airlines and soon after the function of the hub relocated to Chicago. As a result, however, the number of passengers there fell significantly, so that there was little need for another airport. For a long time, the MidAmerican Airport only reached a few tens of thousands of passengers per year. Most recently, however, the number of passengers rose to 157,000 in 2016. The only airline operating there is Allegiant Air .

Rail transport

The city is also served by Amtrak , with several train connections daily to Chicago and Kansas City , as well as daily to Dallas and San Antonio , Texas. Through vans continue to Los Angeles three times a week .

Road traffic

St. Louis is on the route of the once very important Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles. This street is also sung about in the popular hit Get your kick on Route 66 .

Today the city is served by the I-44 , I-55 , I-64 and I-70 highways .

Light rail

A light rail system opened in 1993 crosses the city with two lines in a west-east direction.

Sports

• Baseball : St. Louis Cardinals , a Major League Baseball ( National League ) team. They play their home games in the Busch Stadium, which was newly built in 2006 .
• Ice Hockey : St. Louis Blues , an NHL team . They play their home games at the Enterprise Center (formerly Savvis Center , Kiel Center , Scottrade Center ).
• American Football : The St. Louis Cardinals played in St. Louis from 1960 to 1987 . After they moved to Phoenix in 1987 , no NFL teams played in the city for seven years. In 1995 the then Los Angeles Rams moved to the city and from there played as St. Louis Rams in the Edward Jones Dome . For the 2016 season, the Rams moved back to Los Angeles .
• Basketball : St. Louis has no team in the NBA basketball league . The St. Louis Hawks played in town from 1955 to 1968 before moving to their current location in Atlanta . From 1974 to 1976, the Spirits of St. Louis from the NBA competitive league American Basketball Association (ABA) played their home games in St. Louis. With the merger of the ABA with the NBA, the team was dissolved.
• Olympic Games : In 1904, St. Louis hosted the Summer Olympics .

Tourist Attractions

• The city's landmark is the Gateway Arch , a 192 m tall arch designed by Eero Saarinen .
• Open-air musical theater "The Muny"
• St. Louis Science Center
• St. Louis Art Museum
• St. Louis City Museum
• Missouri Botanical Garden
• The Butterfly House
• St. Louis Union Station (the former main train station) now serves as a shopping center.
• Laclede's Landing (historic district with brick streets and many pubs, restaurants, etc.)
• Old Courthouse (site of the Dred Scott v. Sandford Trial)
• St. Louis Basilica (Old Cathedral)
• St. Louis Cathedral Basilica (New Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Archdiocese of St. Louis)
• The New Masonic Temple Monumental Masonic Temple in Midtown Saint Louis
• "Naked Truth" - memorial of the German-American Carl Schurz , Emil Preetorius and Carl Daenzer , who worked as publicists in St. Louis (sculpture by Wilhelm Wandschneider )
• Cahokia Mounds Earth Pyramids of the largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico; UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1982
• The Forest Park and its associated exhibition area of ​​the 1904 World's Fair.
• Scott Joplin House State Historic Site - home of ragtime composer Scott Joplin
• St. Louis Zoo

Music culture

Saint Louis is home to the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra , founded in 1880 , which has received six Grammy Awards in the course of its history and has been nominated for a total of 56 times. The Opera Theater of Saint Louis will be hosted in 1976.

Jazz musicians Clark Terry , Miles Davis , Oliver Nelson and Grant Green grew up here .

Rock 'n' roll pioneer Chuck Berry is from Saint Louis. In 1958 Tina Turner began singing in the band Kings of Rhythm by East St. Louis-based Ike Turner .

In the 1990s, country singers became famous such as Uncle Tupelo and The Bottle Rockets. Back then, the rise of rapper Nelly (2000), the Saint Lunatics, Murphy Lees, Chingys, J-Kwons and Ebony Eyezs made Saint Louis one of the world centers of rap and hip hop . The city is therefore often mentioned in connection with New York City , Atlanta , Los Angeles and Detroit .

The white actor and musician Jim Byrnes , who lives in Canada and is known for his role as Joe Dawson in the television series Highlander and his music influenced by gospel and blues ( House of Refuge , 2007), comes from St. Louis Prog metal band Anacrusis as well as Dylan Brady , Ravenna Golden and Lewis Grant, who make experimental hip-hop.

Personalities

→ Main article : List of personalities of the city of St. Louis

Town twinning

St. Louis, Missouri has 16 twin cities

city	country	since
Bogor	Java, Indonesia	2004
Bologna	Emilia-Romagna, Italy	1987
Brčko	Bosnia and Herzegovina	2008
Donegal	Ulster, Ireland	1994
Galway	Connacht, Ireland	1977
Georgetown	Demerara-Mahaica, Guyana	1990
Lyon	Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France	1976
Nanjing	Huadong, People's Republic of China	1979
Rosario	Santa Fe, Argentina	2017
Saint-Louis	Senegal	1994
Samara	Volga, Russia	1992
San Luis Potosí	Mexico
Szczecin	West Pomerania, Poland	1992
Stuttgart	Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany	1960
Suwa	Chūbu, Japan	1974
Wuhan	Zhongnan, People's Republic of China	1994

Climate table

St. Louis, Missouri
Climate diagram
J F. M. A. M. J J A. S. O N D.     46   3 -6     54   6th -4     91   13th 2     89   19th 8th     101   25th 13th     95   30th 19th     98   32 21     72   31 20th     79   27 16     68   20th 9     83   13th 3     77   5 -3 Temperature in ° C ,  precipitation in mm Source: National Weather Service, US Dept of Commerce ; wetterkontor.de

Average monthly temperatures and rainfall for St. Louis, Missouri Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Max. Temperature ( ° C ) 3.2 5.9 12.6 19.4 24.5 29.6 31.8 30.7 26.6 20.3 12.6 5.4 O 18.6 Min. Temperature (° C) −6.2 −3.8 1.9 8.0 13.3 18.7 21.3 19.9 15.8 9.1 3.2 −3.3 O 8.2 Precipitation ( mm ) 46.0 53.8 90.9 88.9 100.8 94.5 97.8 72.4 79.2 68.1 83.3 77.0 Σ 952.7 Hours of sunshine ( h / d ) 5.2 5.6 6.4 7.5 8.6 9.7 10.0 8.7 7.9 6.7 4.7 4.2 O 7.1 Rainy days ( d ) 6.0 6.2 9.1 9.1 8.5 7.9 7.1 6.2 6.6 6.6 7.3 7.4 Σ 88 Humidity ( % ) 73 72 68 64 67 67 68 70 72 69 72 76 O 69.8 Source: National Weather Service, US Dept of Commerce ; wetterkontor.de

See also

• 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis
• Greater St. Louis
• Metro East
• Pruitt-Igoe
• List of entries on the National Register of Historic Places in St. Louis

literature

• Patricia Cleary: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: A History of Colonial St. Louis. University of Missouri Press, Columbia 2011, ISBN 978-0-8262-1913-8 .
• Jonathan Franzen's novel The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) deals with the decline of the city of St. Louis in the 20th century. His bestseller The Corrections (2001) is also partly based on St. Louis (called "St Jude" in the novel).
• St. Louis . In: The Gazebo . 1854, p. 10–11 ( full text [ Wikisource ]).

Web links

Commons : St. Louis, Missouri  - Collection of pictures, videos, and audio files

• St. Louis City Government
• Explore St. Louis (tourist information)
• Lasting Impressions: German-Americans in St. Louis
• St. Louis German clubs
• St. Louis County Government
• Pictorial St.Louis large city panorama from 1875

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Accepted Challenges to Vintage 2006 Population Estimates from the US Census Bureau.
2. ↑ MorganQuitno: Safest and Most Dangerous Cities in the United States ( January 29, 2012 memento on WebCite )
3. ↑ https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21720664-addition-countrys-highest-murder-rate-city-boasts-vibrant-start-up
4. ↑ NGO CCSP-JP from Mexico: The 50 Most Dangerous Cities in the World
5. ↑ Liguest, Pierre Laclede ( Memento of 3 November 2013, Internet Archive ) In: Kansas A Cyclopedia of State History. Vol. II; Chicago 1912
6. ↑ Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) statue . Retrieved July 28, 2020.
7. ↑ "Washington, DC Tops American City Flags Survey" ( August 23, 2011 memento on WebCite ), North American Vexillological Association press release, October 2, 2004
8. ^ US Census Bureau: Search Results. Retrieved November 8, 2017 (American English). 
9. ↑ Quickfacts: St. Louis (English) ( Memento from September 12, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
10. ↑ Quickfacts: Missouri (English) ( Memento of August 14, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
11. ↑ Listing of National Historic Landmarks by State: Missouri . National Park Service , accessed February 5, 2018.
12. ↑ https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Gruener-Nebel-Rote-Wolke-Schnelle-Braeune-3395903.html
13. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento from September 27, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
14. ↑ Der Standard , October 2017 [1]
15. ^ US Department of Commerce, BEA, Bureau of Economic Analysis: Bureau of Economic Analysis. Retrieved July 4, 2018 (American English). 
16. ↑ St. Louis, MO-IL Economy at a Glance. Retrieved July 5, 2018 . 
17. ↑ Mercer's 2018 Quality of Living Rankings. Retrieved August 18, 2018 . 
18. ↑ https://www.transtats.bts.gov/airports.asp?pn=1&Airport=BLV&Airport_Name=Belleville,%20IL:%20Scott%20AFB/MidAmerica&carrier=FACTS
19. ^ Gateway Arch Riverfront
20. ↑ The Muny
21. ^ Charles Farley: Soul of the Man. Bobby “Blue” Bland. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2011, ISBN 978-1-60473-919-0 , p. 250 (English).
22. ↑ St Louis Sister Cities Program ǀ World Trade Center St Louis. Retrieved May 8, 2021 . 
23. ↑ Sister towns of St Louis ( Memento from December 15, 2014 in the Internet Archive )