CITY PROFILE:
St. Louey, MO: Gateway to the West

St. Louis is a wonderful city with a variety of great traditions and history. First of all the famous arch, which symbolizes the city's ancient role as gateway to the west. It is a national monument. It was a French fur settlement. They say Chicago bet on railroads, and St. Louis bet on steamboats. They were competing to be the gateway to the west. Chicago won, and that's why Chicago is now a metropolis of three million people, while St. Louis is much smaller. It's possible that their populations were similar in the early twentieth century.

Half the McDonald's logo, or Gateway to the West?

St. Louis has a literary past as well. It was home to several famous authors, such as T.S. Eliot, William S. Burroughs, Harold Brodkey, and Jeffrey Severs. They moved out to greener pastures after adolescence however. Probably other writers lived there as well (Mark Twain, etc.) The movie Trespass took place across the river in impoverished East St.Louis which had several well-publicized financial crises in years past. They had a football team move to Phoenix then took one from Anaheim. It is at the confluence of many major rivers, including the Missouri, Mississippi, and Illinois. It is the chief inland port of the Mississippi, more so than Memphis and again Chicago, with both of which it vies for the well-deserved title of "Home of the Blues." Citizens experienced much flooding during the rainy summer of 1995. The city recently within memory lost its French patois whichmany thought belonged only to New Orleans among the American cities.

Scholars continue to puzzle as to why all the St. Louis ex-literati developed one or more outlandish accents upon leaving the town which is the home of the world's wealthiest brewers, Anheuser-Busch, who built the Cardinals (baseball)'s stadium. St. Louis currently claims 350,000 residents or so within the city limits and a metro area of over two million (2,000,000). St. Louis figures prominently in one of William Faulkner's books where a preacher is sent to Jefferson from there and in the picture Arlington Rd.where a terrorist activity takes place that is falsely blamed on Tom Robbins's character.