The hardest-hit areas of the city were the fashionable Lafayette Square and Compton Heights neighborhoods, as well as the poorer Mill Creek Valley.

Weather forecasters at the time lacked technology sufficient to predict tornadoes (then commonly called "cyclones") of this magnitude,[4] but they could anticipate strong storm systems.

Around noon, the clouds began to appear more ominous and the barometric pressure dropped, alarming those who knew this was an indication of a tornado.

At least 137 people died as the tornado traversed the core of the downtown area, leaving a continuous, 1-mile-wide (1.6 km) swath of destroyed homes, schools, saloons, factories, mills, churches, parks, and railroad yards in its wake.

Numerous trees were downed at the 36-acre (0.15 km2) Lafayette Park, and a barometer recorded a drop to 26.74 inHg (906 hPa at this location.

Uncounted others may have died on boats on the river, which would have swept their bodies downriver where they could not be recorded in the official death toll.

Within an hour of the tornado striking, 32 members were on duty with ambulances and hospital corps to assist in rescue operations and to help victims.

Today, this would be equivalent to almost $5.3 billion dollars worth of damage, making it potentially the costliest tornado on record.

In the wake of highly sensationalized local, national, and international news coverage of the St. Louis tornado, over 140,000 sightseers flocked to inspect the damaged areas.

The cyclone permanently altered the course of residential, commercial, and industrial development in the most heavily damaged areas of the city.

[10][11] Political reverberations came in the 1897 city elections, when middle-class reform candidates were decisively defeated by a coalition supported largely by the German vote in heavily impacted neighborhoods.