History of St. Louis

With its connection through the Ohio River to the east, the Mississippi to the south and north, and the Missouri to the west, St. Louis was ideally located to become the main base of interregional trade.

After the war, federal highway subsidies and postwar development encouraged outward migration as residents moved to gain newer housing; this suburbanization significantly reduced the city's middle-class population.

The city made efforts to create new attractions, such as the Gateway Arch, which construction became a focus of the civil rights movement to gain desegregated jobs in the skilled trades.

The earliest settlements in the middle Mississippi Valley were built in the 10th century by the people of the Mississippian culture, who constructed more than two dozen platform mounds within the area of the future European-American city.

[4][5] Nine years later, French explorer La Salle led an expedition south from the Illinois River to the mouth of the Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico, claiming the entire valley for France.

[11][12] French settlers began to arrive from settlements on the east bank of the Mississippi in 1764, given the transfer of eastern land to Great Britain after the Treaty of Paris.

[30] In spite of the failure of their expedition, the Indians managed to torch much of St. Louis' agricultural lands and capture several heads of livestock, alongside several prisoners of war.

[32] After the conclusion of the Revolutionary War at the Treaty of Paris, French Creole families evading American rule moved to the Spanish-controlled land on the west bank, including wealthy merchants Charles Gratiot, Sr. and Gabriel Cerre.

[41] The population of the city expanded slowly after the Louisiana Purchase, but expansion increased desire to incorporate St. Louis as a town, allowing it to create local ordinances without the approval of the territorial legislature.

Using the engineering planning of Robert E. Lee, levees were constructed on the Illinois side to direct water toward Missouri to eliminate sand bars that threatened the landing.

[108] Among this new class of leaders was Frank P. Blair Jr., who led an effort to create a local militia loyal to the Union after Missouri Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson hinted about secession.

[109] This local militia allied itself with the Union army forces at Jefferson Barracks under the leadership of Nathaniel Lyon, which on May 10, 1861, cleared a Confederate encampment outside the city in what became known as the Camp Jackson Affair.

[169] A ban on burning low-quality coal solved the problem in December 1939, and the addition of natural gas for heating assisted homeowners in making the transition to cleaner fuels by the late 1940s.

[172] Although St. Louis enforced a variety of Jim Crow laws, the area generally had a lower level of racial violence and fewer lynchings than the American South.

[174][175] The ordinance quickly was invalidated by court injunctions, but private restrictive covenants in St. Louis real estate transactions limited the ability of white owners to sell to blacks and were another form of racial discrimination.

[177] Leonidas C. Dyer, who represented part of St. Louis in the U.S. House, led a Congressional investigation into the events and eventually sponsored an anti-lynching bill in response.

His actions are credited as being an early instance in modern medicine of social distancing and resulting in St. Louis having half the per capita death rate in comparison to other cities that took no measures.

[198] In May 1944, when a black sailor in uniform was refused service at a privately owned lunch counter, the action prompted peaceful sit-in protests at several downtown diners.

[198] No changes in Jim Crow segregation policies at lunch counters resulted, but Saint Louis University admitted its first black students starting in August 1944.

[202] The GI Bill allowed many St. Louis veterans to purchase homes and pursue higher education, which encouraged sub-urbanization that after the war reduced the city's population.

Extensive movement to these towns doubled the population of St. Louis County from 1910 to 1920, while due to restrictions on immigration and outward migration the city grew only 12 percent in the same period.

[217] The majority of people displaced from Mill Creek Valley were poor and African American, and they typically moved to historically stable, middle-class black neighborhoods such as The Ville.

[228] Regional planning advocates succeeded in the 1965 creation of the East–West Gateway Coordinating Council, a group given the power to approve or deny applications for federal aid from cities.

[231] However, Schoemehl developed two projects early in his three terms in office that assisted St. Louis: Operation Brightside provided city beautification through plantings and graffiti cleanup.

[232] Schoemehl also instituted a safety program to address crime, known as Operation SafeStreet, which blocked access to certain through streets and provided low-cost security measures to homeowners.

[235][236] In the 1970s, a lawsuit challenging this segregation led to a 1983 settlement agreement in which St. Louis County school districts agreed to accept black students from the city on a voluntary basis.

[247] New retail projects began to take shape: Amtrak abandoned Union Station as a passenger rail terminal in 1978, but in 1985, it reopened as a festival marketplace under the direction of Baltimore developer James Rouse.

[246] The same year, downtown developers opened St. Louis Centre, an enclosed four-story shopping mall costing $176 million with 150 stores and 1,500,000 square feet (140,000 m2) of retail space.

[261] According to an agreement in which the state and city would issue bonds for construction, the Cardinals agreed to build a multipurpose development known as St. Louis Ballpark Village on part of the site of Busch Memorial Stadium.

Many immigrants reported moving to St. Louis, particularly its south side Bevo Mill neighborhood, due to the low cost of living compared to other American cities.