It is 7:30 AM and I’m sitting in The Hotel St. Louis, Autograph Collection. I don’t know what “Autograph collection” means but assume it is a marketing technique to make a hotel seem fancier than it is.
This is my first time in St. Louis as well as this part of the country. Prior to this trip I’ve never been to what I’d call ‘the middle of the US.’ Aside from Dallas, that means I’ve never set foot anywhere between Indianapolis to the east and Colorado to the west.
Here are a few of my thoughts:
When I think of St. Louis I think of the early days of America: the frontier, the starting point for Lewis and Clark, fur traders, that sort of thing. Flying in, I noticed there were plenty of large patches of forest where normally I’d just see a lot of farmland. That made me think back to the frontier days when the entire area would have been covered with trees that would have stretched to the horizon; a seemingly infinite forest.
I try to visualize what that immense forest must have seemed like. I’ve learned that Native Americans actively shaped their environment and cleared hundreds of acres for their settlements but beyond that the world must have seemed like an endless forest. Another way I try to picture it is how many hikers lost and into serious trouble when they step off the path in a national forest, some even die. Well, that’s just a national forest which, while enormous to us today, is just a small drop in the sea of forest that would have been before the European arrival. Our landscape now is so covered by settlement and farm that I find it difficult to imagine this infinite forest and what the world would have seemed like to the Native Americans. I remain fascinated that over thousands of years humanity traveled through those forests, deserts, mountains to populate the entirety of the USA and how they eventually became separate tribes with different languages. Now, here I am flying through the air, looking at a landscape that has mostly forgotten its past.
Then I see the St. Louis arch, a monument built to specifically remember the past! Thanks to ChatGPT I could easily ask what the meaning of it was and on top of that, the origin of the name St. Louis.
Side note: I remain fascinated that I can just ask ChatGPT something and immediately learn the answer. When I was growing up, if I wanted to know something I’d have to ask my parents or a teacher. If they didn’t know then I just forgot the question. Yes, I could go to the library and possibly look in an encyclopedia but let’s be real, nobody ever really did that, especially for the hundreds of questions that randomly pop into a kids mind. Things became easier with Google but you’d still have to search a bit and you might not have your question answered to your satisfaction without a lot of digging. With ChatGPT I can just ask it and carry on a dialogue with follow up questions. It is both amazing and scary.
Returning to the St. Louis Arch, I learned it is called “The Gateway to the West.” I imagine those frontiersmen facing what they’d imagine to be an enormous expanse of infinite forest, infinite desert, impassible mountains, an entirely undiscovered world untouched and unknown by Europeans. Fast forward a few centuries and I’ve just flown over all of that in a few hours from the furthest reaches of that great expanse from a place called San Francisco. Something ordinary to us would be bewildering and incomprehensible to a frontiersman. Perhaps a comparable event for us would be someone teleporting here from Alpha Centauri.
Coming into downtown I was struck by how many abandoned buildings there are. Again, I asked ChatGPT and learned about the “Great Divorce” in 1876. In summary, the city wanted to separate from the country as city leaders felt the country was dragging them down politically and economically. Therefore, with a vote they separated St. Louis City from St. Louis County. This was great for a little while until the tables were turned with ‘white flight’ (racism as always) from the city to the suburbs. The city of St. Louis had their tax base plummet with population and business decline and they’d ‘divorced’ the country so were not entitled to all that tax revenue of the newly flourishing suburbs. This is a problem that they’ve tried to rectify over the century but now it is the suburbs who do not want the city!
The only exception and form of cooperation that is apparent is ‘Ballpark village’ where the St. Louis Cardinals play. This is a beautiful area with shops, restaurants and what you’d expect from city planning gone correctly. We went to the last game of the season (versus the Brewers) and the area was bustling. However, the old problem of that divorce soon become very apparent as once the game ended people got in their cars and returned to their suburbs quickly making that previously busling and lively area turn into a ghost town.
It was on the walk back from the ballpark and after taking a detour to see the arch we realized the extent of the decay. Many huge buildings were completely abandoned, covered by graffiti and had windows broken out. This was sad because some of those buildings had beautiful masonry and decoration that isn’t done anymore due to cost. St. Louis was supposed to rival Chicago and New York but to this day cannot get over that disastrous decision of 1876.
One other item I asked ChatGPT was regarding the name origin of this city. Having traveled quite a bit and being very familiar with the history and langauge of France I was quite certain St. Louis would have been named after a French king. What I didn’t understand was, why the ‘Saint?’ I didn’t know any kings were canonized and so I learned even more about this city.
Louis IX (1214–1270) was a medieval French king, famous for his piety, crusades, and reforms. He was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1297 — one of the few kings to become a saint. By naming the new settlement St. Louis, the founders were both honoring the reigning king’s royal line (Louis XV) and invoking a revered patron saint of France.
The time is now 8:30 AM but with jet lag my body believes it to be 6:30 AM. I’ll leave off by mentioning that when my normal schedule is disrupted, usually due to travel, something unordinary always happens. This time it was an earthquake back in the Bay Area where posters are saying it is was the largest one they’ve felt in a while. I’m starting to think that if I hadn’t left San Francisco the earthquake would have just waited until I decided to take another trip.
