Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
St. Louis is right up there. One of the reasons people are so impressed when they visit St. Louis is because red brick mama was laid out and zoned to be a truly world class city. Check out this stained glass window located in the amazing St. Louis Union Station.
New York, St. Louis, San Francisco
A most impressive feature of the Grand Hall is the "Allegorical Window," a hand-made stained glass window with hand-cut Tiffany glass strategically positioned above the Station's main entryway. The window features three women representing the main U.S. train stations during the 1890s -- New York, St. Louis and San Francisco.
St. Louis is right up there. One of the reasons people are so impressed when they visit St. Louis is because red brick mama was laid out and zoned to be a truly world class city. [/url]
The place has an excellent location on Two Major Rivers, smack dab in the middle of the country. You figure it would be a world class city by now.
The place has an excellent location on Two Major Rivers, smack dab in the middle of the country. You figure it would be a world class city by now.
So what happened?
The city grew from 5,000 in 1830 to 160,000 in 1860 to 450,000 in 1890 to 773,000 in 1920.
Its growth in the 1800's was due to its excellent location as the main port of the Midwest. As the middle of the country grew from nothing to tens of millions of people, St. Louis was a huge transfer point of goods. At a time it was actually the second largest port in the USA.
As railroads grew, coupled with the Midwest becoming "established", there wasn't the huge rush into the region there had been before. The steamboat trade died away, and the railroads chose Chicago as the main hub. The city's huge base of manufacturing (raw goods come in on boats, finished goods left the city) declined during the 20th century, and that's why you see St. Louis today as a fairly healthy metro, but one that doesn't grow too fast.
I think people put too much emphasis on the city of St. Louis itself's population as a measure of the area. The city is something like 60 square miles since it split off from the main county back in the 1800's. That was a short lived idea though, as the 1950's came and hundreds of thousands of people jumped across the border and set up in the suburbs.
Metro St. Louis is doing just fine. It's the 10% of people who live in the city that get all the "DECLINE" image.
Really? Detroit, the "Motor City" grew post car? That's surprising when you look at the map of the city, as it is completely on a grid, and looks like it was designed specifically with cars in mind. Also, what about Pittsburgh? I thought that grew at a similar time as Cleveland.
Well Chicago is the largest grid in the world, and it had 1,700,000 people when cars were invented, 2,700,000 people when they started being mass produced, and 3,600,000 people in the 1950's, when the average family REALLY started buying cars en-mass.
Detroit grew from 500,000 to 1,900,000 from around 1910 when cars started rolling off the lines until the city peaked in 1950. The people of Detroit though really couldn't afford cars until the 1950's though, when they started becoming extremely common for an average family. Ownership rose during the 1920's, but then everything stopped in the 1930's and 1940's because of depression and war.
I think the 1950's and 1960's really show pre and post car cities. Cities that stopped growing and shrank did so because people got cars and moved out to the new suburbs. Before that everyone was closer to the center so they could be near places they needed to go. You could walk to many things, or take trains/trams if you were going to work or shopping.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
