Southern or Midwestern? (St. Louis, Springfield, Columbia: condos, buy, public school)

[anduarto]

Originally Posted by aragx6

Actually the city is gaining residents for the first time since 1950.

And isn't that a TREMENDOUS thing to be able to say! For years the mentality among many St. Louisans was that the city would always bleed, the trend would never reverse. 5K isn't that much but it's a wonderful turn in the right direction.

Isn't the dip in St. Louis Co. population due more to people moving even further out? On my last visit, I was stunned by how much places like St. Charles and St. Peters had mushroomed.

It's always mystified me that so much of the core city would sit vacant while developers continued to tear up the surrounding countryside. Let's hope that 5K turns into 10, 25, 100K. There's plenty of room.

[aragx6]

I think you're definitely right about people moving further out to places like O'Fallon where they can get a 4 bedroom, 2500 sq/ft new construction for under 200k.

But I don't see this trend lasting all that long to be perfectly honest for 2 reasons:

1. Gas - it's only going to go up. Hell I just read prices will be at $4/gallon in many places by summer. right now it's probably only the poor who are truly affected by this, but soon it will be everyone, and suddenly living 40 miles from the city won't seem like such a good idea.

2. Population age - A lot of Americans are getting old. The baby boomers- who were really the first kids to be raised in the 'burbs - won't be around forever, nor will they be able to live independently forever. Younger Americans on the other hand, from what I've seen, are sick of the suburbs. I have 5 or 6 friends who live in St. Louis city (or U City, which is damn close) that just graduated college. I don't think that would have happened 30 years ago.

[ajf131]

Originally Posted by stx12499

There are plenty of rednecks in Missouri. Locals refer to them as Hoosiers. STL has many rednecks outside the city, just like Louisville. The two cities are very similar river cities and have a similar catholic German-Irish culture, eclectic historic areas, and wonderful architecture. You must know that STL has always been larger than Louisville, and even historically STL was a top five city and Louisville was top 15 in population. The main difference between the two cities is sheer size:STL has twice the suburbs and thus twice the metro area. Other than that I find them very similar in culture and vibe.

They don't have anything in common culturally. That much I can positively state without a doubt. And if you want to get technical about it, Ohio has a lot of rednecks too, especially in the Southeast part of it in the Appalachian foothills. Also, if these rednecks that you speak of exist, I've never encountered them around the St. Louis area. Not once. And I go to Franklin and Jefferson County all the time. Louisville is culturally Southern. St. Louis is culturally Midwestern. St. Louis is much more similar to Cincinnati than it is to Louisville. No question about it. When I was in Louisville I felt virtually no similarity to St. Louis. Completely different people and atmosphere. The two have historical links to each other though. I won't deny that. But in the Great Migration, St. Louis gained a great deal of population as blacks migrated up from the South. Louisville, by contrast, lost this population. Also, industrially and economically the two cities are VERY different. Indiana has plenty of dem Hoosiers too hehehe, they just don't live in the hills because Indiana has none. Rednecks don't make a state Southern at all, in fact most of the so-called rednecks of Missouri that I've met don't even really have a Southern accent...there are rednecks in Pennsylvania and Upstate New York for crying out loud. And Missouri doesn't have nearly as many as Kentucky or Tennessee.

[ajf131]

Originally Posted by stx12499

You didn't look hard enough then...and not to turn this to a city versus city thread, but the current state of Louisville's waterfront is infinitely nicer than that in STL. Maybe it was different when you lived in Louisville, but boy has that changed. STL has nothing like this park on the river:
Welcome to Waterfront Park!

As for the German/Irish heritage of the city, you can look that up just as easily. Here are just a few of the historic Irish/German areas, which of course look much different today as do similar areas of STL:

Butchertown, Louisville - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Germantown, Louisville - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Irish Hill, Louisville - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Limerick, Louisville - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Courier-Journal.com: Places in Time


In fact, it looks like the city was 14% German by the end of the Civil War...it never had the make up of your typical "southern" city....which is why the place is an anomaly today. KY is decidedly a southern state, but calling Louisville an exclusively southern city is not at all correct. I have traveled all around STL, and I see Louisville's urban neighborhoods as being very similar to those in STL, albeit on a smaller scale.

That may be somewhat true, but when I was in Louisville sweet tea was available at every restaurant, and all I heard were mainly Southern accents. It felt Southern too at least to me. It doesn't feel as Southern as Nashville, but it certainly did not feel a lot like St. Louis, Cincinnati, or Indianapolis to me. The attitude of the people and the culture and overall appearance of the city reminded me more of Nashville. Louisville is basically a Southern city with some Midwestern characteristics. I guess its location on the Ohio River and its being only 110 miles south of Indianapolis does allow for a pretty decent argument for its being Midwestern or Southern...same thing with Lexington, Kentucky, which is less than 100 miles south of Cincinnati.

[kshe95girl]

no one seems to have touched on the great grits debate yet.........

[aragx6]

I had a cousin from Atlanta who got into an argument with a Denny's waitress in St. Louis because the poor waitress had never heard of grits. I tried to explain to said cousin that this was pretty typical and she was at a loss. To her it was like Denny's telling her they didn't know what pancakes or coffee were.

[kshe95girl]

Originally Posted by kshe95girl

no one seems to have touched on the great grits debate yet.........

Originally Posted by aragx6

I had a cousin from Atlanta who got into an argument with a Denny's waitress in St. Louis because the poor waitress had never heard of grits. I tried to explain to said cousin that this was pretty typical and she was at a loss. To her it was like Denny's telling her they didn't know what pancakes or coffee were.

LOL, my point exactly! If ya cant get grits, ya must not be in the south! One has to go down to about Sikeston to get grits or sweet tea.
Growing up in Sainte Genevieve, the grocer would look at my mom like she had 2 heads when she asked for grits, and my friends thought it strange that iced tea came already sweetened in our house..... mom is from SE Mo.

[aragx6]

The only place I knew of to get grits in Columbia when I went to school there was actually the Asian grocery store and it came in these giant dog food sized bags!

[STLCardsBlues1989]

My Dad eats grits sometimes, but I'm not sure where he gets them.

There's a rap group called Grits as well.

[ajf131]

Stx mentioned Louisville as being 14% German. That is a very small amount of German descent. Compare that to St. Louis, which at one time had 46% of the children who attended public schools as being from German descent. Louisville is light GErman...St. Louis is HEAVILY German. In addition, except for a few patches, namely South Central and Southeast Missouri, (the Ozark area starting around Rolla and going a bit to the east and west as well as to the South) which are a jumble of German and Scotch/Irish and maybe some British, the majority of Missouri counties, including those where most of the population of Missouri resides, have people of German descent as the largest group in them, which is again a Midwestern characteristic. Kentucky, like the rest of the south, does not have people with German ancestors dominating any of its counties...maybe one or two, that's it.