Is St. Louis more like Missouri/KC or Illinois/Chicago? (population, metropolitan)
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The poll doesn't exactly agree with you... I know my answer, but neither city wise is one of the top choices when I think of cities most similar to St. Louis. State wise is another matter but as pointed out St. Louis doesn't get along with MO very well, but there's geographical similarities of course to parts of MO more.
St. Louis and Missouri are like Hong Kong and China. In it but lives by it's own rules and does it's own thing. Kansas City is very much Missouri, but doesn't have the metro population, GDP or the corporate fortune 500 companies. When it comes to Missouri, St. Louis leads the way and yet rebels at the same time
maybe this applies to when st. louis was pretty much the only population center in missouri, but it is not at all true now. in fact, i would say the opposite is true. st. louis was a big city before missouri was a state. the city was originally part of the illinois territory. today the city and its inner ring suburbs are at odds with most of the rest of missouri on pretty much everything. the culture couldn't be more different. i would say the culture and attitudes in st. louis clash with missouri more dramatically than any other relationship between a city and state in the usa.
Been to Pennsylvania?
St. Louis was never part of "the Illinois territory."
Illinois was part of the Northwest Territory, the first major expansion of the American nation.
Missouri, and most of what I call the "agricultural Midwest," was part of the Louisiana Purchase, the second and biggest of all the territorial expanxions.
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Originally Posted by Colts
Neither, but if I had to pick one, it'd be Missouri, because it's in Missouri. Why would it be like Illinois?
If anything, the part of Illinois that's near St. Louis is more affiliated with St. Louis than either Illinois or Missouri.
I don't think culture corresponds well to state lines. I also believe that most major cities have enough of their own identities to not necessarily be affiliated with their states. I think St. Louis is more related to other older independent river cities like Pittsburgh (or Cincinnati) and Baltimore as opposed to the culture of rural Missouri.
I'd second those who say that St. Louis and Baltimore have some notable similarities.
Their status as cities independent of any county is perhaps the most superficial of the similarities, but it is a noteworthy one.
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Originally Posted by slengel
politically, culturally and socially speaking, the city of st. louis is much more similar to chicago than it is to any other city in missouri. that doesn't necessarily make it more like illinois, but politics do color the atmosphere, and st. louis city and county are overwhemingly democratic, with powerful democratic machines dominating decision making, for better or worse. nowhere else in the state really operates that way.
(emphasis added)
I will grant that this is past, not present, but there were few political machines in the country that rivaled the Pendergast machine in Kansas City in its heyday. Boss Tom was as synonymous with KC as the Daleys would become with Chicago later. And for a while in the Depression, the Pendergast organization ran the state. Recall that when Missouri's only President entered the Senate, wags in Washington dubbed him "the Senator from Pendergast." (Which is somewhat ironic, given that he made his reputation within Jackson County on the basis of being somewhat apart from the machine: he built a 600-mile network of paved county highways, all of them concrete - but only 1/4 mile of them paved with concrete from Pendergast's cement company.)
And the older, Jackson County part of Kansas City is as heavily Democratic as St. Louis is. You may note that Kansas City political trends tend to follow those in St. Louis about four years or so later. But yes, Kansas City has a council-manager government and nonpartisan city elections.
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Originally Posted by lovekcmo
I think it's more like Michigan.
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Originally Posted by SPonteKC
HA. Keep telling yourself that.
I'm not sure the difference between Kansas City and St. Louis is as great as that between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but there is one - I refer to St. Louis as "the last great city of the East" and KC as "the first great city of the West".
Even though Chicago is firmly in the "industrial Midwest," it also has ties to the agricultural one - and in that sense you can find bits of Chicago in both Kansas City and St. Louis. But Chicago is truly sui generis among Midwestern cities.
Yeah, most clueless Easterners think Kansas City, Mo., is in Kansas. But there is still a sense in which what John Guinther said about the city back in 1948 is still true: Kansas City, Mo., is the capital of a state it's not even in. There is some rivalry between KC and St. Louis, but KC looks westward as much as it does eastward. And it's nothing at all like Dallas, save maybe for the character of its suburbs. It's Omaha's bigger brother.
Yeah, most clueless Easterners think Kansas City, Mo., is in Kansas. But there is still a sense in which what John Guinther said about the city back in 1948 is still true: Kansas City, Mo., is the capital of a state it's not even in. There is some rivalry between KC and St. Louis, but KC looks westward as much as it does eastward. And it's nothing at all like Dallas, save maybe for the character of its suburbs. It's Omaha's bigger brother.
And those "clueless" Easterners might be onto something. Johnson County on the Kansas side has nearly caught up to Jackson County on the Missouri side, having nearly tripled its population since 1980. The population of Jackson County, on the other hand, remains flat - though stable. That doesn't count adjacent counties on both sides that also have growth/loss stories, but it does tell a big story about the region as a whole. And the sphere of influence in Kansas City--though it hasn't moved necessarily to Kansas--does trickle over to Kansas in terms of population, economic clout, cultural/civic amenities, and residential construction.
And that means that as the sphere of influence in KC moves westward, and it starts to look more like a sprawly upmarket middle-America metropolis on the Plains than a gritty river-and-rail stockyards town, the comparisons to Dallas and Phoenix will be more appropriate.
As a new generation starts to reject the high prices of the so-called superstar cities mostly on the coasts, it will be really interesting to see if KC or St. Louis take hold as destination metros for the Millennials in the same way that cities like Spokane, Boise, and Pittsburgh are. And also if they can attract major employers from the technology sector. At the moment, KC seems further ahead in this regard.
Oh, and to answer the original question "is St. Louis more like Missouri/KC than Chicago/Illinois". Neither.
It's more like Missouri, period. But not like KC, which is the city that feels like it's from another state (which, as I argue, it increasingly is).
And those "clueless" Easterners might be onto something. Johnson County on the Kansas side has nearly caught up to Jackson County on the Missouri side, having nearly tripled its population since 1980. The population of Jackson County, on the other hand, remains flat - though stable. That doesn't count adjacent counties on both sides that also have growth/loss stories, but it does tell a big story about the region as a whole. And the sphere of influence in Kansas City--though it hasn't moved necessarily to Kansas--does trickle over to Kansas in terms of population, economic clout, cultural/civic amenities, and residential construction.
And that means that as the sphere of influence in KC moves westward, and it starts to look more like a sprawly upmarket middle-America metropolis on the Plains than a gritty river-and-rail stockyards town, the comparisons to Dallas and Phoenix will be more appropriate.
As a new generation starts to reject the high prices of the so-called superstar cities mostly on the coasts, it will be really interesting to see if KC or St. Louis take hold as destination metros for the Millennials in the same way that cities like Spokane, Boise, and Pittsburgh are. And also if they can attract major employers from the technology sector. At the moment, KC seems further ahead in this regard.
Oh, and to answer the original question "is St. Louis more like Missouri/KC than Chicago/Illinois". Neither.
It's more like Missouri, period. But not like KC, which is the city that feels like it's from another state (which, as I argue, it increasingly is).
Which is what Guinther said back in 1948. IOW, that's not new, really. In its heyday under editor-in-chief (and Republican kingmaker) Roy Roberts in the 1950s, The Kansas City Star was Kansas' most influential newspaper; its weekly edition (known internally as the "Weekly Star Farmer") was the only newspaper that truly circulated throughout the Sunflower State.
I think the more interesting story is the relative (and maybe absolute) decline of Wyandotte County as a center of regional importance. Kansas City, Kan., had been shedding population throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and while the creation of the Unified Government captured much of its suburban growth, I think that county's population remains stagnant or is actually in decline. I've long referred to KCK as "a little bit of the Rust Belt on the prairie."
Of note: Kansas City has the most evenly divided population of any bi-state metropolitan area in the United States. In most cases, the state containing the core city has two-thirds or more of the total metro population; in Kansas City, it's only 55 percent, and that gap will probably continue to shrink.
But to move this back to the topic: St. Louis is Missouri in a way Kansas City isn't. It may rebel against the rural part of the state, but that makes it like Philadelphia in the state I call home now. In both cases, the city and its region remain the chief economic engine of the state, though the balance in Missouri is less lopsided towards the one city than it is in Pennsylvania (the product mainly of the decline of steel in Pittsburgh; St. Louis too has experienced similar deindustrialization that has moved it closer to Kansas City in terms of economic clout and dropped the core city to second-largest in the state). How anyone could put it in or liken it to Illinois I find puzzling.
--MSE, summer reporting intern at The Kansas City Star, 1976 (the summer before I went off to college)
I think Kansas City feels more like Indianapolis than it feels like St. Louis.
St. Louis feels more like Cleveland and Cincinnatti than it feels like Kansas City.
That's because St Louis is rust belt, Kansas City (and Indianapolis) are not, and if anything they're more like sunbelt cities. St Louis is definitely the more industrial and older city of the two.
St. Louis is older than both KC and Chicago, so I don't think it really feels like either. The commonalities STL has with KC are pretty much limited to the fact that both are major cities trapped in an awful, anti-urban state. Other than that, they are as different as any two cities in the country. Chicago and St. Louis have a very strong connection dating back to Chicago's earliest days, but St. Louis has a decidedly river city culture vs. Chicago's Great Lakes influence. Overall I think St. Louisans seem to have more in common with Chicagoans, since they are both older industrial cities with a heavier eastern influence (and a lot bigger Jewish populations per capita). And there's this: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...i-anymore.html
St. Louis was never part of "the Illinois territory."
Illinois was part of the Northwest Territory, the first major expansion of the American nation.
Missouri, and most of what I call the "agricultural Midwest," was part of the Louisiana Purchase, the second and biggest of all the territorial expanxions.
You're correct, but the poster is probably thinking of France's Illinois Country rather than America's Illinois Territory. At one point St. Louis was in France's Illinois Country. Here's an old map from 1796 that even lists St. Louis as being in "Illinois." https://i.redd.it/yvcg6iarcnl31.jpg
Another thing is, Kansas City, St Louis, and Chicago are all in different subregions. Kansas City is basically in the plains, St Louis is in the Heartland, and Chicago is in the Great Lakes region. Honestly each area is different. Kansas City shares more in common with Kansas, Nebraska, and southwestern Iowa, while St Louis shares more in common with central and eastern Missouri, central and Southern Illinois, and even the far western portion of Tennessee. Chicago shares more in common with Wisconsin and Michigan.
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