The Gateway to the West — where Eero Saarinen's 630-foot stainless steel arch frames the Mississippi River and the American frontier, Anheuser-Busch brewed the beer that became synonymous with America in a Baroque brick brewery complex that tours daily, blues and ragtime drifted north from the Delta, and Forest Park (500 acres larger than Central Park) still houses five of the finest free museums in the United States
St. Louis (290,000; metro 2.8 million) is Missouri's largest city and one of the most historically significant cities in the American interior — the departure point for the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804), the 1904 World's Fair and Summer Olympic Games (the first Olympics held in the Americas), and the city where Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch (completed 1965, 630 feet, the tallest man-made monument in the Western Hemisphere) defines the Mississippi River skyline. Forest Park (1,371 acres — larger than Central Park, 1,371 acres vs. Central Park's 843 acres) was the site of the 1904 World's Fa…
The confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, 15 miles north of present-day St. Louis, was among the most important sites in pre-Columbian North America — Cahokia (across the river in present-day Illinois) was, at its peak around 1100 CE, the largest city north of Mexico with an estimated 20,000 inhabitants and a central mound (Monks Mound) larger at its base than the Great Pyramid of Giza. French fur trader Pierre Laclède Liguest established St. Louis in 1764 as a fur-trading post, naming it after King Louis IX of France (the crusading medieval saint). The Louisiana Purchase (1803)…