St. Louis

St. Louis was the place people left from. Everything moving west between the 1840s and the 1870s came through here to be outfitted, and the levee photographs from that period show steamboats moored four and five deep along a mile of riverfront.

The Eads Bridge changed it. Finished in 1874, it was the first bridge to cross the Mississippi at St. Louis and the longest arch bridge in the world, built of steel at a time when steel was not trusted for structures. James Eads had never built a bridge. He had built ironclads and salvaged wrecks, and he knew the river bottom better than anyone alive. To prove the bridge safe he sent an elephant across, on the theory that animals will not step onto unsound structures.

The caisson work sank piers a hundred feet to bedrock and killed fifteen men from decompression sickness, which was not then understood. Eads' physician documented it and produced some of the first serious medical work on the condition.

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 was the largest World's Fair ever held — twelve hundred acres, twenty million visitors, and the Olympic Games held alongside it. The buildings were staff, a plaster and fiber composite, and were demolished afterward except the Palace of Fine Arts, which is the art museum today. The photographs show a city of white palaces around lagoons that existed for seven months.

The fair is credited with popularizing the ice cream cone, iced tea and the hot dog, none of which is quite true and all of which is repeated. What is true is that the fair introduced most Americans to their first personal encounter with electricity at scale.

Anheuser-Busch built the brewery complex in the 1860s and the buildings — brick, ornamented, industrial — are photographed as often as anything in the city. The Brew House of 1892 has a clock tower and looks like a cathedral, deliberately.

Around seven hundred and fifty images name St. Louis.

The Mining Camp That Bought Itself a Gold Dome