St. Louis Then and Now®

St. Louis Then and Now®
Author: Elizabeth McNulty
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-05-01
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1911216457

St. Louis Then and Now is a captivating chronicle of history and change. It pairs photographs over a century old with specially commissioned views of the same scenes as they exist today to show the evolution of St. Louis from the pioneers’ "Gateway to the West" to a thriving and dynamic city of the 21st century.Established by French fur-trader Pierre Laclede in 1764 and named in honor of the patron saint of France, St. Louis was in its earliest days a trading outpost near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Laclede showed remarkable foresight, pronouncing that "by its locality and central position," St. Louis was to become "one of the finest of cities." His vision was accurate: with the advantages of a natural sand levee and sheltering limestone bluffs, the central "city by the river" grew rapidly over the following decades. After Jefferson purchased the western territories, including St. Louis, from the French in 1804, the town became one of the busiest of American cities during the period of western expansion. St. Louis was the "Gateway to the West," chief provisioner and jumping-off point for westward-bound explorers, adventurers, and gold prospectors.The following centuries have seen St. Louis grow inexorably into Laclede’s "finest of cities." Its location on the Mississippi, once jammed with the fabulous steamboats that brought Mark Twain to the city, and its heritage as a heartland of ragtime, jazz, and blues music have given St. Louis a distinctive flavor that today blends the quaint and historic with the modern.Sites include: SS Admiral, Eads Bridge, the Levee, the Gateway Arch, Old Courthouse, the Garment District, Union Station, City Hall, Soulard Market, Anheuser-Busch Brewery, Missouri Botanical Gardens, St. Louis University, the Theater District, Sportsman’s Park, the 1904 World’s Fair, St. Louis Art Museum, Cathedral of St. Louis

The Broken Heart of America

The Broken Heart of America
Author: Walter Johnson
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 502
Release: 2020-04-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1541646061

A searing portrait of the racial dynamics that lie inescapably at the heart of our nation, told through the turbulent history of the city of St. Louis. From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal. But it was once also America's most radical city, home to anti-capitalist immigrants, the Civil War's first general emancipation, and the nation's first general strike—a legacy of resistance that endures. A blistering history of a city's rise and decline, The Broken Heart of America will forever change how we think about the United States.

Lost Treasures of St. Louis

Lost Treasures of St. Louis
Author: Cameron Collins
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-05
Genre: Business enterprises
ISBN: 9781681060477

"A kaleidoscope of bygone places, events, and items once identified with the Gateway City, Lost treasures of St. Louis captures the essence of cherished times that still resonate with St. Louisans. Celebrate dancing to Ike and Tina at the Club Imperial, Bowling for Dollars at the Arena, taking in movies at Ronnie's Drive-In, and myriad other pastimes enjoyed through the years ... Gone but not forgotten, all of the subjects featured will elicit nostalgia and reveal how the past has shaped our city"--Page 4 of cover.

St. Louis

St. Louis
Author: Joe Sonderman
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 34
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780738561097

Contains captioned, archival photographs that trace the history of the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Missouri, from the groundbreaking to the closing ceremonies.

My Squirrel Days

My Squirrel Days
Author: Ellie Kemper
Publisher: Scribner
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2019-07-02
Genre: Humor
ISBN: 1501163353

Comedian and star of The Office and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and host of The Great American Baking Show Ellie Kemper delivers a hilarious, refreshing, and inspiring collection of essays “teeming with energy and full of laugh-out-loud moments” (Associated Press). “A pleasure. Ellie Kemper is the kind of stable, intelligent, funny, healthy woman that usually only exists in yogurt commercials. But she’s real and she’s all ours!” —Tina Fey “Ellie is a hilarious and talented writer, although we’ll never know how much of this book the squirrel wrote.”—Mindy Kaling Meet Ellie, the best-intentioned redhead next door. You’ll laugh right alongside her as she shares tales of her childhood in St. Louis, whether directing and also starring in her family holiday pageant, washing her dad’s car with a Brillo pad, failing to become friends with a plump squirrel in her backyard, eating her feelings while watching PG-13 movies, or becoming a “sports monster” who ends up warming the bench of her Division 1 field hockey team in college. You’ll learn how she found her comedic calling in the world of improv, became a wife, mother and New Yorker, and landed the role of a bridesmaid (while simultaneously being a bridesmaid) in Bridesmaids. You’ll get to know and love the comic, upbeat, perpetually polite actress playing Erin Hannon on The Office, and the exuberant, pink-pants-wearing star of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. If you’ve ever been curious about what happens behind the scenes of your favorite shows, what it really takes to be a soul cycle “warrior,” how to recover if you accidentally fall on Doris Kearns Goodwin or tell Tina Fey on meeting her for the first time that she has “great hair—really strong and thick,” this is your chance to find out. But it’s also a laugh-out-loud primer on how to keep a positive outlook in a world gone mad and how not to give up on your dreams. Ellie “dives fully into each role—as actor, comedian, writer, and also wife and new mom—with an electric dedication, by which one learns to reframe the picture, and if not exactly become a glass-half-full sort of person, at least become able to appreciate them” (Vogue.com).

Mapping Decline

Mapping Decline
Author: Colin Gordon
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2014-09-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812291506

Once a thriving metropolis on the banks of the Mississippi, St. Louis, Missouri, is now a ghostly landscape of vacant houses, boarded-up storefronts, and abandoned factories. The Gateway City is, by any measure, one of the most depopulated, deindustrialized, and deeply segregated examples of American urban decay. "Not a typical city," as one observer noted in the late 1970s, "but, like a Eugene O'Neill play, it shows a general condition in a stark and dramatic form." Mapping Decline examines the causes and consequences of St. Louis's urban crisis. It traces the complicity of private real estate restrictions, local planning and zoning, and federal housing policies in the "white flight" of people and wealth from the central city. And it traces the inadequacy—and often sheer folly—of a generation of urban renewal, in which even programs and resources aimed at eradicating blight in the city ended up encouraging flight to the suburbs. The urban crisis, as this study of St. Louis makes clear, is not just a consequence of economic and demographic change; it is also the most profound political failure of our recent history. Mapping Decline is the first history of a modern American city to combine extensive local archival research with the latest geographic information system (GIS) digital mapping techniques. More than 75 full-color maps—rendered from census data, archival sources, case law, and local planning and property records—illustrate, in often stark and dramatic ways, the still-unfolding political history of our neglected cities.

Secret St. Louis: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure

Secret St. Louis: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure
Author: David Baugher
Publisher: Reedy Press LLC
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2016-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1681060396

Where in St. Louis can you… …picnic at a radioactive waste dump? …learn what West County Center’s famous dove really represents? …visit the grave of the man who burned Atlanta? …join a nudist resort? …view a cube comprised of a million dollar bills? …see a piece from New York’s Twin Towers? …find out exactly what a Billiken is? Whether you are piloting a simulated barge on the Mississippi River, exploring the hidden history of Abraham Lincoln’s bizarre swordfight in St. Charles County or eating a ten-pound apple-pie in Kimmswick inspired by the Great Flood of 1993, it is hard to get bored with a copy of Secret St. Louis: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure. By turns wistful and whimsical, this is a book which answers the questions you never knew you had about St. Louis while taking readers on a whirlwind tour through 97 unique but often little-known spaces and places that can’t be found anywhere else. A tourist handbook for people who thought they never needed one, “Secret St. Louis” provides a scavenger hunt of hidden gems traversing the somber, strange, surprising and silly locales which define the culture and history that make St. Louis such a diverse and amazing place to call home. From Weldon Spring to Wildwood, from Overland to O’Fallon, from Bellefontaine to Bridgeton, this is an exploration of St. Louis’s odds and ends like no other.

The Last Children of Mill Creek

The Last Children of Mill Creek
Author: Vivian Gibson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781948742641

Vivian Gibson grew up in Mill Creek, a neighborhood of St. Louis razed in 1955 to build a highway. Her family, friends, church community, and neighbors were all displaced by urban renewal. In this moving memoir, Gibson recreates the every day lived experiences of her family, including her college-educated mother, who moved to St. Louis as part of the Great Migration, her friends, shop owners, teachers, and others who made Mill Creek into a warm, tight-knit, African-American community, and reflects upon what it means that Mill Creek was destroyed by racism and "urban renewal."