But do not for an instant think that St. Louis herself is dead. There are other hotels, and far finer than those of the war-times and the river-trade. And you have only to walk a few squares back from the levee to find industry flourishing once again, solid squares of solid buildings, grimy, commercial, uncompromising, but each representing commerce. St. Louis is still the very center of the world to the great Southwest and to her it pays its tribute, in demands for merchandise of every sort. That is why she builds shoe-stores and dry-goods stores and wholesale stores of almost every other conceivable sort, and builds them for eight or ten or twelve stories in height, closely huddled together, even through unimportant side streets. That is her reason for existence today—when the river-trade, her first reason for growth and expansion, is dead. But the railroad is a living, vital force, when the rivers are frozen and dead, and railroads slip out from St. Louis in every possible direction. Their rails are glistening from traffic, and there at the city from whence they radiate Commerce sits enthroned.
For you must look upon St. Louis, yesterday and today, as essentially a commercial city. She is not a cultured city, although she has an excellent press, including a weekly newspaper of more than ordinary distinction. Still you will find few real bookshops in all her many miles of streets, she has never leaned to fads or cults of any sort; but she measures the percentage which a business dollar will earn with a delightful accuracy. She is a commercial city. That is why she is to the casual traveler an unimpressive city, although we think that her lack of a dignified main street in her business section is responsible for much of this impression. In other years Broadway—Fifth street upon her city plan and a fearfully long thoroughfare running parallel to the river—ranked almost as a main street and had some dignity, if little beauty. But today St. Louis, like so many other of our American towns, is restless and she has slipped back and away from Broadway, leaving that thoroughfare somewhat forlorn and deserted and herself without a single great business thoroughfare—such as Market street, San Francisco or State street, Chicago. Her downtown streets are narrow and as much alike as peas in a pod.
And yet even a casual traveler can find much to interest him in St. Louis. Let him start his inspection of the levee, let romance and sentiment and memory work within his mind. Let his fancy see the riverboats and then he, himself, inspect one of them. Here is one of them, gay in her ginger-bready architecture. Her stacks rise high above her "Texas" but they are placed ahead of her wheel-house, a fancy peculiar to the old naval architects along the Mississippi. She is driven by sidewheels and if our casual traveler goes upon her he will find that each sidewheel is driven by a separate engine, a marvelous affair painted in reds and blues and yellows. With one engine going ahead and the other reversed a really capable Mississippi pilot—and who shall doubt that a Mississippi river pilot, even in these decadent days, is ever anything less than capable—could send the boat spinning like a top upon the yellow stream. That pretty trick would hardly be possible with one of the flat-bottomed stern wheel boats, and there still are hundreds of these upon the Father of Waters and his tributaries, moving slowly and serenely up and down and all with a mighty splashing of dirty water.
If you are a casual traveler and upon your first visit to the Mississippi valley, you will make a mental reservation to ride upon one of the old boats before you leave St. Louis. They may not be there so very many more years. The steel barges have begun to show themselves, and commerce is looking inquiringly at the idle stream to see if it cannot be brought into real efficiency as a transportation agent. And before you leave that levee, with the grass growing up between its ancient stones, you will find a very small and a very dirty sidewalk that leads from it up into and upon the great Eads bridge.
St. Louis does not think very much of the Eads bridge these days. Yet it was only a few years ago that it was bragging about that wonderful conception of the engineer—who had finally spanned the lordly Mississippi and right at his chief city. But other bridges have come, two huge ungainly railroad structures to the north and a public bridge to the south—that is, it will be a public bridge if the voters of St. Louis ever cease quarreling about it. At the present time it is hardly a bridge, only a great span over the water and for long months absolutely unprovided with approaches because the taxpayers of St. Louis refuse to vote the funds for its completion. So it is that the Eads bridge is today but a single agency out of three or four for the spanning of the river; it, too, has grown grimy in forty years and the railroad travelers who come across through its lower deck only remember that from it there leads under the heart of the city of St. Louis one of the smokiest railroad tunnels in existence—and that is saying much.
But the fact remains that it was the first structure to span the river, and to end the importunities of the unspeakable ferry. And today it is, with all of its grime, the one impressive feature of downtown St. Louis. It is the only wagonway that leads from the sovereign state of Illinois into the sovereign city of St. Louis. Across its upper deck passes at all hours of the day and far into the night a silent parade of trolley cars, mule teams, automobiles, farm trucks, folk of every sort and description, on foot. It is as interesting as London bridge and a far finer piece of architecture. But the modern St. Louis has all but forgotten it, save when it chooses to take a motor run across the Illinois prairies.
*****
The casual traveler finally turns his back upon the river and its oldest bridge, although not without some regret if any real sentiment dwells within him. He threads his way through the narrow streets of downtown St. Louis and finally he enters the oldest residential part, the streets still narrow but the houses of rather a fine sort, many of them transformed into small shops or given these days to lodgers. They are of a type somewhat peculiar to the town. They were built high and rather narrow and as a rule set upon a terrace and detached. Builded of brick, the fancy of those old-time architects seemed to turn almost invariably to a façade of marble, an unblushing and unashamed veneer to the street, with the side walls humble and honest in dark red brick. Steps and lintels were of marble or what must have been marble in the beginning. A Philadelphia housewife would quail beneath the steady bath of smoke and cinders that falls upon St. Louis.
There are many thousands of these red-brick and white-marble houses, finally important cross streets, such as Jefferson and Grand, and then you come into the newer St. Louis—a residential district of which any city might well be proud. In the newer St. Louis the houses are more modern and more attractive perhaps, due partly to the fact that they are farther away from the river and the great factories and railroad yards that line it. You can trace the varying fads in American house architecture in layers as you go back street by street in the new St. Louis—Norman, Italian Renaissance, American Colonial, Elizabethan—all like the slices in a fat layer-cake. Some of the more pretentious of these houses are grouped in great parks or reservations which give to the public streets by entrance gates and are known as Westminster place, or Vandeventer place, or the like. They form a most charming feature of the planning of St. Louis, and one almost as distinctive as the tidy alleys which act as serviceways to all the houses. The houses themselves are almost invariably set in lawns, although there are many fine apartments and apartment hotels. The fearful monotony of the side street of New York or Philadelphia does not exist within the town.
At the rear of these fine streets of the newer St. Louis stands the chief park of the town, not very distinctive and famed chiefly as the site of the biggest World's Fair that was ever held, "considerably larger than that Chicago affair," your loyal resident will tell you. Our individual fancy rather turns to Tower Grove Park and the Botanical Gardens just adjoining it. Tower Grove is in no very attractive section of St. Louis, and as an example of landscape gardening it is rather lugubrious, little groups of stones from the old Southern Hotel, which was burned many years ago and was a fearful tragedy, being set here and there. But intangibly it breathes the spirit of St. Louis, and hard by is the Botanical Gardens that Henry Shaw gave to the city in which he was for so many years a dominating figure. And for even a casual traveler to go to St. Louis and never see Shaw's Gardens is almost inconceivable.