It separated from St. Louis County in 1877, becoming an independent city and limiting its own political boundaries. St. Louis had a brief run as a world-class city in the early 20th century. In 1904, it hosted the Louisiana Purchase Exposition and the Summer Olympics. Kforce is a professional staffing services firm offering Technology and Finance & Accounting jobs with top employers nationwide. We specialize in providing contract, contract-to-hire and direct placement opportunities, with over 50 years of experience in the staffing industry. Kforce offers many consultants comprehensive benefits depending on employment status, including medical, dental, 401, life insurance and disability.
In addition, Laclède granted new settlers lots in town and the surrounding countryside. In hindsight, many of these original settlers thought of these first few years as “the golden age of St. Louis”.
After World War II, St. Louis began losing population to the suburbs, first because of increased demand for new housing, unhappiness with city services, ease of commuting by highways, and later, white flight. Most of the residential areas of the city are planted with large native shade trees. Most species here are typical of the eastern woodland, although numerous decorative non-native species are found. The most notable invasive species is Japanese honeysuckle, which officials are trying to manage because of its damage to native trees. Before the founding of the city, the area was mostly prairie and open forest. Native Americans maintained this environment, good for hunting, by burning underbrush.
Other industrial buildings from the era include some portions of the Anheuser-Busch Brewery, which date to the 1860s. Several urban renewal projects were built in the 1950s, as the city worked to replace old and substandard housing. Some of these were poorly designed and resulted in problems. One prominent example, Pruitt-Igoe, became a symbol of failure in public housing, and was torn down less than two decades after it was built.
Because much of the city’s commercial and industrial development was centered along the riverfront, many pre-Civil War buildings were demolished during construction of the Gateway Arch. The city’s remaining architectural heritage of the era includes a multi-block district of cobblestone streets and brick and cast-iron warehouses called Laclede’s Landing. Now popular for its restaurants and nightclubs, the district is located north of Gateway Arch along the riverfront.
The Missouri History Museum was built afterward, with the profit from the fair. But 1904 left other assets to the city, like Theodore Link’s 1894 St. Louis Union Station, and an improved Forest Park.
The St. Louis MetroLink light rail system has used the rail deck since 1993. Slaves worked in many jobs on the waterfront as well as on the riverboats. Given the city’s location close to the free state of Illinois and others, some slaves escaped to freedom. Others, especially women with children, sued in court in freedom suits, and several prominent local attorneys aided slaves in these suits. About half the slaves achieved freedom in hundreds of suits before the American Civil War. The printing press of abolitionist Elijah Parish Lovejoy was destroyed for the third time by townsfolk. For the first few years of St. Louis’s existence, the city was not recognized by any of the governments.
It is home to nine of the ten Fortune 500 companies based in Missouri. Before European settlement, the area was a regional center of Native American Mississippian culture. St. Louis was founded on February 14, 1764 by French fur traders Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent, Pierre Laclède, Auguste Chouteau and named after Louis IX of France. In 1764, following freelance seo consultant France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War, the area was ceded to Spain. In 1800, it was retroceded to France, which sold it three years later to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. In the 19th century, St. Louis became a major port on the Mississippi River; from 1870 until the 1920 Census, it was the fourth-largest city in the country.
Trees are mainly oak, maple, and hickory, similar to the forests of the nearby Ozarks; common understory trees include eastern redbud, serviceberry, and flowering dogwood. By the 1900 census, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the country. In 1904, the city hosted a world’s fair at Forest Park called the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Among the fair-related cultural institutions in the park are the St. Louis Art Museum designed by Cass Gilbert, part of the remaining lagoon at the foot of Art Hill, and the Flight Cage at the St. Louis Zoo.
After the war, St. Louis profited via trade with the West, aided by the 1874 completion of the Eads Bridge, named for its design engineer. Industrial developments on both banks of the river were linked by the bridge, the second in the Midwest over the Mississippi River after the Hennepin Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis. The bridge connects St. Louis, Missouri to East St. Louis, Illinois. The Eads Bridge became a symbolic image of the city of St. Louis, from the time of its erection until 1965 when the Gateway Arch Bridge was constructed. The bridge crosses the St. Louis riverfront between Laclede’s Landing, to the north, and the grounds of the Gateway Arch, to the south. Today the road deck has been restored, allowing vehicular and pedestrian traffic to cross the river.
Although the settlement was thought to be under the control of the Spanish government, no one asserted any authority over it, and thus St. Louis had no local government. This vacuum led Laclède to assume civil control, and all problems were disposed in public settings, such as communal meetings.