Northern? Southern? Eastern? Western? St. Louis is all—and none—of the above
By Elizabeth Armstrong Hall
When I moved to St. Louis in the 1970s, I knew only that it was on the Mississippi River and “in the middle” of the country. As a native of eastern Pennsylvania who had never ventured west of Pittsburgh or south of Washington, D.C., I imagined St. Louis as a Northern New Orleans, a slow-paced, lush, organdy-and-ribbon city where families lived in Edwardian-era houses with huge front lawns and wraparound porches. In my view, everyone in St. Louis flocked to the banks of the Mississippi on long summer evenings to picnic, listen to blues bands and watch a parade of steamboats chugging northward. Invariably those evenings included ice-cream cones.
Long after reality punctured this Meet Me in St. Louis version of my new hometown, I still floundered when I tried to name the region where I lived. For me, the flat St. Louis twang sounded Midwestern, but the architecture and multiethnic enclaves reminded me of Philadelphia. The steamy summers convinced me that I had moved to the South, but after surviving my first late-spring tornado watches and bone-chilling winter, I felt like I was living on the Western plains.
Given my own geographical bewilderment, I could hardly quibble when my Pennsylvania relatives asked me how I liked living “out west,” my friends from California wondered how I was surviving “back east” or a friend in Florida referred to St. Louis as “up north.”
Dutifully memorizing the eight states that border Missouri only added to my confusion. How could I place St. Louis in the South, East or West when it touches Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa? As William F. Allman aptly put it in his story “Going Home: Special Report” for U.S. News & World Report, “St. Louis is not quite sleepy Southern serenity, not quite belching Northern industry; it’s too far east to be West and much too Western to play a role in the East’s comedy of manners.”
“Foremost in the Mississippi Valley, it is a queen of a city, surrounded by the United States and packed with the meaning of America. —Fannie Hurst in the American Mercury, reprinted in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 1955
A random sampling of opinions gathered for this story assured me that I was far from alone in my baffled state. “When I was growing up in Chicago, I thought St. Louis was as far south as New Orleans,” says Linda V. Ballard, director of the University City Public Library. “Now I don’t think of St. Louis as Southern. Missouri is Southern, but not St. Louis.” That last comment introduced yet another piece to the puzzle: a commonly held regional disconnect between St. Louis and Missouri. This gap goes beyond other urban-rural divides between, for example, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. (I still identify my roots as “from Pennsylvania” and feel a tie to anyone else I meet from the Keystone State.)
Yet for the more than a dozen years when I lived in St. Louis, I don’t remember ever using the phrase “I’m from Missouri.” I was only reminded of my home state when I renewed my car registration or filled out state income-tax forms. In his essay in The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia, third-generation St. Louisan Eric Sandweiss, now teaching at Indiana University in Bloomington, explores this city-state disconnect: “Missourians share little in common with each other. … For their own part, residents of various parts of Missouri have at times in the state’s history, tied themselves more closely to the culture and economy of Tennessee plantation owners, Mississippi sharecroppers, Kansas ranchers, or Rhineland dairy farmers than they have to their neighbors in the state’s largest city.”
Missouri’s “geographical peculiarities,” to quote Sandweiss, helped me understandSt. Louis’ own split personality—much of it, as I learned while working at the Missouri Historical Society, rooted in history.“St. Louis is the place where every part of the country touches and overlaps,” saysSt. Louis native Patrick Murphy, vice president of production at KETC-TV and the “voice” of Channel 9. “It’s a city that was pulled apart by the Civil War and still lives with a strong sense of history.”
Even the motto “Gateway to the West” is misleading, promoting an image of a frontier outpost that no longer applies to modern-day St. Louis. No wonder I thought I was moving to Lewis and Clark country that first time I crossed the Mississippi River into Missouri and gaped at the Gateway Arch. As I soon discovered, St. Louis history is very much alive and well, with such public celebrations as Mardi Gras and Strassenfest and back-to-back World’s Fair exhibitions at the Missouri History Museum.
“I wished I lived away down East, where codfish salt the sea,
And where the folks have pumpkin pie and apple-sass for tea.
Us boys who’s livin’ here out West don’t get more ’n half a show;
We don’t have nothin’ else to do but jest to sort of grow.”
—St. Louis–born Eugene Field in “A Western Boy’s Lament,” 1922
Historian Kathy Corbett, who curated the Missouri History Museum’s first World’s Fair exhibition in 1996, says that St. Louis’ “identity crisis” goes back to its roots: “St. Louis’ early Creole culture and links with Louisiana, status as a slave state and numbers of people who moved to St. Louis from the Southeast gave it a Southern focus, yet its position as a Union stronghold, Eastern money, industrial growth, heavy German and Irish immigration and influences from educators like William Torrey Harris also gave the city a Northern character.”
Fast-forward to 21st-century St. Louis, no longer a Western outpost or Union stronghold. Most people in my unabashedly unscientific sample place St. Louis smack in the Midwest, that midsection of the United States that, according to my knowledge of geography, stretches from Ohio to the Rockies. But “Midwestern” means different things to different people.
“St. Louis is typical of medium-sized Midwestern Rust Belt cities,” says New York City native Andrew Hurley, history professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. “The urban landscape is very similar to that of Cincinnati, Milwaukee and Indianapolis.” Watercolorist Mary D. Schmidt, a St. Louis native, says that St. Louis is definitely in the Midwest—because “it’s right in the heart of the country.” For most, “Midwestern” means “friendly,” “affordable” and “easy to get around,” in contrast to the congested, expensive and impersonal East Coast cities. “St. Louis provides a steady anchor that fits like an old shoe: comfortable and easily worn,” says patent attorney andSt. Louis native Ari Bai, who returned to his hometown because it’s a “good place to raise kids”—and he missed the Cardinals.
Chicago native Joan Lipkin, artistic director of That Uppity Theatre Company, puts it this way: “The friendliness is definitely Midwestern. Being from Chicago, though, St. Louis often feels Southern to me as well. The pace is slower. I speak and work too fast for many of the people I know.”
Ballard calls St. Louis “the most western Eastern city.” David Halen, first violinist with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, calls it “the last Eastern city.” Dan Martin, illustrator, designer and Post-Dispatch “Weatherbird” artist, says it’s “the most northern Southern city and the most western Eastern city.”
According to locally born casting director and acting coach Carrie Houk, who worked for St. Louis’ defunct film office to promote the city as a film location, St. Louis is “definitely Midwestern: The natives say ‘you guys’ and not ‘y’all.’ This is the determining factor.”
Yet another view comes from art historian and Austral Gallery owner Mary Reid Brunstrom, for whom “Midwestern” is the equivalent of “landlocked.” Having grown up on the beaches of North Queensland, Australia, she explains how she has suffered from “coastline deprivation” since moving to St. Louis in 1985: “A good friend of mine told me that Midwesterners derive that same sense of perspective that you get from a walk along the beach from the expansive sky here. I’m working on it.”
St. Louis weather adds yet another dimension to the city’s multiregional identity. “When I first visited St. Louis, I thought it was like cities in the East but more temperate,” says musician/songwriter Kati Guerra, who grew up in Roma, Texas, on the Mexican border. First she decided that St. Louis was “a Northern version of the Texas Hill Country.” Then she traveled through the South—which does not include her home state—and “realized how Southern St. Louis felt because of the hot, humid summers.”
The weather left the largest imprint on my own memory—the lightning storms, knees-sticking-together summers, bone-chilling winters and curtains of nonstop rain. What other city spends more radio drive time on weather news than on rush-hour traffic? Where else does everyone’s favorite meteorologist, the recently retired Ben Abell, garner local-celebrity status?
Abell, who grew up in Washington, D.C., admits that he, too, identified the St. Louis region as “the middle of the country” before moving to the area in the late 1950s. “I was wrong,” he explains. “The real answer is ‘the mid-Mississippi Valley,’ as distinct from the ‘southern Mississippi Valley’ of the Delta and the ‘northern Mississippi Valley’ of northern Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota.”
“I think [St. Louis] must rather dispose to fever ... Just adding, that [it] is very hot, lies among great rivers, and has vast tracts of undrained swampy land around it. I leave it to the reader to form his own opinion.”—Charles Dickens in American Notes, 1842
Dickens wrote these comments while traveling on a Mississippi River steamboat during a six-month visit to the United States. Long before and after maps of the flood of 1993 spotlighted the Big Muddy in the national press, the Mississippi defined St. Louis. T.S. Eliot may have spent only the first 16 years of his life here, but as he wrote in a 1930 letter to the Post-Dispatch, the river left a lasting impression on him. “There is something in having passed one’s childhood beside the big river,” he wrote, “which is incommunicable to those who have not.”
For anyone who has ever called St. Louis home, the Mississippi River comes closest to grounding the city in a sense of place. Like St. Louis itself, the river tugs at our imagination, revealing little beneath its surface, as the swift current carries stories that reveal St. Louis to be unlike any other place in America.
Unmappable.
