Construction is going swimmingly at St. Louis Aquarium at Union Station. St. Louisans now have to wait only about a year to take a rope bridge over a 385,000-gallon shark tank, get face to face with thousands of exotic wildlife species, and learn about the properties and inhabitants of aquatic environments from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.
But there’s already one booming aquarium in the state, about a three and a half hour drive from St. Louis. Just over a year ago, the 350,000-square-foot Wonders of Wildlife National Museum and Aquarium opened in Springfield, Missouri. Typical aquarium and museum displays aside, the destination is the only place in the Midwest where visitors can dive with sharks. In its first year, the Wonders of Wildlife brought in 1.6 million visitors, it recently reported, and was named America’s Best New Attraction and America’s Best Aquarium by USA Today. The facility has a major expansion planned for 2019.
Discover fun things to do with the family
Subscribe to the St. Louis Family newsletter for family-friendly things to do and news for local parents, sent every Monday.
Wonders of Wildlife wildly exceeded its expectations for the first year. Can St. Louis Aquarium expect similar numbers?
What was formerly a mall area inside of St. Louis Union Station will, by fall 2019, be a 125,000-square-foot, $45-million family attraction. And once its doors open, the aquarium plans to keep them that way 365 days a year—weekends and holidays included.
St. Louisans began pleas for an aquarium back in 2015, when artist and Strange Folk Festival founder Autumn Wiggins proposed the idea. Back then, a new riverfront NFL stadium was in the works in hopes of keeping the Rams in town. Wiggins wrote that a world-class aquarium would offer cultural and educational aspects that an NFL stadium wouldn’t, and could increase tourism and tax revenue. The Twitter hashtag #fishiesnotfootball caught on.
The Rams left St. Louis in early 2016; by August, plans for the aquarium were announced.
The owners of St. Louis Aquarium, who hadn’t returned SLM’s request for comment at publish time, hope 1 million visitors will come through the attraction annually. With all of the enthusiasm leading up to the aquarium’s announcement, and the success of Wonders of Wildlife, is it possible that St. Louis Aquarium will blow that 1 million figure out of the water?
