Last Friday’s regular meeting of the full Board of Aldermen of the City of St. Louis will certainly be one that will not be forgotten for a very long time. As far as toxicity, it ranks up there with the final debate for the Rams stadium bill, but probably surpasses it in terms of amount of bile spilled. The board bill which generated such heated and caustic debate revolved around the 2012 voter passage of a charter amendment that will reduce the board of aldermen from 28 to 14 in 2021, after the release of the 2020 federal census. Many aldermen want the reduction to continue, and many do not. I was extremely disappointed in the behavior of some of the aldermen’s words and decorum. If they were trying to convince voters of the benefits of keeping 28 aldermen, their actions on Friday achieved the opposite. In fact, I am deeply saddened that so few people have spoken out publicly at just how awful some aldermen treated their colleagues last Friday. The citizens of St. Louis deserve better of their public servants.
But as a historian, after watching the debate on Friday, my questions turned to previous incarnations of the numbers and boundaries of wards in the City of St. Louis throughout the last 200 years. My cursory search was able to reveal an interesting cross-section over the decades, particularly in the 19th century as the city was growing rapidly. How did local government apportion out the city, and what were the shapes? I also examined, for external perspective, the ward sizes and shapes of other cities that St. Louis is often compared to, such as Baltimore, Kansas City, Minneapolis and Cleveland.
(Disclaimer: This article does not imply that historic ward maps of St. Louis should serve as models or guides for the drawing of ward boundaries in 2021, regardless of the eventual number of wards chosen by voters.)
Our first stop in St. Louis ward maps comes in 1844, right in between one of the most meteoric jumps in census counts: from 1840 to 1850 the city’s population climbed from 16,469 to 77,860, a 372.8% increase (no wonder even Adam Lemp, a business man of questionable skills, did a brisk brewing trade during that time). René Paul’s 1844 map reveals an interesting method of ward draughtsmanship, and one that would set precedent for decades: long, slender wards extend out from the original plat of Laclede and Chouteau’s city along the Levee, while two wards, One and Six, encompass broad swaths of what presumably was open farmland to the north and south. Those long wards intrigue me; the aldermen of those would have been having to juggle drastically different constituencies.
At one end of their ward, their residents would have been complaining of overcrowding, skyrocketing land prices and sanitation, while at the other end, out on the west side of their domain, their constituents would be harping about unpaved streets, lack of city services, but also dreaming of the promise of the growing metropolis. In other words, these aldermen would be forced to deal with a wide swath of the city’s population. Now of course, one of those skinny wards, along Washington Avenue, would have possessed much more wealthy residents than the others, but nonetheless, no one alderman represented a completely homogenous ward in topography or urban fabric.
J.H. Fischers’ map of St. Louis from 1856, when the city’s population was growing to 160,773 by 1860, had grown to ten wards. But the tradition of keeping wards that still extended from the river all the way out to the western city limits continued, often with what would seem comical by today’s standards, with some only two blocks wide in the middle of the city (the boundary had moved to Grand Boulevard at this point). Likewise, the northern and southernmost wards were still large pie-shaped swaths of land, befitting their still mostly rural character.
Why St. Louis’ “Good Old Days” were actually kind of terrible
Perhaps the most interesting map and germane (a word I did not realize so many current aldermen knew) to today’s discussion of ward boundaries is Julius Hutawa’s 1870 map of St. Louis (posted at the top of this article), when the city possessed twelve wards inside municipal boundaries defined still by Grand Boulevard on the west. What was the population of St. Louis in 1870, inside a vastly smaller footprint that modern St. Louis? It was 310,864, which is almost exactly what the Federal Census Bureau estimates the population of St. Louis to be in 2018, at 308,626. The city still possessed those long, slender wards that stretched from the river to the western edge of the city, but tellingly, the Tenth Ward reveals a new philosophy: it is a compact, irregular trapezoid-shaped district, reflecting the high population density of that part of the city. Likewise, the Sixth and Seventh Wards are clearly the divided halves of what had once been one long ward that had been afflicted with the high density of the aging housing stock north of downtown turning into slums. The Samuel Augustus Mitchell map of St. Louis from 1880 reflects the same boundaries.
As mentioned above, I also looked at the ward maps of other cities in the Midwest and East Coast with similar 19th century Industrial Revolution histories and found the exact same methodologies in the delineation of boundaries and number of wards. Minneapolis, St. Paul, Chicago, Cleveland and Baltimore all practiced similar methods of large, compact wards or drew boundaries that began in the central business district or harbor/riverfront area and stretched to the municipal boundaries of the respective city. What I found most interesting was that these cities still have largely compact, logically shaped wards, proportional in population to the present day. This goes for fiscally solvent cities with strong economies, and with financially struggling cities with struggling economies. St. Louis, in contrast, possesses what could be described as a very “interesting” ward map, or in other words, we are the only major city where one needs a Masters in Creative Writing to describe the boundaries of our wards. So please, in 2021, whether we’re drawing 14 new wards or redrawing 28, everyone deserves a new way of doing what is now an old ritual.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at [email protected].
