Britt Spencer
In the southeast quadrant of Forest Park, just a stone’s throw from the McDonnell Planetarium, a long barn provides shelter for the four horses in the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department’s mounted unit. This large structure wasn’t always a stable, though: It once housed airplanes.
After World War I, the United States Postal Service set up the first coast-to-coast airmail route, which stretched from New York to San Francisco, passing through Chicago. The St. Louis postmaster proposed creating a branch line extending from Chicago to St. Louis.
City Hall and the Chamber of Commerce each kicked in $12,500 to build a hangar and clear about 100 acres of Forest Park for a runway. The first airmail flight clattered out of the park on the morning of August 16, 1920, carrying about 150 pounds of mail. “Let us carefully nurture the present advantages of the aerial service and look to its immediate enlargement,” the Chamber declared in a letter, “[so] that this interchange of business may be even larger, to the lasting benefit of both cities.”
Yet the Forest Park airmail service lasted less than a year. It wasn’t slow: The planes could deliver letters to Chicago in less than four hours, on average, whereas a train would take eight hours at best. The problem, rather, was that Congress failed to appropriate the funding necessary to keep it going, so the route closed June 30, 1921. All told, the aircraft had carried 52,000 pounds of mail and logged 130,000 miles.
A private firm operated on the Forest Park airfield as well: the Robertson Aircraft Corporation. The Robertsons purchased a Curtiss JN-4 Jenny biplane left over from the war. They took passengers up for lessons and sightseeing flights. Ralston Purina hired them to paint the checkerboard logo on their plane and drop advertisements onto farm property for $20 a day. But the residents who lived near that edge of Forest Park complained about the noise, so the city told the company to find another headquarters. It was relocated to the area that is now St. Louis Lambert International Airport.
The section of Forest Park that used to be the airfield is now called the Boeing Aviation Fields; it boasts four baseball and four softball diamonds. And the hangar? The SLMPD’s mounted unit moved into it in the 1970s. After the discovery of lead paint in 2009, the horses were relocated to new quarters for their own safety. Forest Park Forever raised $900,000 for a renovation that included lead and asbestos removal, a new roof, and offices for the officers. The unit returned to the hangar in fall 2013 and remains there today.
