Old St. Louis Riverfront

The Old St. Louis Riverfront was the city's original core — the blocks laid out from Auguste Chouteau and Pierre Laclède's 1764 village, which grew into a dense district of stone and cast-iron warehouses, commission houses, fur dealers, and federal buildings above the steamboat levee. By the early twentieth century much of it stood vacant or derelict. After St. Louis voters approved a bond issue in 1935 for a riverfront memorial, the federal government condemned the district and, between 1939 and 1942, cleared thirty-seven full blocks and parts of three more — bounded by the Mississippi River on the east, Third Street on the west, Eads Bridge on the north, and Poplar Street on the south. Some 486 buildings came down, displacing roughly 290 businesses and nearly 200 residences, for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. The cleared ground served as a parking lot until Arch construction began in 1963. The old United States Custom House and Post Office at Third and Olive fell in the clearance; the Old Cathedral was spared and still stands within the park, the Old Courthouse survived just to the west, and Laclede's Landing, north of Eads Bridge, remains the last built fragment of the nineteenth-century riverfront.