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ARK TWAIN CAME To ST. LoUIS as an ambitious boy, dreaming of becoming a pilot on the Mississippi River. In the 1850s, he prowled the riverfront, boarding the steamboats that were “packed together like sardines” along the levee. He achieved his ambition, but lost his job when the Civil War interfered with river commerce. More than twenty years later, he returned to his old haunts and found that the steamboats had mostly disappeared, but that St. Louis had expanded west of the riverfront to become “a great and prosperous and advancing city.”1 Between the 1840s and the 1870s, St. Louis evolved from a bustling river port to a great industrial center. Railroads and factories moved into the lowlands along the Mississippi River. By 1880, flour, meat, chewing tobacco, malt liquor, paint, brick, cloth bags, and iron topped the list of St. Louis’s products. Coal-powered machinery generated clouds of black smoke that polluted the air. Breweries and other manufacturing plants dumped waste into streets, gutters, and ponds. Freight trains clattered through the bottoms, spewing dust, noise, and prosperity. To escape the dirt and din and enjoy their newfound wealth, many residents moved to the higher ground in the central and western portions of the growing city.2 From a child’s perspective, the story of Chouteau’s Pond dramatizes the changes that took place in the older sections of the city. In the 1760s, Chapter One The City Streets The first time I ever saw St. Louis I could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it. It was bitter now to look abroad over this domed and steepled metropolis, this solid expanse of bricks and mortar stretching away on every hand into dim, measure-defying distances, and remember that I had allowed that opportunity to go by. —marK Twain, Life on the Mississippi M 10 The City Streets 11 French settlers dammed a creek to create power for a gristmill. After Auguste Chouteau purchased the property in 1779, the mill pond became known as Chouteau’s Pond. More than two miles long and about a quarter of a mile wide, the pond was a great attraction for boys and others who enjoyed fishing, boating, and swimming in the summer and skating in the winter. After the cholera epidemic of 1849, city officials drained the pond while creating a sewer system. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Mill Creek Valley, the site of the pond, became the locus of railroad tracks and industrial development, and the city lost a great recreational resource.3 Parks and recreational developments bypassed the eastern part of the city, closest to the riverfront, leaving that heavily populated area without green space in which children could play. In 1868, Henry Shaw donated about two hundred acres of land to create Tower Grove Park, which he named after his home on the grounds of his nearby botanical gardens. In 1872, St. Louis purchased a thousand acres for the magnificent Forest Park, which also encompassed the zoological gardens. Unfortunately for residents of the riverfront area, both these parks were located in the western district of the city. By 1900, the western section of town contained nearly 85 percent (approximately 1,800 acres) of St. Louis’s park land. The central district, with 21 percent of the city’s population, had only 8 percent of the city’s park area, and the eastern district, where nearly half of the city’s 575,000 residents lived, had only 150 acres of park land (less than 7 percent of the total park area).4 Throughout the nineteenth century, immigrants and in-migrants crowded into the older sections of the city. In the 1840s, the city’s population quadrupled, as Germans and Irish people fled social unrest and famine in their homelands. According to the 1850 census, nearly one-third of St. Louis residents were natives of Germany, outnumbering natives of Missouri. The Irish held second place among immigrants, although Germans outnumbered them by two to one. The Civil War slowed immigration in both the city and the nation as a whole, so that in 1870 foreign-born residents accounted for only 36 percent of the city’s population . In the aftermath of the war, which brought an end to racial slavery and spurred in-migration from the rural South, the proportion of African Americans increased from 2 to 7 percent. Many African Americans moved...

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