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1 I have a confession to make. A native St. Louisan, I spent my youth oblivious to my hometown’s colonial past. I can’t accuse my parents of a lack of civic pride or blame them for indifference to the city’s history. My father, an immigrant of Irish and English background who lived in St. Louis from the age of three, made the place his own and was a walking compendium of information about it. My mother, born on the south side to the descendants of German and English immigrants, could not have been more of a St. Louisan if she had tried, with her typical accent and thrifty habits. Together, they showed us the city as they knew and loved it. On Sunday drives, during my childhood, we repeatedly visited two locations: the riverfront and Forest Park. At the former, walking down the large and angled cobblestones lining the river’s edge, we would stare out at the Mississippi, watch it churning with branches that moved rapidly past bridge supports and gaze at barges fighting the river’s swift current to move upstream. In Forest Park, our other destination, we sometimes stopped and fed the ducks in front of the Municipal Opera (the Muny, in local parlance), but more often we headed straight for the Zoo, there to delight in the barking seals and ponder the polar bears, immense and improbable creatures, particularly on sweltering summer days in the Midwest. (All of these activities—and many others in the city—I would add, were free, a fact that was and is noted proudly by St. Louisans.) The not-so-slight, intentional hint of boosterism in my opening remarks aside, the two places I describe mark both the geographic borders of the city and the two most celebrated episodes in its history. Curving around to form the eastern boundary of St. Louis, the mighty Mississippi is muddy at this point, dirtied by silt from the Missouri River and the confluence of the two waterways just to the north. From the air, one can see the waters of two rivers , blue-gray and yellow-brown, traveling side by side in the same channel Introduction t h e Wo r l d , t h e F l e s h , a n d t h e D e v i l / 2 until they merge and become one, the volume nearly doubled by the addition of the meandering Missouri. I remember being impressed by the river as a child, and a little frightened of falling into it. What thrilled me especially, though, was the centerpiece of the riverfront site, the Arch, the iconic image of the city. With its gleaming silver geometry soaring 630 feet into the sky, the Arch is architect Eero Saarinen’s celebration of St. Louis as the “Gateway to the West,” the centerpiece of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. Although the famed duo of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark actually set out on their 1804 voyage of discovery through the newly acquired Louisiana Territory from St. Charles, located nearby on the Missouri River, St. Louis was the more important settlement, the place where President Thomas Jefferson sent the two men to prepare for their famed expedition up the Missouri. Here was one key to the city as I understood it then: a technological triumph symbolizing the way early champions of the West—Jefferson, Lewis, and Clark—paved the way for the nineteenth-century expansion of the United States. That is where and when the story of St. Louis seemed to begin. The other most notable chapter in St. Louis’s past took place at the western edge of the city limits. There stands Forest Park, a glorious reminder of the virtues of nineteenth-century city parks, 1,293 acres of rolling hills, gardens, waterways, bike paths, baseball diamonds, golf courses, museums , and yes, the Zoo.1 Opened in 1876, the park witnessed its zenith of fame in 1904, as the location for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the months-long celebration of the centenary of the territory’s acquisition , known locally simply as the World’s Fair.2 The year of the fair, when St. Louis captured the world’s attention, when people and products from around the globe came to town, holds a peculiar and tenacious place in St. Louisans’ civic memory. That was the city’s moment in the sun, with the largest fair the world had seen, a vision of electrical palaces, fantastic fountains...

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