History UsefulNotes / StLouis

* In 2023, STL will become home to a UsefulNotes/MajorLeagueSoccer team, St. Louis City FC. The city has been a hotbed of U.S. soccer for decades; in fact, for a time in the early 20th century, the de facto top level of the sport was a St. Louis city league. While the league folded during the Depression, the passion never went away, with several relatively short-lived teams operating in various U.S. leagues over the years. College soccer was and still is big in the region as well. The Saint Louis Billikens (Saint Louis University) were a dominant men's side from the 1950s through the mid-1970s, winning a still-record 10 NCAA Division I championships.[[note]]Most of these were in the predecessors to D-I.[[/note]] The Billikens are half of a big local rivalry in the sport with the SIU Edwardsville Cougars (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) across the river in Metro East. The city had been on MLS' radar almost since the league was founded, but plans for a St. Louis team fell into {{development hell}} until 2019, when City SC was announced with a planned 2022 start date, since pushed back to 2023.

* Wrestling/{{Kane}}: Born in Spain, grew up in St. Louis.

* The [[FolkMusic folk]] and blues standard "Music/StaggerLee", which has been performed by... well, just about everyone (see the song page for a partial list), is based on a real-life shooting that happened in St. Louis on Christmas Day, 1895.

* Phyllis Diller

* Dan O'Bannon

* Cedric the Entertainer: Born in Jefferson City, MO, moved to the Berkeley suburb after junior high.

* Creator/ScottJoplin

* Wrestling/KellyKlein

* Music/{{Akon}}: Born in STL, grew up mostly in Senegal.

* Jane Smiley (Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist): Born in L.A., grew up in the Webster Groves suburb.

* Beau Willimon: Born in [[UsefulNotes/WashingtonDC Alexandria, VA]], but mostly raised in St. Louis.[[note]]He was a [[MilitaryBrat Navy brat]]; his father settled in St. Louis after he finished his Navy service to be a lawyer.[[/note]] Creator of ''Film/TheIdesOfMarch'' and the [[TransAtlanticEquivalent American adaptation]] of ''Series/{{House of Cards|US}}''. Also a veteran of Jon Hamm's 8th-grade drama class.

* The W.C. Handy {{Blues}} standard "Saint Louis Blues" has been performed by Music/LouisArmstrong, Bessie Smith, Music/CabCalloway, Music/BingCrosby, Count Basie, Music/GlennMiller and many others, in addition to lending its name to several [[Film/StLouisBlues films]] and the city's NHL team. Handy himself lived briefly in St. Louis.

* Dred Scott: The infamous 1857 [[UsefulNotes/AmericanCourts Supreme Court]] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford decision]] which ruled that African Americans do not count as US citizens and which is often credited as a catalyst for the outbreak of the [[UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar American Civil War]] four years later occurred when Scott sued his enslaver for bringing him back to St. Louis (where slavery was legal) after a period in (free) Wisconsin. The courthouse where the case was first tried is still a prominent St. Louis landmark, and a statue of Scott stands outside of it.

* Creator/MarkTwain: Was born 100 miles upriver in Hannibal, MO and spent plenty of time in St. Louis throughout his life, especially as a steamboat pilot in the years when the city was a major river port. Today there's a neighborhood in the city named after him.

* Dred Scott: The infamous 1857 [[UsefulNotes/AmericanCourts Supreme Court]] [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford decision]] which ruled that African Americans do not count as US citizens and which is often credited as a catalyst for the [[UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar American Civil War]] four later occurred when Scott sued his enslaver for bringing him back to St. Louis (where slavery was legal) after a period in (free) Wisconsin. The courthouse where the case was first tried is still a prominent St. Louis landmark, and a statue of Scott stands outside of it.

* The W.C. Handy {{Blues}} standard "Saint Louis Blues" has been performed by Music/LouisArmstrong, Bessie Smith, Music/CabCalloway, Music/BingCrosby, Count Basie, Music/GlennMiller and many others, in addition to lending its name to several [[Film/StLouisBlues films]] and the city's NHL team.

* UsefulNotes/UlyssesSGrant

* The W.C. Handy {{Blues}} standard "Saint Louis Blues" has been performed by Music/LouisArmstrong, Bessie Smith, Music/CabCalloway, Music/BingCrosby, Count Basie, Music/GlennMiller and many others, in addition to lending its name to several films and the city's NHL team.

!! People from St. Louis (and vicinity)

!! In media

* Creator/JonathanFranzen: Born in Illinois, grew up in the Webster Groves suburb. (His first novel, ''The Twenty-Seventh City'', is about a fictitious St. Louis County police chief.)

!! In fiction

* ''Series/TheJohnLarroquetteShow''
* The City appears in ''[[Film/NationalLampoonsVacation National Lampoon's Vacation]]''.
* ''Series/MastersOfSex'', based on the real-life studies of Masters and Johnson at Washington University in the '50s.
* In ''[[Literature/PercyJacksonAndTheOlympians The Lightning Thief]]'', Percy goes up the Gateway Arch, then in an emergency ''jumps straight'' into the Mississippi River. [[WritersHaveNoSenseOfScale No, really]]. In real-life, he would have been swatted before he even reaches the street separating the complex from the river, because there's a freaking stairway in front of the arch. A ''gently sloping'' stairway.
* ''Literature/AnitaBlake: Vampire Hunter''.
* ''Webcomic/{{Lackadaisy}}'' is set in Prohibition-era St. Louis.
* ''Theatre/TheGlassMenagerie'', by St. Louis native Creator/TennesseeWilliams, is set in the city.

St. Louis, Missouri, is known for the Gateway Arch and... well, actually, that's pretty much what it's known for now, which is a real shame considering its history. St. Louis sits just south of the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, a naturally strategic place for a major settlement; the ancient UsefulNotes/{{Native American|s}} city of Cahokia, the largest pre-Columbian settlement in what would become the US, was more or less just on the other side of the river. This location helped it grow into a huge city and made it a big deal back when riverboats were considered a speedy form of transportation; at the start of the 20th century, St. Louis was the fourth-largest city in the entire country. However, the city has been declining in importance (and population) for quite awhile now. It's lost population in every census since 1950, is no longer even in the top ''fifty'' largest cities in the U.S., and is no longer even the largest city in Missouri.[[note]]There's an asterisk there, as we'll discuss below: Many of those people just moved to the suburbs, and the total metropolitan area still has a larger population than UsefulNotes/KansasCity's.[[/note]]

St. Louis is nicknamed "the Gateway to the West" (''cf.'' the Gateway Arch), presumably because a gateway is a place you ''go through'' to get to where you were ''actually interested in going''. Missourians who live more than a couple of dozen miles from the Arch may instead call it "the Exit from the East." Politically, St. Louis is a fairly deep blue stronghold in an otherwise mostly red state, a trait it shares with Jackson County (Kansas City) and Boone County (the University of Missouri–Columbia). Speaking of counties, the City of St. Louis is ''not'' in any of Missouri's 114 counties. It used to be part of St. Louis County but voted to secede in 1876. Besides affecting the city's tax base and infrastructure, this separation has also contributed to St. Louis's population shrinkage by comparison with other major U.S. cities--since the borders of the city itself are fixed, the common practice of incorporating outlying suburbs has been halted for the last century and a half. The full metro area is actually the 21st most populous in the U.S. to this day--still a major downgrade from its earlier prominence, to be sure, but not nearly as bad a drop as it looks on paper. Part of that metro area lies across the river in Illinois; those go by the description "Metro East" for obvious reasons.

St. Louis is nicknamed "the Gateway to the West" (''cf.'' the Gateway Arch), presumably because a gateway is a place you ''go through'' to get to where you were ''actually interested in going''. Missourians who live more than a couple of dozen miles from the Arch may instead call it "the Exit from the East." Politically, St. Louis is a fairly deep blue stronghold in an otherwise mostly red state, a trait it shares with Jackson County (Kansas City) and Boone County (the University of Missouri–Columbia). Speaking of counties, the City of St. Louis is ''not'' in any of Missouri's 114 counties. It used to be part of St. Louis County but voted to secede in 1876. Besides affecting the city's tax base and infrastructure, this separation has also contributed to St. Louis's population shrinkage by comparison with other major U.S. cities--since the borders of the city itself are fixed, the common practice of incorporating outlying suburbs has been halted for the last century and a half. The full metro area is actually the 20th most populous in the U.S. to this day--still a major downgrade from its earlier prominence, to be sure, but not nearly as bad a drop as it looks on paper. Part of that metro area lies across the river in Illinois; those go by the description "Metro East" for obvious reasons.