St. Louis Audio Tour

Highlights

• 
  Gateway Arch

  Your first sight is the Gateway Arch, the tallest national monument in the country at 630 feet, taller than the Washington Monument. Designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, who won the design competition in 1947, the Arch wasn't completed until 1965.

• 
  Busch Stadium

  Busch Stadium is home to the St. Louis Cardinals, one of the most storied franchises in Major League Baseball history. The Cardinals have won eleven World Series championships — second only to the New York Yankees — and this franchise has given the game some of its greatest players: Stan 'The Man' Musial, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Ozzie Smith, Albert Pujols, and many more.

• 
  Jefferson National Expansion Memorial

  Jefferson National Expansion Memorial is the federal park holding the Gateway Arch and the grounds along the riverfront. The memorial was authorized by Congress in 1935, during the Depression, as a public works project and a monument to Manifest Destiny — the 19th-century American belief that the United States was destined to expand across the continent from sea to sea.

• 
  Forest Park

  Forest Park covers 1,371 acres of urban greenspace, larger than Central Park in New York City. The park was established in 1876, when the city was growing rapidly and civic leaders worried about the health of urban residents — fresh air, open space, and nature were seen as essential public goods, not luxuries.

• Missouri Botanical Garden

  Henry Shaw founded the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1859, and it remains the oldest continuously operating botanical garden in the United States. Shaw was an English-born hardware merchant who came to St. Louis in 1819 at the age of 18, made a fortune supplying tools and cutlery to the city's growing frontier economy, and retired at 40.

All 40 stops

• Gateway Arch (Downtown / Riverfront)

  Your first sight is the Gateway Arch, the tallest national monument in the country at 630 feet, taller than the Washington Monument.

• Old Courthouse (Downtown)

  Notice the Old Courthouse, completed in 1862, site of legal proceedings that helped ignite the Civil War.

• Dred Scott Freedom Steps (Downtown)

  Picture the cruel machinery of American slavery once playing out here in full public view.

• Laclede's Landing (Riverfront)

  Picture Pierre Laclède Liguest, a French fur trader from New Orleans, stepping ashore on this bluff in February 1764 to found a trading post.

• Mound City — Native American Heritage (Riverfront)

  Mound City was this place's earlier name, given for the dozens of earthen mounds the Mississippian culture raised here.

• Cahokia Mounds Viewpoint (Riverfront / East Overlook)

  Look across the Mississippi River toward Illinois, where the Cahokia Mounds preserve the largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico.

• Soulard Market (Soulard)

  Soulard Market has traded continuously since 1779, the oldest farmers market west of the Mississippi River.

• Soulard Neighborhood — French Creole Heritage (Soulard)

  Narrow brick rowhouses and iron lacework mark the heart of Soulard, one of St. Louis's oldest neighborhoods.

• Anheuser-Busch Brewery (Soulard)

  Eberhard Anheuser bought a struggling brewery here in 1852, and the Anheuser-Busch Brewery grew into one of the largest in the United States.

• Busch Stadium (Downtown)

  Busch Stadium is home to the St. Louis Cardinals, one of the most storied franchises in Major League Baseball history.

• Laclede's Landing Historic District (Riverfront)

  Cast-iron and brick warehouses from the 1870s fill Laclede's Landing, a nine-block district on the northern riverfront.

• Eads Bridge (Riverfront)

  James Buchanan Eads, a self-taught engineer, designed the bridge ahead of you, completed in 1874 and carrying his name ever since.

• Leonor K. Sullivan Boulevard — Mississippi River Levee (Riverfront)

  Leonor K. Sullivan Boulevard runs along the top of the flood levee that protects downtown St. Louis from the Mississippi River.

• Chouteau's Pond Site — Original French Settlement (Downtown)

  Chouteau's Pond, a large natural lake, once covered much of what is now the western edge of downtown St. Louis.

• City Garden Sculpture Park (Downtown)

  City Garden opened in 2009 as a two-block public sculpture park and has become one of downtown St. Louis's most beloved spaces.

• St. Louis City Hall (Downtown)

  St. Louis City Hall was completed in 1898 in the French Renaissance style, a deliberate homage to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris.

• Union Station (Downtown / Midtown)

  Union Station opened in 1894 as the largest and busiest railroad terminal in the world.

• Forest Park (Forest Park)

  Forest Park covers 1,371 acres of urban greenspace, larger than Central Park in New York City.

• St. Louis Art Museum (Forest Park)

  Cass Gilbert designed the St. Louis Art Museum as the Palace of Fine Arts, one of the few 1904 World's Fair buildings meant to be…

• Missouri History Museum (Forest Park)

  Missouri History Museum occupies a Jefferson Memorial building constructed in 1913 to honor Thomas Jefferson and to hold the collections of the Missouri Historical Society.

• Saint Louis Zoo (Forest Park)

  Admission to the Saint Louis Zoo has been free since 1916, one of the few major zoos in the United States that charges nothing to…

• Saint Louis Science Center (Forest Park)

  Picture hands-on exhibits filling the Saint Louis Science Center, another free institution born of Forest Park's legacy.

• DeBaliviere Place (DeBaliviere / Skinker-DeBaliviere)

  DeBaliviere Place, at the northern edge of Forest Park, traces the whole arc of postwar American urban decline and reinvention.

• Central West End (Central West End)

  Wealthy St. Louisans moved west from the crowded downtown core to build the Central West End, one of the city's most elegant and enduring neighborhoods.

• Grand Center Arts District (Grand Center)

  Grand Center is St. Louis's arts and entertainment district, a one-mile corridor along Grand Boulevard between Delmar and Lindell where you find performance venues, galleries…

• Fox Theatre — 'The Fabulous Fox' (Grand Center)

  Opened in 1929, the Fox Theatre has been called The Fabulous Fox ever since, a nickname entirely deserved.

• Powell Hall — St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (Grand Center)

  Powell Symphony Hall houses the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1880 and the second-oldest symphony orchestra in the United States.

• Compton Heights (South City)

  Compton Heights, in South St. Louis, was laid out in the 1880s and '90s as one of the city's earliest planned residential communities.

• Tower Grove Park (South City)

  Tower Grove Park, 289 acres of Victorian pleasure ground, came in 1872 from Henry Shaw, the English-born merchant who founded the Missouri Botanical Garden.

• The Grove — LGBT Community Hub (The Grove / Forest Park Southeast)

  Manchester Avenue runs through The Grove, the commercial district at the center of St. Louis's LGBTQ+ community and a hub of alternative culture for decades.

• Cherokee Street — Antiques Corridor (South City)

  Antique shops, record stores and dive bars give Cherokee Street its gritty, creative energy, one of the most layered commercial corridors in St. Louis.

• Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (Downtown / Riverfront)

  Jefferson National Expansion Memorial is the federal park holding the Gateway Arch and the grounds along the riverfront.

• Lafayette Square (Lafayette Square)

  Lafayette Square gathers around a four-acre park set aside in the 1836 city plan, one of St. Louis's oldest and most beautiful residential neighborhoods.

• Scott Joplin House (Midtown / Delmar)

  Scott Joplin, the King of Ragtime, lived from 1900 to 1903 in this house at 2658 Delmar Boulevard.

• Sumner High School (The Ville)

  Established in 1875, Sumner High School was the first high school for Black students west of the Mississippi River.

• Veiled Prophet Ball — St. Louis Society History (Downtown)

  For over a century the Veiled Prophet Ball served as the definitive ritual of St. Louis high society, right near this spot.

• Pruitt-Igoe Site (Near North Side)

  Pruitt-Igoe rose near here between 1954 and 1956 and became one of the most famous symbols of 20th-century American urban policy failure.

• Cardinals Baseball Culture (Downtown)

  Cardinals baseball means something to this city deeper than wins and losses, and Busch Stadium is where you feel it.

• Missouri Botanical Garden (Tower Grove)

  Henry Shaw founded the Missouri Botanical Garden in 1859, and it remains the oldest continuously operating botanical garden in the United States.

• Chuck Berry's St. Louis Roots (The Ville / North St. Louis)

  Charles Edward Anderson Berry, known to the world as Chuck Berry, grew up in this part of North St. Louis and found his musical voice…

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