Saint Louis, Missouri

St. Louis Has a World-Class Art Museum That Charges No Admission

The Saint Louis Art Museum in Forest Park is free, open Tuesday through Sunday, and has strong holdings in German Expressionism, pre-Columbian art, and 19th-century American painting. It is consistently ranked among the top art museums in the United States for the quality and depth of its collection, and the vast majority of American visitors who don’t live in the Midwest don’t know it exists. This is the pattern for St. Louis generally: genuinely excellent things that the city’s position and reputation conspire to hide from national attention.

The Gateway Arch is 630 feet high, completed in 1965 to designs by Eero Saarinen, and is the most recognisable structure in St. Louis for obvious visual reasons. The ride to the top is in small tram pods that hold four people, take 4 minutes each way, and rotate slightly as they follow the curve of the interior – disconcerting in an interesting way. The observation windows at the top look east over the Mississippi and west over the city. Book online at nps.gov/jeff; summer trams fill up.

City Museum

Describing City Museum accurately is difficult. It is inside a former shoe warehouse, but it is not a museum in any conventional sense. Bob Cassilly, a sculptor, spent decades converting the building into a multi-floor environment of repurposed industrial objects: school buses cantilevered from the roof, concrete caves and tunnels through the basement, a 10-storey slide, climbing structures from salvaged metal, and a functioning Ferris wheel on the roof. Adults climb through it alongside children and both get equally lost. It is one of the more genuinely original things in American tourism and costs around $20. Go on a weekday if possible; Friday and Saturday nights have bar service and DJ sets, which is a different experience.

Forest Park

Forest Park covers 1,371 acres – considerably larger than Central Park – and the main attractions within it are free. The Saint Louis Zoo is consistently ranked among the best free zoos in the country. The Missouri History Museum covers the 1904 World’s Fair, which brought the world to St. Louis and put the city briefly at the centre of American cultural ambition. The Saint Louis Art Museum, as mentioned. The Jewel Box, a 1936 Art Deco greenhouse. Renting bikes at the park entrance is the practical way to cover multiple institutions.

Food

Toasted ravioli is a St. Louis invention: pasta stuffed with meat, deep-fried, served with marinara. The origin story involves a chef at Charlie Gitto’s on Edwards accidentally dropping pasta into breaded frying oil. Whether true or not, Charlie Gitto’s still serves them and they remain the specific local food thing to order.

Imo’s Pizza is a regional orthodoxy that requires explanation: thin unleavened crust, Provel cheese (a processed blend of provolone, Swiss, and cheddar that essentially exists only in the St. Louis metro area), cut into squares. People who grew up with it love it; outsiders often require multiple encounters. This is the correct description and Charlie Gitto’s crowd would disagree with the framing but not the facts.

The Grove neighbourhood on Manchester Avenue and Cherokee Street south of downtown have developed genuine food and bar scenes over the past decade. Pitted Bar-B-Que on Jefferson is old-school St. Louis barbecue, specifically the pork steak tradition unique to this region. Olive and Oak in Webster Groves (10 minutes south) is arguably the best restaurant in the metro area, doing what a good American bistro does with local sourcing. Ted Drewes Frozen Custard on Chippewa Street, open since 1929, serves frozen custard thick enough that a spoon stands upright in the cup. Queue. It is worth it.

Getting Around

Lambert-St. Louis International Airport is served by all major US carriers. The MetroLink light rail runs from the airport to downtown and Forest Park for $2.50 – one of the more useful airport rail connections in the American Midwest. The city is affordable by American urban standards, and the tourist areas (Forest Park, the Arch, downtown, the Grove) are all accessible and safe to visit.