St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape

Abstract

Eric Sandweiss has written a history of city building in St. Louis from the political economy of land to the arrangement of rooms in apartments. Its ambitious chronology starts from the city's foundation in 1764 and extends more or less to the present, but the book focuses on the years 1850 to 1910, when most of St. Louis was built. During much of that period it was the fourth largest city in the United States. In order to examine interrelations among a variety of scales—city, neighborhood, block, house, and room—Sandweiss looks in detail at South St. Louis and in even greater detail at several case study blocks. Early chapters trace land and urban development through the complex French and Spanish colonial history and then the American commodification of urban land. At the mid-nineteenth century, Sandweiss switches to a thematic organization, looking in turn at the roles of producers, consumers, and regulators of the urban landscape. Producers included subdividers and builders, and early on they also included the municipality, as it liquidated the last of its colonial common lands.