St. Louis, Missouri (March 2025)
One More Thing to Show Me
St. Louis had been part of my life long before I ever lived there. Two dozen business trips over the years had given me a working knowledge of the city, its downtown corridors, its energy, its reputation. But knowing a city for work and knowing it as a resident are two entirely different things. Moving there in 2023 gave me the time and the freedom to go looking for the parts I had never had reason to find.
By March 2025 I knew my time in St. Louis was winding down. These three outings were part of a larger effort to document as much of the city as I could before I left, to make sure I had seen what I came to see. The Mural Mile along Wharf Street downtown, where massive walls of art run alongside the river and the train tracks. Compton Heights and its extraordinary water tower. Tower Grove East. Fort Bellefontaine along the Missouri River, where Lewis and Clark once walked and stone ruins now sit quietly in the woods as if waiting to be noticed. And Chain of Rocks, where the old Route 66 bridge still stretches across the Mississippi into Illinois and the river keeps doing what rivers do.
I had not planned to walk the banks of the river that day. I found a path that made the shore accessible and followed it. Around a bend I came across a shipwreck, rusted and half buried in the sand, completely by accident. St. Louis had one more thing to show me and I almost missed it.
