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Few American cities carry their mythology quite so visibly as St Louis. The Gateway Arch rises 630 feet above the west bank of the Mississippi, a parabolic curve of stainless steel that functions simultaneously as civic monument, national symbol, and the most legible full stop in the country's westward expansion story. Eero Saarinen designed it in the early 1960s as part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, and it remains the tallest man-made monument in the United States. To stand beneath it and look south along the river is to understand something about scale and ambition that no photograph quite conveys.

The city sits at a geographic crossroads that shaped its entire character. The confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers made St Louis one of the great trading and departure points of the nineteenth century, the place from which Lewis and Clark set out in 1804 and through which generations of settlers passed on their way further west. That history left behind a city of considerable architectural substance, from the cast-iron facades of Laclede's Landing on the riverfront to the grand Romanesque bulk of Union Station, now repurposed as a hotel and entertainment complex. The older neighbourhoods reward unhurried attention: the Cherokee Street antiques corridor, the restored Victorian streetscapes of Lafayette Square, and the dense cultural life of the Grand Center arts district, which anchors institutions including the Fox Theatre and Powell Symphony Hall within a few blocks of one another.