Open Ye Gates! Swing Wide Ye Portals!

I hand the attendant a fifty-cent piece and watch him drop it into the automatic turnstile, itself a marvel. Behind me, the murmur of money changers, the swish of gored skirts tapering to white shirtwaists. Beyond that, the din of St. Louis. My sack suit rustles as I stride ahead. The stile makes a quarter turn, an electric pulse registering my attendance in a distant room. Officially, I’ve arrived, but I am not here. I’m crossing the threshold of an impossible city: a manicured wonderland of symmetrical lagoons winding through sculpted gardens studded with allegorical statues—in the distance, rising like white gods, loom the massive palaces of learning, their beaux-arts façades harkening back to ancient Rome and heralding a future brighter than the hundred thousand incandescent lights that line them against the night. Perspective fails; buildings rise and fall with the logic of a dream. There is music in the shadows. My pulse quivers in my throat. I’m dizzy and jumpy and—underneath it all, for reasons I cannot name—more than a little sad. I have all evening, but time is running out. None of this can last. The words of Exposition President David R. Francis ring in my ears—Open ye gates! Swing wide ye portals! Enter herein ye sons of man, and behold the achievements of your race! Learn the lesson here taught and gather from it inspiration for still greater accomplishments!—and I step into the fair.

St. Louis is a city of gates that do not normally swing wide. The urban private street, or “private place,” is believed to be a local invention, dating to the 1850s. Private places are owned by their residents, who typically build and maintain the road, median, sidewalks, curbs, street lighting, and—most crucially—gates. Some gates were utilitarian, imposing and plain; others were small castles, complete with clock towers, fountains, statues, gaslights, and gatehouse apartments that caretakers (and, later, college students) lived in until the 1980s. Private places offered a refuge from the ever-booming city, a world apart. Some have been razed, their gates uprooted, the neighborhoods now troubled by crime; many still stand, pockets of wealth and privilege, with boards of trustees that oversee matters of law (historic preservation, landscaping) and etiquette (street parking, book clubs, Easter-egg hunts).

Nearly two years ago, when my wife and I were moving to town and looking for an apartment, we were taken aback: everywhere, gates, gates, gates. Gates that lock and unlock according to byzantine schedules publicized only to residents (thus thwarting commuters and anyone else who might try to cut through the neighborhood). Gates that open by remote control. Rolling metal gates with yellow hazard signs. Gates built for carriages that now barely fit a car. Even in less rarified neighborhoods—with weeds in the lawns and unwashed economy sedans on the street—at the end of the block might stand a pitiful (and easily dodged) sawhorse made of white PVC pipe. A symbol that speaks to the natives. PRIVATE STREET: NOT THRU. PRIVATE STREET: NO PUBLIC PARKING. NO THRU TRAFFIC. PRIVATE NEIGHBORHOOD. NO SMOKING BEYOND THIS GATE. PRIVATE. NO TRESPASSING. KEEP OUT.

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, popularly known as the 1904 World’s Fair, opened in St. Louis on April 30, one hundred and one years to the day after the signing of the Louisiana Purchase Treaty. Before a crowd of 187,793 people, John Philip Sousa’s band played the “Star-Spangled Banner,” five hundred choristers sang the “Hymn of the West,” the fair’s official song, and—from the East Room of the White House—President Theodore Roosevelt touched the gold telegraph key that sent the signal to unfurl ten thousand flags and begin pumping ninety thousand gallons of water a minute down the three terraced “cascades” that flowed into the Grand Basin, where four fountains threw water seventy-five feet into the air at the foot of Festival Hall, the centerpiece of the fair, a building that boasted—in addition to the world’s biggest organ—a gold-leafed dome larger than St. Peter’s.

At first glance, the fair offered a spectacle of size, a vision of man’s enlightened expansion into—and conquest of—untrammeled space (recalling contemporary notions of the Louisiana Purchase itself). The fairgrounds occupied 1,272 acres—double the size of the famed 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—spilling out of the city’s giant Forest Park onto the campus of Washington University and neighborhoods to the south. Twenty thousand people would live and work on the grounds. In preparation, crews straightened and buried a river in sixty-five days. They built 1,576 buildings, plus a garbage plant, sewer, post office, press pavilion, telegraph stations, pay telephones, and 125 eateries that could feed 36,650 people at one time. Five of the restaurants could seat more than two thousand people. Visitors ate everything from filet mignon to frankfurters, fried frog legs to caviar, plus international delights such as Japanese sukiyaki, Mexican guacamole, Indian curry, and Egyptian molokhia soup. To drink: 1893 Louis Roederer brut champagne (six bucks a quart), mineral water (sixty-five cents), or Jameson’s whiskey (fifteen cents a shot), not to mention—this being St. Louis—plenty of beer. There were five fire-engine houses and thirty-six miles of pipe serving a network of sprinklers and hydrants, some of which to this day still dot Forest Park, popping up incongruously on the golf course.

The great distances between attractions made the fair taxing to navigate. Visitors traveled by intramural railroad, a trolley that trundled twelve miles per hour through seventeen stops; they boated along the mile-and-a-half system of lagoons in gondolas or swan and serpent boats. They rented a rickshaw or wheelchair, with or without a guide to push; drove a car; or, if the mood struck, rode a camel, burro, or giant turtle. The official guide claimed a “brief survey” of the wonders would require a minimum of ten days and fifty dollars.

The colossal exhibit palaces were built of yellow pine and ivory-colored “staff,” a mixture of plaster and hemp that could be easily molded, sliced, sanded, and sawed. On average, eighteen trains of forty cars each were needed to haul the materials for a single palace. There were some seventy thousand exhibits from fifty-three foreign countries and forty-three states (plus more than a few territories and businesses). The fair offered a taxonomy of knowledge: exhibits were sorted into sixteen departments that were divided into 144 groups that were subdivided into 807 classes, an encyclopedic education open to all and structured to create, in the words of the director of exhibits, “a properly balanced citizen capable of progress.” The goal: to show civilization marching proudly in a direction. The faith: that from the artifacts of the past one could draw a line to the future. In practice, the fair fostered fierce national competition under the banner of international exchange. Proudly on display: progressivism, nationalism, exoticism, racism, hucksterism, humiliation.

The fair’s president, David R. Francis—local businessman, Democrat, former St. Louis mayor, the state governor who failed to win the bid to host the 1893 exposition, and now, eleven years later, one of the most photographed men in the country—would proclaim of his fair: “So thoroughly did it represent the world’s civilizations, that if all man’s other works were by some unspeakable catastrophe blotted out, the records established at this exposition by the assembled nations would afford the necessary standards for the rebuilding of our entire civilization.” A time of optimism, these years between the Gilded Age and the First World War.

I wander the palaces, open from nine until dusk. Afterward, I walk the grounds until half an hour before midnight, when the fair lights are gradually, almost imperceptibly dimmed to dark. . . .

The Palace of Electricity is a cathedral of dynamos, motors, rheostats, transformers, and vacuum tubes. I touch the wall—the building hums. Meanwhile, I am speechless before the radiophone—sound transmitted over a beam of light! They are perfecting wireless telegraphy. I fling a message to Kansas City: “Wish you were here.” A man offers to show me the power of lightning. His companion says he can record and replay voices on a steel wire. Lights are everywhere—big, small, colorful, and bright. Inventors claim soon our homes will have wall outlets. I ponder the mysteries of electromagnetism, electrochemistry, electrotherapeutics, and electric cooking. A hefty gent clutches his wife: “Steak done in six minutes—lobster broiled in twelve!”

The central court bustles with crowds that circle aimlessly, heads bent. The yard is silent save for small, exultant sighs. A man bumps into me and, with a nod, moves on. He is wearing earpieces that sprout from a curious wheel he holds in one hand. A dusty farmer takes off his hat, then puts it on again—over and over, an incredulous, unconscious salute. An old woman stands on her toes, as if straining to the heavens. A little girl holds her skirt, her mouth hanging open. Someone hands me a wireless receiver; I strap it on—suddenly I hear music pulled from the ether!

In the 1944 MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis, Judy Garland plays a young spitfire trying to snare the boy next door in the months leading up to the 1904 World’s Fair. The exposition’s unofficial anthem—“Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis,” a ditty about a man who returns home to find his sweetheart has fled their humdrum life for the bright lights of the fair—can be heard at least six times in the film’s first five minutes. (To this day, the song turns up all over town; at my first hometown baseball game, I was not surprised to be led, on the jumbo screen, in a sing-along by the St. Louis Symphony clad in Cardinal red.) Nominated for four Academy Awards, Meet Me in St. Louis contains several classic numbers, among them “The Trolley Song” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” A darling of best musical and film lists, it has been named “culturally significant” by the Library of Congress and preserved in the National Film Registry.

The exposition saw almost twenty million visitors during its seven-month run—about one hundred thousand a day. (On weekends, trains to the fairground left downtown’s Union Station on the minute.) The fair offered an unparalleled economic boon to the city that had lost the chance to host the 1893 Columbian Exposition to its great midwestern rival, Chicago. In 1904, St. Louis was the nation’s fourth largest city, centrally located on America’s two largest rivers, a rail and river hub that—according to the official fair guide—claimed the biggest brewery, tobacco factory, cracker factory, and chemical-manufacturing plant in the country; the largest brickworks and electric plant on the continent; and one of the grandest shoe operations in the world. The city also churned out hardware, drugs, saddles, white lead, jute bagging, hats, gloves, caskets, and streetcars. Its Union Station was the terminus of twenty-seven rail lines; its citizens read nine daily papers and sent their children to the nation’s second-best school system. That said, St. Louis had suffered an economic depression from 1893 to 1897 and weathered a bloody strike of streetcar workers in 1900; the local government was plagued by corruption and graft, the city interests run by a cabal of businessmen called “the Big Cinch.” In 1902, McClure’s Magazine dubbed the city one of America’s “worst governed.” For St. Louis’s new Progressive Reform mayor—busy cleaning up the water, air, streets, and government in time for the grand opening—the fair was a chance at redemption through political force.

Initial funding was raised through equal parts federal appropriation, local municipal bonds, and sale of ten-dollar shares of fair stock to the good people of St. Louis. The exposition was meant to honor the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, itself a shrewd deal, the U.S. government shelling out fifteen million dollars to France for what would become thirteen states west of the Mississippi. Due to delays, the fair missed the anniversary, which gave St. Louis the chance to steal—after threatening to hold its own rival athletic games—the previously scheduled 1904 Olympics from Chicago. The fair would have it all, including sweet revenge.

I stroll the “Model Street,” block after perfect block courtesy of the Municipal Improvement Section of the Department of Social Economy. A man loafs on the wide lawn, his collar open, before a guardsman tells him to keep moving. I pass a town hall, a hospital, a civic pride monument, and a playground, where lost children are gathered. By the end of the fair, all 1,166 of them will have found their way home. For a small fee, a woman checks her two-week-old infant with a nurse. She waves: “Mother will be back soon!”

Opened in 1954, Pruitt-Igoe was a mammoth, state-of-the-art public housing development designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who later would build another striking set of modernist towers, the World Trade Center. The Pruitt-Igoe development rose on a parallelogram bounded by Cass Avenue, North Jefferson Avenue, Carr Street, and North Twentieth Street on St. Louis’s north side, close to downtown. A city-designated “slum” was razed and in its place rose a modern utopia, Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City” made real: thirty-three modular eleven-story buildings smartly arrayed in superblocks across fifty-seven acres, each high-rise facing the same direction, vertical neighborhoods of light and space with ample parking and vibrant public areas. Kids scampered in the breezeways. Apartments were clean and bright, offering views better than those enjoyed by the rich. In a recent documentary, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, a former resident remembers her top-floor apartment as a “poor man’s penthouse.” Another says, “It was like another world,” then adds, “Everybody had a bed.”

Pruitt-Igoe was founded on the faith of communal, public life; it offered better living through architecture. One set of high-rises was to be white (the Igoe Apartments, named after a Congressman), the other black (the Pruitt Homes, after a Tuskegee airman), but Brown v. the Board of Education came down the year the development opened—and the whites moved out. Black by default, Pruitt-Igoe flourished. In 1957, occupancy was at 91 percent. Fifteen thousand tenants would call it home.

The fair’s fanned grounds—laid out by George Kessler, the architect of Kansas City’s parks and boulevards—offered a mix of the urban and pastoral. The landscape was strewn with twelve hundred staff statues that, according to the chief of sculpture, aimed “to create a picture of surpassing beauty and to express in the most noble form which human mind and skill can devise, the joy of the American people at the triumphant progress of the principles of liberty westward across the continent of America”—though at least one fairgoer sniffed, “It is a pity that there are so many statues exhibited even on the grounds absolutely naked.”

Only twenty-five years old when construction of the fairgrounds began, Forest Park was a wilderness in the process of being uplifted—still more forest than park. In September 1901, President Francis and his party of VIPs were an hour late to ceremonially drive in the first stake because they were lost in the wilds of the park’s northwest corner. Then steam shovels moved earth and hills, lakes were drained, and century-old trees felled. Despite the exposition company’s contractual obligation—spelled out in 1901 St. Louis Ordinance 20412—to restore the park to its original form within a year of the fair, there was no going back. Forest Park had become a groomed urban oasis, and wrangling between the city and the company lasted for years.

I pay fifty cents and step into the sky, courtesy of the Giant Observation Wheel, the invention of Mr. George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. (now deceased), who envisioned a perfect circle spinning above the plain. I board one of the thirty-six cars at random, but I’ve made a happy choice. After sixty of us crowd inside, a giddy couple announces they will be married at the top. They’re both sitting on ponies. A piano stands in the corner. The guard tells me he’s seen it all. Yesterday, a female daredevil made an entire revolution standing atop a car. A few cabins below, fashionable ladies and gents are enjoying a private banquet. The wheel is so quiet we can hear the tinkling piano as we’re swung twenty-five stories into the air. While the crowd cheers the kissing couple, I hold my breath—I can see the whole world: the Grand Trianon of Versailles, Charlottenburg Castle, the Orangery at Kensington Palace, a Roman villa, a Chinese summer palace, Robert Burns’s Cottage, and the homes of Andrew Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and Thomas Jefferson—all of them rebuilt at the fair. A city of replicas, a cosmopolitan capital forged of iron will.

Today, the city’s most conspicuous monument to Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase is the massive Gateway Arch, designed in 1947 by Finnish futurist Eero Saarinen, who died before he could see the arch dedicated in 1968 in honor of America’s westward expansion. Arches were popularized but not invented by the Romans. There are many kinds of arches: horseshoe, lancet, scheme, ogee, trefoil, basket-handle, Gothic, Tudor, triumphal. Saarinen’s monument was a six-hundred-and-thirty-foot-tall-and-wide stainless-steel curve made of tapering equilateral triangles, a mathematical dream rising over the heartland.

The lore of the fair claims many firsts: the debut of Dr. Pepper, the ice cream cone (known as “World’s Fair Cornucopias”), iced tea, hotdogs, hamburgers, cotton candy (a.k.a. “Fairy Floss”)—but these items were merely popularized and not, as legend might have it, invented at the fair. There were several true firsts: the first appearance of puffed rice cereal, which the Quaker Oats Company shot out of eight cannons every fifty minutes; the first large-scale cast of Rodin’s Thinker; the first participation from China in an exposition; the first Japanese garden in America; the first time British troops paraded on U.S. soil since the Revolution.

Perhaps foremost: the first Olympic Games played in the U.S., which also saw the first gold, silver, and bronze medals handed out, and took place in the first concrete and steel stadium, Washington University’s Francis Field, which had room for fifteen thousand. Competitors from the U.S. and eleven foreign nations set thirteen Olympic records in twenty-two official events.

Notable performances included a gymnast, George Eyser, whose wooden leg didn’t prevent him from winning six medals, three of them gold, and an unsportsmanlike brawl after the fifty-yard swim. But the most memorable event was the marathon, which was run August 30th at three o’clock in the afternoon in ninety-degree heat over tough terrain and dusty roads. Runners received only two chances for fresh water—at six and twelve miles—in deference to the head of the Department of Physical Culture’s amateur scientific interest in dehydration. Fewer than half of the thirty-two participants crossed the finish line. Runners were plagued by traffic, hills, and cheating. (The first man to return to the stadium received a wreath from Alice Roosevelt, daughter of the president, before it was revealed he had ridden eleven miles in a car.) The true victor, Thomas Hicks, pride of the Cambridge YMCA, ran a time of 3:28, though aided by brandy, raw eggs, and the stimulant/rat poison strychnine. After being sponged by his supporters with hot water from a car radiator, he had to be carried, hallucinating and shuffling his feet in the air, across the finish line. He had lost eight pounds. Men representing clubs from Chicago and New York stumbled in second and third. A Cuban mailman came in fourth (he had hitchhiked to the games). Len Tau, a Tswana tribesman running barefoot, finished ninth and presumably would have done better if not driven a mile off course by a wild dog. By taking time off from the Boer War exhibition, he and his fellow countryman, Jan Mashiani, who finished twelfth, became the first South African Olympians. Black athletes wouldn’t represent the country again until the 1992 games.

Education was the theme of the fair—which was meant to be “an international university” concerned not with commerce but knowledge—but not all exhibits were meant to uplift. More liberal entertainment could be found on the mile-long midway called the Pike, where battle reenactments, hootchy-kootchy girls, ragtime rhythms, and flights of wild fancy thrived outside the purview of the Bureau of Music and the Department of Art. The Old Plantation featured log cabins and cakewalking “slaves.” The Jerusalem re-creation was said to include one thousand natives of the city, though one magazine reporter found a fellow from Hoboken. Battle Abbey included cycloramas of the battles of Gettysburg, New Orleans, and Manila, plus Custer’s Last Stand. Jim Key, the educated horse, could spell and sort mail. He was not the only equine wonder; in the Boer War reenactment, even the horses played dead.

On the Pike, one visitor observed, “No respect was shown to age or dignity, no mercy to starch and feathers.” Bands of dancing young men might accost couples, and “every stiff hat was a target for the inflated bladder” (or water balloon). The same fairgoer wrote in his memoir, “I believe if the Pike had been a mile longer it would have led to hell.”

Later, he recanted: “And yet I had a desire to imbibe a little of the spirit of the Pike. I wanted to be a boy again. Be a little bit bad perhaps.”

The Palace of Agriculture is a blinding colossus in the sun. The man next to me reads from a booklet: twenty acres large, covered with 147,250 panes of glass. I have timed my visit—in one minute a giant clock made of thirteen thousand flowers will strike noon. I am finished with the exhibits. I have seen the Missouri corn palace, the 4,700-pound cheese; I have laughed at Minnesota’s contribution, “The Discovery of St. Anthony Falls by Father Hennepin” shaped out of 1,000 pounds of butter. Now a hiss of compressed air throws the 2,500-pound minute hand the final 5 feet, where it points to the giant numeral 12. An hourglass flips, doors open to reveal the gears of the clock—oh, triumph of industrial time!—and a massive bell tolls the death of more agrarian rhythms.

The company is a major employer in this city. One cannot miss its print and radio campaign: “We grow ideas here.” “We work together here.” “We dream here.” “We’re proud to be St. Louis Grown.” Its website offers videos of employees working in food banks, cleaning up after tornados, visiting Forest Park, and standing in front of the arch. Articles rate the town’s best burger joints, as judged by company workers. The company is a major donor to local charities and institutions, including the university in which I teach. In 2013, the company’s net sales were $14.8 billion, up 10 percent. Its chief technology officer won the 2013 World Food Prize. The company has 21,183 employees in 404 facilities in 66 countries—but its headquarters are here, where, over the years, the much-maligned Monsanto Company has worked to produce saccharin, PCBs, polystyrene, DDT, Agent Orange, nuclear weapons, dioxin, RoundUp, bovine growth hormone, and genetically modified seeds.

Pyramids of fruit on a sea of china plates—the entire Palace of Horticulture smells like apples. Virginia has created a statewide shortage by sending too many to the fair. Part of me is sad I missed Missouri Peach Day, when the palace gave away fifty thousand peaches. I dip my fingers into the fountain, which gushes ice water. Farmers shake their heads at the monstrosities on display: a pineapple the size of a turkey, a mysterious dimpled fruit that is said to be the unholy cross between a strawberry and a raspberry.

I live in a small apartment building that stands in the footprint of the Horticulture Palace. We grow nothing in the backyard but herbs, potted lettuce, and a few stunted rose bushes, but on sunny days I like to think I smell apples.

In Meet Me in St. Louis, Judy Garland’s older sister reminds her, “Nice girls don’t let men kiss them until after they’re engaged. Men don’t want the bloom rubbed off”—to which Garland responds, “Personally, I think I have too much bloom.” Garland gives a spirited performance as a virginal teen, her eyes flashing beneath a swath of auburn hair coiled on her forehead like a fender, but in reality the twenty-one-year-old ingénue already had been persuaded to have an abortion and would soon move in with the director, Vincente Minnelli, nearly two decades her senior. (They married a year after the film came out, had a daughter—Liza Minnelli—and divorced five years later.)

The film’s crisis comes when Garland’s father declares his intention to move the family to New York City, dashing his daughters’ romantic interests and hopes of the fair. In the dramatic Christmas Eve denouement, he decides the family will stay put, saying, “New York doesn’t have a copyright on opportunity. Why, St. Louis is headed for a boom that’ll make your head swim.”

A slick-haired fellow shouts from an automobile: “One hundred and forty models of cars powered by gas, electricity, and steam!” His eyes shine with belief in the Palace of Transportation. He waves a magazine furiously about; as he reads, he stabs his finger in the air: “This new form of carriage will become perfected, and then the great cities will spread out into the suburbs, and life on an acre will become a possibility for even the humblest class of people!”

The Pruitt-Igoe housing project was built for a postwar boom that never came. The city of St. Louis was dying; another kind of planned community was thriving beyond its borders—the suburb, fueled by the same 1949 Federal Housing Act that enabled Pruitt-Igoe. Having already legally fixed its boundaries, the city couldn’t abate its population decline by annexation. With the middle class fleeing to the suburbs, the development would never be able to raise the significant maintenance fees it needed from its tenants. The city let the brand-new buildings deteriorate almost from the start. More pernicious factors were also at work. Suburbs passed zoning laws barring low-income housing; public projects became a tool of segregation, the goal being to prevent, in the parlance of the day, “negro deconcentration.”

St. Louis is often ranked as one of the country’s most segregated cities based on what’s called its “dissimilarity score,” which analyzes racial makeup across census tracts. While different measurements suggest the divide might not be so stark, the traditional color line is widely acknowledged to be Delmar Boulevard. Seventy-three percent of residents south of the boulevard are white; head north, and neighborhoods become 98 percent black. A color-coded map of the 2010 census reveals a similar pattern: blacks to the north and whites to the south and west, with some intermingling along the southeastern edge of the city.

The wealthy west county suburbs are predominately white. One historian has called St. Louis “the poster child of white flight.”

In the musical, Garland sings about her home at 5135 Kensington Avenue, a stately three-story Victorian on an idyllic block on the MGM back lot known as “St. Louis Street” (which would appear in a number of films before being torn down). The real address—a few blocks north of Delmar—belonged to the writer Sally Benson, from whose memoirs—serialized in the New Yorker as “5135 Kensington”—the film was drawn. Benson’s former home was abandoned and demolished in 1994. Today, 5135 Kensington Avenue is a vacant plot with a history of debris and graffiti complaints, valued in the city’s last appraisal at $3,800. The St. Louis Land Reutilization Authority owns it. The neighborhood has suffered over the years; in 2001, wild dogs ate a ten-year-old boy in a park two blocks away. (“They fed off of him,” the police chief said.) As it turns out, Benson’s family did move to New York and never saw the fair.

I push past the crowds into the Palace of Education and Social Economy. In a model classroom, the teacher struggles to keep the attention of the giggling local children, who are thrilled at their turn to take part in the exhibit. I wander into the “School for Defectives.” Deaf students sewing—blind students on violins! Helen Keller, a senior at Radcliffe, will be lecturing soon. On my way out, I peruse modern treatments for the insane.

St. Louis is a city preoccupied with school districts, perhaps because its public schools were stripped of accreditation by the State Board of Education in 2007, when governance of the district was transferred to an administrative board appointed by the governor, mayor, and president of the city’s Board of Aldermen. The district was nearly $25 million in debt. Fewer than one in five students could read at grade level. In fall of 2012, the schools regained provisional accreditation, though the previous spring’s exams had shown only 27 percent of students passing in math (compared to a 55 percent average statewide).

The problem of St. Louis schools is a Gordian knot of politics and passion that has been studied by heads far smarter than mine. I cannot do it justice here. But most people admit the usual “solutions”—bussing, lotteries, a district transfer system, a mix of private, parochial, charter, and magnet schools—have failed to create equal opportunity.

The odds are against the shrinking city. In 1970, St. Louis public schools enrolled 111,233 students. In 2011, average daily attendance was 20,880. A 1972 discrimination and desegregation lawsuit lingered until 1999, when a settlement finally ended court supervision of the district. Left in place: a voluntary transfer system that allows African American students from the city to attend one of the participating (wealthier) county districts. Waiting lists are long; each year, thousands of students are turned away. Those who are admitted face an average one-way bus ride of fifty-four minutes, among other challenges. At the start of 2013, five thousand and thirty-six students transferred from city to county schools. The program also allows white suburban students to transfer to city magnet schools—eighty-seven students took advantage of that opportunity.

The transfer program is scheduled to extend until 2019.

East St. Louis, Illinois, sits just across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Louis. Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Miles Davis, Jimmy Connors, and Ike and Tina Turner have called it home. The U.S. attorney for the district recently called it “the Wild West.” From 2008 to 2011, the city had to cut its police force by 33 percent; the per capita murder rate is more than sixteen times the national average. Since 1960, East St. Louis has lost two-thirds of its population; a casino and the school district provide most of the jobs. At a party, I met a man who moved to St. Louis six years ago; he told me, “When friends visit from Europe, I drive them through East St. Louis. It really shakes up their notion that there is a certain level of poverty here that no one falls below. They can’t believe America can be so bombed out.”

A man in a blue uniform approaches me. He is a physical specimen—between twenty-one and forty years old, at least five-foot-eight, 145 to 180 pounds, and of “good feature and bearing”—one of the Jefferson Guard, the omnipresent guides and official policemen of the fair, some three hundred strong. I nod and say, “Just passing through.” He looks at me and smiles, but I’m starting to feel uncomfortable, nervous. I cross the street. He pulls his mustache as he reprimands a boy for spitting: “No one is innocent.” He should know. For fifty dollars a month plus housing, he and his brethren will arrest 1,439 citizens, including 312 trespassers, 421 disturbers of the peace, 5 murderers, and 1 vile soul charged with “wife abandonment.” On hot summer days, he sports a lighter khaki.

As a kid, I learned of East St. Louis from National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983), in which the hapless Griswold family gets lost there, a sequence that—by playing into negative stereotypes—popularized the city as national shorthand for “crime-ridden ghetto.” (A clueless Chevy Chase lectures his family, “This is a part of America we never get to see. . . . We can’t close our eyes to the plight of the cities. Kids, are you noticing all this plight?”)

But rewatching the movie, one notices that—thanks to a continuity error—the family actually would have been in St. Louis, having already been shown crossing the river into Missouri. In terms of plight, St. Louis holds its own. In 2013, it ranked as the third most violent city in the U.S. after New Orleans and Detroit. Another report listed two of its neighborhoods on the “Top 25 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods in America.” Invariably the mayor’s office and the police department rebut such rankings—often with good reason, as an antiquated city/county divide puts St. Louis at a tremendous national disadvantage in polling methodology, and skews many of these stats. Still, at the time of the fair, St. Louis was nearly twice the size it is now. It has lost some five hundred thousand people over the past fifty years. Segregation, disastrous “urban renewal” projects, “white flight” to the suburbs, “redlining” (racist lending practices), and blockbusting (racist real-estate scaremongering and profiteering) tell some of the complicated story. The fact remains: the last time the city had this few people was in 1870—and the national perception endures that it is dangerous to live in St. Louis on either side of the river.

Pruitt-Igoe residents were treated with suspicion and subject to dehumanizing regulations, the subtext being that the poor were in need of forced moral uplift. Televisions were forbidden; apartments could be painted no color but white. Disastrous welfare laws broke up families—no able-bodied man could live in a unit that received federal aid—so fathers hid in closets when they were supposed to be, by regulation, out of the state. Many of the buildings’ modern innovations functioned poorly. “Skip-stop” elevators that didn’t land on every floor—an economic concession that supposedly encouraged mingling and use of the stairs—made residents easy prey for muggers. Public galleries became gauntlets. Residents had been promised beautiful, safe, affordable housing, but city maintenance deteriorated. Elevators smelled of urine and broke down regularly; “vandal proof” light fixtures stayed dark. Firefighters, police officers, and ambulances stopped showing up after frustrated tenants dropped bottles and bricks on them. Pruitt-Igoe quickly became an emblem of an overblown white fear of black poverty and crime. As the experiment unraveled, a complex story of structural inequality and misunderstood urban forces was turned—by some—into a more vicious parable of how those people just couldn’t be helped, just couldn’t be trusted with nice things. Critics blamed the residents, the design, and the welfare state; such accounts overlooked or underplayed the effects of racism, segregation, and a city in crisis. In 1965, Architectural Forum noted, “Pruitt-Igoe also is a state of mind. Its notoriety, even among those who live there, has long since outstripped the facts.” Rents were raised three times in one year. Residents were stretched to the breaking point and got nothing in return. Apartments went without heat. Buildings fell apart. The city had become a predatory “slum lord.”

I hurry past an anthracite coal mine belching soot and smoke in a gulch south of the palace, pausing only briefly to wonder what might be unearthed. Slipping between a pair of Egyptian obelisks, I enter the Palace of Mines and Metallurgy. I glance over my shoulder—no policemen in sight. I have no time for an oil rig, a 1,200-pound pot of mercury, the devil made of sulfur. I duck into a dark room that holds a luminous collection of radium ores. A child presses my hand and whispers, “They look like fireflies.” Next door, at 2:30, the U.S. Government will stage a demonstration of the mysterious element. Cosmopolitan implores I not miss this epochal discovery: “Revealing an energy so powerful, inexhaustible, and apparently so abundant in nature, that its substitution for other forms of light and power now in general use is within the range of possibility.”

A local sociologist named Lisa Martino-Taylor recently uncovered a secret army experiment conducted in the 1950s and 1960s in which St. Louis citizens were unknowingly sprayed with a mixture of zinc cadmium sulfide that she believes might have been radioactive. Chemical sprayers were attached to buildings, schools, and station wagons. Residents were told smoke screens were being tested that might conceal the city from the Russians. In fact, St. Louis was believed to be a fair model of certain Soviet military targets—the perfect Cold War replica. The army was studying fallout patterns. Poor minority communities were targeted. Roughly three-quarters of the inhabitants of the test area—what army documents called “a densely populated slum district”—were black. Cadmium was known to be toxic; the finely ground chemical was easily inhaled. Martino-Taylor has collected stories of cancer. The army admits the aerosol was fluorescent, but it won’t say whether it was radioactive. Many documents remain classified. Most of the spraying was done around the Pruitt-Igoe complex, home at the time to about ten thousand low-income residents, some 70 percent of whom were children.

The Baby Incubators didn’t hold the only newborns at the fair. The first child born on the grounds was to one of the workers in 1902; Louisiana Purchase (Louise) O’Leary died in 2003, nearly 101 years old. On July 1, 1904, a St. Louis policeman brought an abandoned preemie to the incubator exhibit; on the last day of the fair, the policeman and his wife took the baby home and named her Frances, after the exposition president. She forever would be their “World’s Fair souvenir.” Meanwhile, an Inuit child was born into far more humble housing, only to die shortly thereafter from the summer heat.

In 1969, Pruitt-Igoe tenants organized a rent strike, a shocking development in public housing. After nine months, the housing authority caved. But that winter, two months after the victory, water and sewage pipes burst, perhaps partly due to an estimated ten thousand broken windows. Sheets of ice cascaded down the façades. Buildings were vacated, then stripped by thieves. Superblocks became ghost towns, the darkened shells offering a high-rise vantage for drug lords looking to evade enemies and cops.

In 1972, the city capitulated—the first three buildings were imploded. The demolition of building C-15 on April 21, 1972, was nationally televised, the spectacular footage spreading so widely that Charles Jencks, the architectural theorist, proclaimed this first stage of demolitions to be the day “modern architecture died.” The final eight hundred tenants were relocated, and by 1976 the development had been erased, leaving a fifty-seven-acre scar across the north side.

In the Hall of Anthropology, housed in a university building I can see from my office window, visitors could get tested anthropometrically—their bodies weighed, their skulls, foreheads, ears, and jaws measured—or gawk at a Brazilian shrunken head. On display in the ethnological exhibits: a family of nine Ainus from Japan (supposedly the world’s hairiest people), several Patagonian “giants,” pygmies from Africa, representatives from more than twenty native North American tribes, and “many other strange people, all housed in their peculiar dwellings, such as the wigwam, tepee, earth-lodge, toldo, or tent.” The Department of Anthropology hoped to show “how the other half lives, and thereby to promote not only knowledge but also peace and good will among the nations.” Cultural and political imperialism were given a scientific gloss; the virtues of white, western assimilation were roundly praised. In his diary, one fairgoer favored the Ainus, whom he found “not as dirty nor nearly as lazy-looking as the Patagonians.”

There are ethical concerns of looking, and I am reluctant to gawk. YouTube videos titled “the worst ghetto in America” scroll through Google Street View shots scored with either a lugubrious sound track or high-octane rap. On a video for north St. Louis, the comments run the gamut—boastful, racist, reasoned, sad—from trolls, residents, rubberneckers, and the like. One well-designed website tracks the deterioration of a single north-side block, comparing a dense map of dozens of houses and stores at the turn of the twentieth century to a diagram of the six buildings that remain—on either side of the street—nearly a hundred years later. Today there is but one house standing. These are old buildings, often made of St. Louis brick, a fine, beautiful brick that was once the pride of the city. In the fourth ward, there is a long-running scam in which thieves set fire to a vacant house; after firefighters come and scour off the mortar with their hoses, the thieves return and cart off the cleaned bricks. Thanks to a policy of demolition and clearance, an inner-city prairie has sprouted, a startling sight. Satellite imagery shows swaths of city blocks turned into gridded green plots of land, with scrub brush, a few trees, some crumbling structures, maybe a house with no roof. A four-way intersection in the middle of the city might look like a forgotten rural byway.

But perhaps I shouldn’t take you on these streets. Perhaps I shouldn’t be going there myself just to look. A white professor who rents an apartment in a neighborhood in which he could not afford to buy a house—what gives me the right? I don’t know these communities. I can’t see them for real. Even writing this, I worry I’m not illuminating a problem but feeding a self-perpetuating fear.

The gem of the anthropological offerings was the Philippine exhibit, dedicated to the islands that had become a U.S. territory following the recent Spanish–American War. After walking a bridge across Arrow Head Lake, visitors entered the forty-seven-acre encampment through a reproduction of the walled city of Manila. Ads touted “40 different tribes, 6 Philippine villages, 70,000 exhibits, 130 buildings, 725 native soldiers—better than a trip through the Philippine Islands!”

The most popular—and controversial—part of the exhibit was the Igorot Village. In their loincloths, the tribesmen looked “like bronze statues,” according to one female viewer. (A male visitor noted they “seemed to have a tremendous attraction for the ladies.”) Secretary of War William Howard Taft wanted the tribesmen in trousers, but the fair’s Board of Lady Managers overruled, upholding their idea of science over prudishness. The loincloths carried the day, even late into the year, when the huts were warmed to accommodate the light dress.

Even more sensational were the regular dog feasts, an occasional tribal tradition greatly played up for the fair. Fueled by reports in the papers, visitors brought dogs to the village to donate, sell, or trade; some sources claim twenty canines a week were provided by a local pound, though the number seems apocryphal.

At the Philippine Model School, Igorot schoolchildren serenaded President and Mrs. Roosevelt with “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” The President remarked, “It is wonderful, such advancement and in so short a time!” One Igorot chief insisted a telephone be installed in his imperial hut. A photo caption from Cosmopolitan that September: “Miss Roosevelt and her friends are amused at the manners and customs of the Filipinos.” Four white-hatted white ladies holding small bouquets peer around some shrubbery and laugh, flashing their ivory teeth.

The area occupied by the village is now a tony—gated—neighborhood I sometimes walk through on the way to campus. In the morning and late afternoon, the wide streets are eerily quiet, deserted, the only activity the comings and goings of uniformed domestic help or buzzing groups of gardeners. In a year of wandering through the neighborhood I don’t think I’ve ever seen an inhabitant of one of these houses. I walk past a public school whose mascot was the Igorot until 1974.

A local sixteen-year-old named T. S. Eliot frequented the fair. I visit the reading room of the Missouri History Museum’s Library and Research Center, just south of the Life-Saving Lake (now gone), where shipwrecked sailors were rescued daily at 2:00 p.m. I sit beneath a Byzantine dome in the former sanctuary of a synagogue. The room is a whispering gallery: I hear voices, snatches of conversations, echoes where there is no one. Across the room, an archivist laughs, and it sounds like she’s behind my ear. I pick up Stockholder’s Coupon Ticket #1313, signed “Thos. S. Eliot” and bearing a photo of the boy poet, who gazes slyly down to the left, as if he knows better than to look. He wears a coat and tie, with tidy hair and a tight collar. His alabaster skin is wan and washed-out, and his heavy-lidded eyes are sunken, blurred, and unfocused, almost blind. One large ear is turned, as if listening. He sports a thin, coy smile. The archivist handed me the photo with a shudder. “Creepy,” she said. The boy looks like a seer.

The slim, salmon-colored booklet held detachable coupons good for admission any day but Sunday, when the fair was closed. Tickets were nontransferable; in a fifty-coupon book, only one remains. The cardboard cover is a bit warped, perhaps by sweat. How many hours did it spend inside a pant or coat pocket—or clutched in a sweaty sixteen-year-old palm? The ticket feels heavy with history. Despite being an official stakeholder, the poet never wrote directly of visiting the fair—though a year later, in his school’s journal, he would publish a south-seas short story critical of the powers of civilization, certain details of which recall the Igorots. The white boy fell under the sway of “the exotic.” Lecturing at Harvard twenty-seven years later, he would state, “Poetry begins, I dare say, with a savage beating a drum in a jungle.”

Also on display was an Mbuti pygmy named Ota Benga, who for a nickel would bare his pointy filed teeth. In two years, he would be exhibited in the monkey house of the Bronx Zoo—causing a furor. He eventually relocated to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he went by the name Otto Bingo. In 1916, after filing off the caps on his teeth, he lit a ceremonial fire and shot himself in the heart. There is no poetry in a bullet to the heart.

I distrust my eyes. Chief Geronimo sits in a booth at the Indian Building. A sign says the seventy-five-year-old Apache prisoner of war arrived from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, under military guard. A man whispers, “Yesterday, he made a bow and arrow for my neighbor.” When the chief doesn’t move, the guy shuffles away. I say, “Chief, I am sorry. I am repulsed by your treatment.” He sighs and says, “Go ahead—I know you want my picture.” I’m silent. He looks disappointed. “Two dollars, white man.” As I reach for my Kodak, I ask, “Is it true the Indians in the Cliff Dweller attraction aren’t Hopis, but Pueblos—and they’re faking both the snakes and the steps in their ‘Hopi Snake Dance?’” He says, “I have nothing for the likes of you.”

The Japanese exhibit was a popular but befuddling entry, one that threatened to derail the fair’s anthropological narrative. The Ainu, with their light skin and “Caucasoid appearance,” provided a problematic example to a contemporary anthropologist, who noted in confusion, “Here we find a white race that has . . . proved inferior in life’s battle to the more active, energetic, progressive yellow people, with which it has come into contact.” Never mind that Japan was busy beating Russia in a war. A fairgoer wrote in his diary: “Japanese section—wilderness of pottery—clouds of fine needle work. Their every work marvelous.” A writer for Cosmopolitan was caught short: “First surprise; then profound astonishment; then mortification: this describes the feelings which developed as I made my progress through the Exposition, everywhere Germany and Japan displaying a superiority for which, I confess, I was in no way prepared.”

The same didn’t hold true for the Chinese exhibit for at least one visitor, who wrote in his memoir: “Cared little for the China section. Somehow it always impressed you as topsy-turvydom, and could not get your mind down to a patient scrutiny, if general, of twisted dragons, fantastic dogs, full-bellied figures, and a confused mass of carvings, jim-cracks, and—and space occupiers that center the thought mainly on the time that it took to make these things.” When the fair ended, twenty-nine-year-old Prince Pu Lun, who had lived at the George Washington Hotel for two months, gave the entire Chinese Pavilion to Exposition President Francis, after which it went missing.

On the north side of St. Louis stand the city’s many chop suey houses. Happy Chop Suey, Wing Hing Chop Suey, Harold’s Chop Suey, Mandarin Inn, Newstead Chop Suey Catfish. There are bars on the windows and no tables or chairs; orders are taken behind bulletproof glass. Chop suey—Chinese vegetables and meat stir-fried in a heavy cornstarch sauce—is a nineteenth-century immigrant invention born in America and embraced early by African Americans. (February 26, 1926: Louis Armstrong records his hit “Cornet Chop Suey.”) The country experienced a sustained chop suey craze. But when Nixon went to China in 1972, he didn’t eat chop suey. America learned about other—perhaps more authentic—Chinese cuisines. Today, chop suey endures only in Middle America—and in St. Louis, chop suey shops cling sharply to the color line. South of Delmar, they are for the most part simply “Chinese restaurants.”

The specialty of St. Louis chop suey is something called (curiously) the St. Paul Sandwich, a gastronomical gut-bomb of mysterious origin. To outsiders, the ingredients might seem a bit topsy-turvy: egg foo young, tomato, pickle, lettuce, and mayonnaise slapped between white bread.

Hungry, I stop at Dragon Chop Suey on Kingshighway because the neon sign says it is open. The menu takes up most of the wall: a plain St. Paul Sandwich costs $2.30 ($3.20 for duck in it, $3.50 for tripe). Extra cheese is 60 cents. Packets of soy sauce, sweet and sour sauce, and red pepper are a nickel each. A yellow sign declares NO CHANGE. There is only one opening in the wall, a rotating octagon made of very thick plastic—one of those distrustful lazy Susans that only lets one side (the customer or the kitchen) access it at a time. The place is deserted. I bend and call into the opening, “I’d like a St. Paul Sandwich.” No reply. I’ve made a mistake in coming here. I try again, but I’m ignorant—ten thirty in the morning is too early for a St. Paul Sandwich. A face appears in the octagon and simply says, “Eleven o’clock.”

I’ve only lived here a year and a half—I don’t pretend to know these streets. I am new at the fair, a yokel trying to take it all in. I offer no answers; I might have the wrong questions. This essay is an exposition, its own kind of fair. I am putting together something that doesn’t exist. A replica. Perhaps an ideal. My own not-so-radiant city. I am building on sand and shadows; I, too, am destined to fail.

Later, during the lunch rush at Yan Wu House Chop Suey on Delmar, a St. Paul Sandwich takes fewer than five minutes to make. You don’t have to be patient; there’s nothing to scrutinize. The sandwich costs the seemingly standard $2.30 and is hot and crisp.

August 12 and 13 were Anthropology Days, a series of sporting contests organized by the departments of Anthropology and Physical Culture a few weeks before the Olympic Games (when pervading beliefs held that the Americans would win over the “primitive” races, never mind the fact that George Poage, an African American sponsored by the Milwaukee Athletic Club, would become the first black medalist when he won bronze in both the 220-and 440-yard hurdles).

And so the Sioux competed against the Arapahos in tug-of-war. Tribesmen tossed a fifty-six-pound weight. There was a mud fight. Crack spear-throwers struggled with the javelin. Runners stopped and ducked under the finish-line tape. Participants laughed at the events; they didn’t try very hard. The white man’s games didn’t translate. Attendance was poor, as was the quality of “data” collected by the departments. Winners were given American flags. A Filipino Negrito named Basilio was the fastest to climb the greased pole.

On July 2, 1917, near Fourth and Broadway in East St. Louis, a black man was cornered and strung up on a telephone pole; when the rope broke, the man fell to the gutter, where, according to the New York Times, a mob “riddled his body with bullets” before hanging him again. In 1916 and 1917, some ten thousand African Americans moved to East St. Louis from the rural south as part of the Great Migration, greatly feeding white cultural, economic, and political fear. Labor tensions ran high. The night before that July lynching—which would prove to be only one of many—a car of white men had driven through Market Street, shooting at black residents. When plainclothes police officers appeared in a car, they were mistaken for the original culprits and were fired upon, killing two. East St. Louis exploded into some of the bloodiest race riots in American history. The goal: drive out the blacks.

Houses were set alight and the fleeing residents gunned down. Eyewitnesses described babies being tossed into the river or shot in the head and fed into the flames. Small boys fired revolvers. Two young white girls dragged a black woman off a streetcar; another white girl stomped on a black man’s face, bloodying her stockings. Bodies were left in the street. Militiamen were ordered to shoot to kill in their efforts to subdue the white mobs, but one black woman—hearing gunfire—fled an outhouse only to have her arm shot off by a soldier. The city’s most famous expat, Josephine Baker, would remember watching—as an eleven-year-old—a man being beaten, and hearing about a pregnant neighbor whose baby was torn out.

The mayor’s office attempted a cover-up; his private secretary ordered police and militiamen to smash cameras and arrest anyone attempting to photograph the violence. But the next day, a telegram reached the War Department: “Very bad night fires and rumors period. A lot of negroes killed number unknown period.” The approximate death toll: eight whites and anywhere from forty to hundreds of blacks. At least $400,000 in property lost. More than six thousand African Americans would flee. W. E. B. Du Bois, sent to bear witness to the massacre, reported an old woman’s lament: “We can’t live in the South and they don’t want us in the North. Where are we to go?”

In the fall of 2013, an editorial appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch proposing an amendment to the state constitution that would join the city and county of St. Louis—undoing the “Great Divorce of 1876,” what the editorial board called “the biggest mistake this region ever made.” Secret talks—including “key city, county, civic, and corporate leaders”—had been underway for years. The paper pushed the mayor to go public. An anonymous opposition group set up a website. Weeks went by with no more news. A longtime St. Louisan told me, “Oh, there are rumors all the time.”

I’m having lunch with a prominent local, someone who—along with Maya Angelou, Chuck Berry, Yogi Berra, Phyllis Diller, Robert Duvall, Walker Evans, Redd Foxx, Betty Grable, William Holden, and Stan Musial—has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. We discuss a city that doesn’t know how to define itself. During the Civil War, it had slaves but was not southern. It is not western, like Kansas City, on the other side of the state, but it is not eastern, not really—just ask any transplant from the coast. It truly is Middle American, whatever that means. There’s the old joke: what kind of city would advertise itself as a jumping-off point, an exit door, a gateway to somewhere else?

It is a city that lives with a sense of belatedness. A city haunted, proud of its past but worried its best days are behind it. The fear: that it has become just another link on the Rust Belt, the next Detroit. It once competed to be the biggest and best in the middle of the country—a crown long since lost to Chicago, though the rivalry (which sometimes seems a little one-sided) endures. It is a city preoccupied with the order of things. Living here, one of the common questions is “Where did you go to school?”—which my lunch companion tells me means high school. In other words, it’s a way to talk implicitly about neighborhood, class, religion, and race—an arcane social code that no transplant will ever fully crack. My companion says that even after living here some thirty years he feels like an outsider.

Valentine’s Day weekend 2014 marked the 250th anniversary of the founding of St. Louis, which was celebrated with a lavish festival in Forest Park. (The centerpiece: a sculpture of a heart—on fire—rising above the Grand Basin.) The semiquincentennial celebration lasts all year, with exhibits, symposiums, and historical reenactments. For the planners, optimism runs high.

In 2005, St. Louis adopted a comprehensive plan for the use of every block in the city. It has been amended ten times. Supposedly, a north-side renewal is afoot. Land has been bought, the developers given massive tax incentives that were temporarily blocked by lawsuits. Many north-siders feel alienated, not included in the plan. The biggest developer—whose website details his vision for a fifteen-hundred-acre site that would become “a shining example of modern America” and “a gateway for liberty”—has quoted Winston Churchill: “You’ll never get to your destination if you worry about every barking dog along the way.”

Today apartments are available (a banner: “Downtown Living, Uptown Style!”). A local nonprofit organization held an international contest to reimagine use for the Pruitt-Igoe site, with winners announced in 2012, the fortieth anniversary of the demolition. The top design, from two Harvard graduate students, took home $1,000 and called for the abandoned land to become an “ecological assembly line,” with nurseries and aquaculture basins producing native plants, trees, mussels, and fish. The proposal is beautiful, part memorial, part farm, but I cannot stop staring at images of the implosion. Something about them arrests me. Eventually, I see it. Behind the buildings and the dust cloud, to the left of the horizon, stands what was then the city’s most recent monument to a radiant future—dedicated only four years earlier—the gleaming Gateway Arch.

From the beginning, the purity of the plan was suspect. After Saarinen announced his design, an Italian architect claimed the idea was his, stolen from a fascist monument he had drawn up for Rome’s 1942 World’s Fair (never realized). Saarinen said his arch was universal. (Indeed, Mussolini’s arch—while meant to be taller—looks eerily identical.) Twenty-one years later, at the dedication, Vice President Hubert Humphrey proclaimed the Gateway Arch would provide a “new sense of urgency to wipe out every slum,” promising that—by its example—“whatever is shoddy, whatever is ugly, whatever is waste, whatever is false, will be measured and condemned.”

Forty downtown blocks were leveled to make room for the arch, many of them home to poor bohemians, artists, and African Americans. A day or two after reading Humphrey’s speech, I hear a historian say on the radio that the arch hasn’t transformed the city as its builders had hoped, and if it is destined to be remembered by history, it will not be as a celebration of the Louisiana Purchase, but as a monument to the mid-twentieth century—to an America so powerful, so brash, so sure of its future that it would destroy a downtown to put up a symbol.

Reviewing Meet Me in St. Louis on November 25, 1944, critic James Agee wrote, “This habit of sumptuous idealization seriously reduces the value even of the few scenes on which I chiefly base my liking for the picture; but at the same time, and for that matter nearly all the time, it gives you, for once, something most unusually pretty to watch.”

A perfect day at the fair could be ruined in many ways, by rain, cold, heat, exhaustion, not to mention the usual human foibles and follies. The expense was not trivial; expectations had to be met—a lot was riding on the day. Countless diaries, photos, letters, articles, and books exist—an obsessive amount of documentation. Visitors struggled to render the fair, to capture it, to wrestle it into posterity, to fix it in amber. As the final days neared, visitors undertook frantic tours to try to see it all again. But, as one fairgoer put it, the fair resisted narrative—it “cannot be even hinted at by words.” Across accounts, the one that seems to crop up most often: “indescribable.”

And so beneath the fairgoer’s wonder was a kind of manic sorrow, a present-tense nostalgia, the fleeting realization that one couldn’t live forever at this pitch. Dazzled by the lights, you already began picturing life outside the glare. You knew you were being changed, not always for the better. As one concert attendee rued in his diary, “Our taste will be better than our opportunities hereafter.”

I sense the lights dimming—I’m getting frantic. Like any good con on the Pike, I’ve focused your gaze to suit my own ends, but what about the attractions I have left out? Bellefontaine and Calvary Cemeteries, those radiant cities of the dead, the final resting place of Fair President Francis—their massive mausoleums impress even today, but I am growing tired of plans that look toward eternity. (Francis ran his operations from an office across the quad from mine—the smell of champagne will last for months after he’s gone!) And what about other subterranean histories, such as the city’s natural caverns, which—offering cool storage—built the city’s beer business and later hid speakeasies, roller rinks, and theaters that offered light opera to audiences of three hundred? I haven’t mentioned the local earthquakes—some of the greatest recorded on the continent. Or the indescribable City Museum, with its surreal six hundred thousand square feet. Meanwhile, Frank Lloyd Wright is becoming enamored of Japanese design at the fair. What about the city’s Bosnian community flourishing on the south side, now the largest (per capita) outside Bosnia itself? Or the Liberty Bell, delivered to the fair after seventy-five thousand local children signed a petition, and now guarded by a real Philadelphia policeman? Whither the city’s literary sons and daughters: Marianne Moore, William S. Burroughs, Jonathan Franzen, Kate Chopin (who collapsed at the fair and died two days later), and Tennessee Williams, who—while institutionalized in 1969 in a hospital on the east side of Forest Park—began assembling a secret time capsule, an olive-green Samsonite suitcase into which he put journals, poems, parking receipts, and his first passport, before leaving it with his personal secretary and lover. Layers upon layers! At the Aeronautic Concourse, where the “bird-men” dock their floating vessels behind a thirty-foot fence, none of the airships will navigate the course fast enough to collect the $100,000 prize. And what about the Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh’s plane backed by businessmen from this fine town, which the former mail pilot predicted would become the country’s aviation center—another promise unfulfilled! Or the amusements of the Pike, which might have become permanent had Washington University not protested the distraction: the Temple of Mirth, the Spectatorium, Creation, the Hereafter. Thomas Jefferson’s original headstone has been brought to the fair. Outside the Alaska Building, union workers are planting some newly painted totem poles upside down. The city has known horrors—it, incidentally, is the birthplace of Vincent Price and the town where the man Scotland Yard believed to be the prime suspect for Jack the Ripper drew his last breath. U.S. Marines will be drilling from 8:00 until 10:00 a.m., followed by feeding hours for the seals. Oh, and I have said nothing of Nelly.

Meet Me in St. Louis ends at the fair. Overlooking the Grand Basin, Garland swoons to her beau, “I never dreamed anything could be so beautiful.” When the palace lights come on, her mother sighs, “There’s never been anything like it in the whole world.” The youngest sister asks, “Grandpa? They’ll never tear it down, will they?” He replies, “Well, they’d better not.” Garland gets the last breathless word: “I can’t believe it. Right here where we live. Right here in St. Louis.” Fade out.

The fair closed on December 1, 1904. The governor declared Closing Day a school and business holiday. As midnight approached, President Francis made a brief speech, then turned off the lights as the band played “Auld Lang Syne.” His face floated over the grounds, painted in fireworks next to the words “farewell” and “good night.”

Having cost roughly $50 million to build, the disposable fair buildings were sold for $450,000 to the Chicago House Wrecking Company, which salvaged and resold a hundred million linear feet of lumber (“enough to build outright over ten cities with a population each of 5,000 inhabitants”), plus roofing, steel, doors, plumbing, fittings, and so on. Also for sale, some 350,000 incandescent lamps: six cents used, sixteen cents new. Several architectural forms appeared in Missouri homes.

In an Alpine-themed restaurant on the Pike, the fair fathers pick their teeth with quail bones; juice from medallions of beef drips down their chins. In the corner, the governors of Wisconsin, Missouri, and Minnesota share a hearty joke. In five days, President Francis will turn off the lights. The men are confident and rich. One of the waiters bumps me. He says to a guest, “Pardon him, sir—just another rube at the fair.” The gentlemen smirk in my direction before offering me a seat. One asks, “Well, was it worth it?” Does he mean the fair or my visit? Then President Roosevelt stands and delivers these thoughts: “I have but one regret, and that is a deep regret—the regret that these buildings and these exhibits could not be made permanent; that these buildings cannot be maintained as they are for our children and our children’s children and all who are to come after, as a permanent memorial of the greatness of this country. I think that an American who begrudges a dollar that has been spent here is not so far-sighted as he should be. It is a credit to the United States to have had such an exposition carried on so successfully from the beginning to its conclusion.”

Many people mistake the Gateway Arch for a parabola, but it’s more complicated than that. In truth, our arch is a flattened catenary arch—the graph of the hyperbolic cosine made flesh, or, put another way, the natural curve a cable makes when suspended between two points. The name comes from the Latin word for chain. I have ridden a tiny tram capsule up the north leg of the arch. The 1960s space-age pod barely fits five people and rises in a rocking-step motion—ka-chunk, ka-chunk—followed by stretches of smooth ascent. Travel is not for the faint of heart, nor the claustrophobic. My head brushes the roof of the pod. Before boarding, a futuristic female voice speaks from a monitor: “The Gateway Arch transcends time.” The trip lasts four minutes.

A Park Ranger repeats over and over: “Welcome to the top. It’s all good,” and, “You got questions? Let your tax dollars sing.” Visitors get their bearings by peering through seven-inch slits. A hot summer day: the arch casts a long, lopsided shadow. It takes a moment to orient yourself; approaching the arch through the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial park, I heard an excited girl shout, “To the west!” when we were actually migrating south. The base of the arch holds something called the Museum of Westward Expansion.

The arch is centered on the Old Courthouse, immediately to the west, where slaves were auctioned and Dred Scott tried his case twice. Ahead of me stretches downtown, Pruitt-Igoe, Forest Park, my university, my neighborhood, a number of private places. What was once the world’s largest wheel no longer rises over the fairgrounds—after the fair, it was dynamited, its countless perfect spokes twisted and heaped like the slack tendrils of some broken beast. The remains were sold for scrap, but the wheel’s seventy-ton axle—then the largest piece of forged steel in the world—remains missing to this day. My mind turns circles. I look over the north side and picture Dragon Chop Suey, just a few blocks from the corner where gunfire erupted last night as part of a citywide spree of unrelated violence. Seventeen people shot and one man stabbed—there have been no arrests. The police chief was out of town and had no comment for the paper.

Behind me stretches the swollen, brown Mississippi, well above flood stage, having already swallowed the lip of downtown. On a submerged street, a stop sign lists with the current. Muddy water laps up the steps leading to the arch, as if to reclaim it. Across the river rise a casino, grain elevators, an American flag, and the train yards and telephone poles of East St. Louis.

Most of Pruitt-Igoe has returned to the wilderness. The land sat unused until 1989, when fourteen acres became a public school site that still houses magnet middle and elementary schools. The remaining thirty-three acres have become an abandoned urban forest bound by an easily and—judging by the total collapse in some places—frequently scaled chain-link fence. An access road leads to an electrical substation on the site; a chain dangles between two short poles, blocking the way, another gate swung shut: DANGER: KEEP OUT.

Trash and debris collect beneath tall, fast-growing trees. A crumpled beer can—the label says Busch, a local name. Sirens are approaching, but no need for alarm—there’s a fire station adjacent. Weeds and grass have taken over the cracked pavement that has become a wooded path; here and there a manhole pocks the forest floor. Further on, a storm drain disappears to nowhere. A streetlight sprouts from a lonely copse of trees. Former residents still stop outside the fence, where honeysuckle grows. They miss their radiant city. They dream of it. Part of them still calls it home.

Even after the fair ended, visitors returned to wander the empty paths. One woman wrote her husband that she was “heart sick to see the ruin and desolation”—but she could almost imagine herself still at the fair.

Here’s the thing: the arch is beautiful. Before moving to town, I dismissed it as a hulking piece of modern midcentury kitsch—a civic branding tool, the stuff of bad airport T-shirts and mugs. But for more than a year the arch has watched over me, and while there are places in my neighborhood and on campus where I know to look for it, I often find myself catching an unexpected glimpse and—shocked back down to size—experience a jolt of the sublime. It is not unlike what used to happen with the Twin Towers. The arch is machined, perfect, soaring—the city’s greatest open gate. It changes color with the weather and hour: sometimes sky blue, sometimes gunmetal gray, sometimes pitch black. Hovering on the horizon, it has its own moods. But the arch can be a sad star to steer by. I can’t help but remember it’s just an upside-down chain.

It’s time to leave, but I linger. I know less than before, but as another fairgoer will write in his memoir, “Oh it was so sweet to sit there and look and listen, why could it not last forever? Who wanted to think of going home? Home was a fool.”

On August 9, 2014—six months after a version of this essay is published—unarmed black teenager Michael Brown is fatally shot by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, a small suburb in the northern county of St. Louis, just outside the city proper. The demographics of Ferguson have changed dramatically in the past twenty years, as black residents have resettled there from St. Louis and white residents have fled to further exurbs. Despite the shift in population, Ferguson’s power structure remains white. The shooting outrages the communities of Ferguson and of St. Louis in general. Three months later, a grand jury decides not to indict Officer Wilson, and protests spread from St. Louis across the country. The signs read: BLACK LIVES MATTER.

The arch has no keystone; the north and south legs are of equal length. You’re either on one side or the other. Arches, it should be noted, hold themselves up: they rise on their own weight, they compress—higher pieces push down and out on those below. Some five hundred tons of pressure were needed to pry the legs apart to install the final four-foot piece. That’s why the windows are so small: to preserve the structural integrity. A wider view would cause the whole thing to crash down. The National Park website lists the exact mathematical equation that describes the arch, but it never was a pure construct: it sits eighteen degrees askew from the north–south axis and sways some eighteen inches, like a chain or a gate. That fact does not comfort me when the wind blows, or even on a clear day like today. The balance is an illusion. I stand at a tense threshold—atop the tallest man-made monument in the country—upheld, for now, by forces great and unseen.

2014