Thursday, September 3, 2009

79 Neighborhoods of St. Louis

Many refer to St. Louis as a city of neighborhoods. According to this source, there are 79 distinct neighborhoods in St. Louis. I recognize most of these neighborhoods by name only. Sadly, I could only accurately describe how to get to 32 of them. That means I could not reliably tell you how to get to 60% of my own city. Pretty lame, eh?

Furthermore, I was surprised not to see Dogtown and Kingshighway Hills on this list. I thought these were official neighborhoods. Guess not. Turns out what I've always considered as Dogtown is actually the Clayton/Tamm neighborhood and Kingshighway Hills is officially North Hampton.

I've lived in St. Louis for 15 years. I lived in Belleville, Illinois for 19 years. In order for me to honestly call myself a St. Louisian, I figure I should have spent the majority of my life there. I still feel STL is new to me in many ways and Belleville is my true "hometown". However in 5 years, I will statistically have spent the majority of my years in STL. Therefore, by my own personal standards, I'm on the verge of becoming a true St. Louisian. The timing seems right that I should visit and document my findings/observations from each and every neighborhood. So in an effort to satisfy my curiosity, I plan to spend a day in each of the 79 neighborhoods taking photos and notes as I go. I will make a separate post on each neighborhood.


I think I'll start with "heights" neighborhoods. There are 7 of them:

Botanical Heights
Boulevard Heights
Clifton Heights
Compton Heights
Hamilton Heights
McKinley Heights
Princeton Heights


Stay tuned.

7 comments:

  1. This is a good idea but it begs a question: Are you going to spend a day in St. Louis' extremely downtrodden, undesirable neighborhoods? I don't mean to sound like a I'm-going-to-die-if-I-even-drive-through-there suburbanite, but do you really want to spend a day in the Greater Ville? Or Walnut Park? I love St. Louis but there's no question that some areas should be avoided, if possible. In fairness, there are places in the county and metro east that I feel the same way about.

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  2. My goal is to document all 79 neighborhoods. If my spidey senses tell me to stay away or not get out of the car, I will heed the warning. For clarity, when I say "spend a day" in the neighborhood, I don't mean 24 hours. I just want to walk, ride or drive the entire neighborhood and take notes and photos as I go. I hope to walk away from this exercise a more informed resident. For example, I didn't even know that Walnut Park or the Greater Ville were 2 of the bad neighborhoods, as you mentioned above. I need to know these things. I need a point of reference.

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  3. I think this is a really cool idea ... go for it, but be safe!

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  4. I just found this blog via stldotage, and I love it! Your tours of the various neighborhoods are fascinating. A question: Where do you find the demographic/census information you cite for each neighborhood? Keep up the good work! I look forward to future posts.

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  5. framiko, thanks for reading. Here's my source on the census info:http://stlouis.missouri.org/neighborhoods/

    Just click on the neighborhood and then the 1990 or 2000 census

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  6. hey cool blog i live in boulevard heights and i think it would be really cool if you could talk about that. its got a good mix between new and old and is very diverse

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  7. ^anonymous, here's the Boulevard Heights post:

    http://www.stlouiscitytalk.com/2010/01/boulevard-heights-neighborhood.html

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