Wealthy St. Louisans moved west from the crowded downtown core to build the Central West End, one of the city's most elegant and enduring neighborhoods. The neighborhood's main commercial corridor, Euclid Avenue, is lined with restaurants, boutiques, and coffee shops occupying buildings that have housed commerce for over a century. The residential streets nearby — Maryland Avenue, Westmoreland Place, Portland Place — are showcase blocks of mansions built for the industrial and mercantile elite of Gilded Age St. Louis.
The private streets — gated, maintained by neighborhood associations — are a St. Louis peculiarity: the city has more private streets than any other American city, a legacy of wealthy 19th-century residents who wanted the benefits of urban density without having to share their streets with through traffic or the general public. Chesed Shel Emet Cemetery, Washington University's medical campus, Barnes-Jewish Hospital — one of the country's great research hospitals — and the Chase Park Plaza Hotel all anchor the neighborhood. Tennessee Williams spent part of his troubled childhood here; he set 'The Glass Menagerie,' in part, in a St. Louis apartment.
The Central West End represents the St. Louis that was flush with confidence before the long 20th-century decline.