Leonor K. Sullivan Boulevard runs along the top of the flood levee that protects downtown St. Louis from the Mississippi River. Named for Missouri Congresswoman Leonor Sullivan, who served from 1953 to 1977 and was one of the first women elected to Congress from Missouri, the boulevard gives you a ground-level perspective on the river that shaped everything you've seen today. The Mississippi at St. Louis is roughly a quarter mile wide, and it carries approximately 436,000 cubic feet of water per second past this point on an average day.
In flood years — 1927, 1993, 2019 — those numbers become catastrophic. The Great Flood of 1993 was the most destructive river flood in American history: 50 people killed, 75,000 displaced, $15 billion in damages. The levee held here, protecting the city, while communities upstream and downstream were inundated.
Look out at the water. The river is brown — loaded with silt from the Missouri and the tributaries of half a continent. Mark Twain, who piloted steamboats on this stretch in the 1850s, called it 'too thick to drink and too thin to plow.' The river is not decorative.
It is the reason this city exists.