St. Louis City Hall was completed in 1898 in the French Renaissance style, a deliberate homage to the Hôtel de Ville in Paris. The building took 14 years to construct and cost over $6 million, an enormous sum at the time, and it was meant to announce St. Louis's arrival as a world-class city. And in 1898, that claim was not unreasonable.
St. Louis was the nation's fourth largest city, home to nearly 600,000 people, a manufacturing powerhouse, a railroad hub, and a cultural center preparing to host the 1904 World's Fair. The city at that moment had everything: money, ambition, industry, and architecture to match. The great irony of St. Louis history is what happened next.
In 1904 the city was at its zenith. Over the following decades, the population peaked at nearly 860,000 in 1950 and then collapsed — to 650,000 by 1970, 350,000 by 2000, under 300,000 today. Suburbanization, white flight, deindustrialization, highway construction that destroyed neighborhoods: the 20th century was not kind to St. Louis.
City Hall still stands, magnificent and slightly incongruous, a palace built for a city that grew smaller than its dreams.