Saint Louis

Saint Louis is a city of 319 thousand¹ and a metropolitan population of 2.670 million² located as close as flood plains permit to the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, in the state of Missouri, in the United States of America. Its suburbs spill across the river into the state of Illinois. The city's tallest conventional building is One Metropolitan Square (593 feet, 1989), home to the HOK architectural firm. The Gateway Arch (630 feet, 1965), a steel monument, and a wired transmission mast (1073 feet, 1971) are taller. The tallest conventional building from 1976 to 1986 was US Bank Plaza (484 feet). The tallest conventional building from 1926 to 1969 was the Southwestern Bell Building (399 feet). Other buildings of note include the Civil Courts Building (386 feet, 1929), which is intended to resemble the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus; the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, which has mosaics with over 41 million tesserae in more than 7000 colors; the Wainwright Building (147 feet, 1892), with a brick and terra cotta facade designed by Louis Sullivan; and Busch Stadium (2006), home to the Saint Louis Cardinals baseball team.³

Its Illinois suburb of Collinsville is the location of the Cahokia Mounds, the center of Mississipian culture, whose influence spread as far as the state of Florida, 1500 kilometers away. The UNESCO World Heritage Site has about 120 mounds, with the tallest, the so-called Monks Mound, being the largest prehistoric earthwork in the Americas at 50,000 square meters and a height of 30 meters.⁴ It had perhaps a population of 40,000 in 1100.⁵

Skyline of Saint Louis, Missouri, seen from atop a pre-Columbian mound in Collinsville, Illinois, United States of America

Footnotes

1. 2010 census figure from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population, accessed February 6, 2018.
2. 2012 figure from world-gazetteer.com, accessed February 6, 2013. The combined statistical area had a 2011 population of 2.883 million according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_statistical_areas, accessed February 2, 2018.
3. Emporis.com, accessed November 29, 2017. One AT&T Center (588 feet) was the tallest conventional building from 1986 to 1989, and the tallest from 1969 to 1976 was the Laclede Gas Building.
4. UNESCO, World Heritage Sites (Firefly Books, 2010).
5. Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, 2nd ed. (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1987), "Tables of the World's Largest Cities." UNESCO, op. cit., says only 10 to 20 thousand between 1050 and 1150. Chandler says it was reduced to four thousand by 1400. The site is uninhabited today but the city of Collinsville has a population of 26 thousand in 2010 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_in_Illinois, accessed February 6, 2018.