Chicago and St. Louis Compared

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Mr. Beat compares and contrasts Chicago and St. Louis, who once competed to be the America's Next Top Model, er, I mean America's Next Top Midwestern City.

Here is Dave's video

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Produced by Matt Beat. All images used under fair use guidelines or found in public domain. Music by Electric Needle Room (Matt Beat).

Thanks to US101 for also collaborating with me for this video.

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Chicago, Illinois and St. Louis, Missouri

Two American Midwestern cities just 260 miles (418 km) apart, although if you’ve seen Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, you’d think they were a lot further away than that.

Wait, why I am comparing these two cities? Why not Chicago and Houston? Or St. Louis and Kansas City? Doesn’t that make more sense.

Well kind of. But I’m comparing Chicago and St. Louis because those two cities were once in direct competition to become the biggest and most important city in the Midwest. I’m making this video in collaboration with Dave from the channel City Beautiful. On his channel, he has a video explaining why and how Chicago beat out St. Louis to indeed become THE biggest, most important Midwestern city. Be sure to check it out after you’re done watching this one.

Once upon a time, it was actually St. Louis that appeared to be destined to become the biggest, most important American Midwestern city. First of all, St. Louis is older than Chicago. It was founded by the French in 1764, after they lost the Seven Years’ War. Basically, French settlers fled there from the east after the British took over their former territory. For its first 38 years, St. Louis was under Spanish control. So while the French lived there, the Spanish guarded the town during that time. In those early years, St. Louis established itself as a major fur trading center. In 1803, when it had maybe 1,000 people living there, the United States bought Louisiana from France after it briefly took it back over. St. Louis, being in Louisiana, was now an American city, and became the administrative capital of all of Louisiana Territory. After Lewis and Clark left St. Louis exploring this vast territory, others would follow, and the city became a hub for folks on their way out to the “Wild West.”

St. Louis steadily grew, it’s population nearing 5,000 by 1830. In 1833, when St. Louis was 69 years old, Chicago was finally born. I mean, St. Louis was a creepy old man by the time Chicago came around. While St. Louis was mostly a fur trading hub, Chicago quickly became a transportation hub, a way to connect the east, where most Americans lived, to the west. It was the site of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, completed in 1848 to connect the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River. After a couple decades, it became the most important railroad city in the country.