Book Review: Historic Photos of St. Louis

Recently, a publisher contacted me with an offer: get a free copy of our book for reviewing it on your blog.

They sent the book, so now I'm (finally) holding up my end of the deal.

Historic Photos of St. Louis by Adele Heagney and Jean Gosebrink is much cooler than I thought it would be. Honestly, I went into it thinking, "oh boy, a book of old photos of St. Louis. At least it will help me get to sleep at night..."

I couldn't be more wrong. While a lot of books of this nature tend to have a very narrow focus, this book gives an excellent overview of St. Louis over the course of a century -- from the 1860s to the 1960s. Personally, this book gave me a different perspective of our area. I mean, let's face it -- I was born in 1979, after the population of St. Louis had gone from 856,000 at its peak in 1950, to 452,000 at the time of my birth, to its most recent level of 348,000 in 2000. While I had always been told by my elders that St. Louis used to be a much more densely populated area -- bustling, even -- it was hard for me to visualize much more than the run-down neighborhoods I saw in my youth. Note that I only saw them -- I didn't go to St. Louis much, since I grew up in Pacific, a direct result of my maternal grandparents relocation to the small town when, in the 1950s, Alton Box built the factory where my grandfather worked.

Historic Photos of St. Louis is arranged chronologically, which I found very helpful, as I have always been somewhat fascinated by the St. Louis of my mother's childhood, where streetcars could take you anywhere you wanted to go, where people walked everywhere, and where the Cardinals played on North Grand. I had only seen remnants of that St. Louis -- most prominently when visiting my mother's aunts, who lived in a brick, two-family flat (Aunt Aggie on top, Aunt Regina on the bottom) that had some old streetcar tracks in the adjacent alley. Sadly, over time, that neighborhood deteriorated, and after Aunt Regina died, it was sold, and Aunt Aggie moved in with her daughter. This book has reunited me not only with the period of time represented (in my mind) by that old brick house in South St. Louis, but with views of the entire region from its golden age.

While providing a glimpse of St. Louis in its prime, this book also gives the reader a better understanding of the impact of a national trend -- urban sprawl -- on our fair city. And, rather than presenting the reader with opinions on the effect of urban sprawl on St. Louis, it simply presents facts about the images, and allows the reader to string these facts together into his or her own opinion of what has become of a once-great urban area.