Scott Joplin House State Historic Site

Scott Joplin came to St. Louis in the spring of 1901 already known for the Maple Leaf Rag, which his Sedalia publisher John Stark had turned into a national hit in sheet music. He moved into a room of the flat at 2658A Morgan Street, now Delmar Boulevard, in a plain brick tenant row house built around 1860. In the year and a half or so he lived here he wrote The Entertainer, Elite Syncopations, March Majestic and The Ragtime Dance, and with royalties coming in he performed less and taught and composed more.

Here too he wrote A Guest of Honor, his first opera, set at the Missouri Governor's Mansion in Jefferson City. The score is lost and the opera can no longer be performed. Joplin moved to New York in 1907, could not get his opera Treemonisha staged, and died on April 1, 1917, at 49, in a grave left unmarked until 1974. The Sting brought The Entertainer back to the whole country in 1973.

The flat is the only residence of Joplin's known to survive. The city's Black community saved it from demolition, it became a National Historic Landmark in 1976, and in 1983 Missouri made it the first state historic site devoted to African American heritage. The site has since widened its story from ragtime to the neighbourhood around it, poverty, sanitation and prostitution included. Guided tours run on the hour through rooms where a player piano plays his music, and the site's Rosebud music rooms stay open into the evening.