St. Louis & the Confluence

The Kimmswick Bone Bed, misread and quarried for more than a century until a Clovis point found among mastodon bones in 1979 gave the first solid evidence that people and mastodons lived here together.

Henry Shaw's 1859 garden in south St. Louis, with his 1849 country house, the geodesic Climatron of 1960 and a Japanese garden laid around a four-acre lake.

A riverbank on the St. Louis Riverfront Trail where, in May 1855, the widow Mary Meachum tried to get nine enslaved people across the Mississippi to Illinois, Missouri's first Network to Freedom site.

The courthouse where enslaved people were auctioned at the east door and where Dred and Harriet Scott and some three hundred others sued for their freedom.

The riverbank where the Corps of Discovery waited a week and pushed off on May 21, 1804, and the rooms over a dry goods store where Missouri's first legislature met.

White Haven, the Dent family farm where Grant courted Julia and farmed in the 1850s beside the enslaved people her father held, some of whom the park now names.

The Delmar Boulevard flat where Scott Joplin lived after the Maple Leaf Rag made him famous and wrote The Entertainer, saved by Black St. Louis and kept as a state site.

A Romanesque and Byzantine cathedral on Lindell Boulevard begun in 1907, whose mosaics took until 1988 to finish and now hold 41.5 million tesserae.

Saarinen's 630-foot steel arch on the ground of the old French town, forty blocks razed for it after a rigged bond vote, with a free museum under its legs.

A mile-long 1929 truss bridge over the Mississippi with a 22-degree bend in the middle, once Route 66's bypass around St. Louis and now a walking and cycling crossing to Illinois.