Beyond the Gateway: St. Louis is more than Crime Statistics Show
For almost a decade, the city of St. Louis had been known as a murder capital. This title was bestowed upon the city due to its high homicide rate and declining population. However, over the last two years, this title has become less fitting, with a drastic decrease in homicide numbers. The title of Murder Capital has given the city a bad reputation for people who do not know St. Louis.
Leah Freeman, currently the Vice President and Chief Communications Officer at Nine PBS, did not grow up in St. Louis. Her first job was with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, where she got a different perspective of the crime within the city.
“I was working alongside police officers every day, and was also working alongside the media,” Freeman said. “And unfortunately, I was the one that had to convey the bad stories you saw on the five o’clock news to [the public]… even though I knew so much about the crime rate here, it really didn’t affect my love for the region.”
Freeman lived in both New Jersey and Kentucky and visited St. Louis a few times with friends, before falling in love with the city and deciding to start her career there.
“My family lives mostly on the East Coast, and they have come to visit me over the years, and I think they had an impression of St. Louis that wasn’t necessarily based on experience,” Freeman said. “It was based on what they see in the media, or maybe even what they see in TV and movies. So it was either that St. Louis was a dangerous place to visit, or that it was the Midwest, and it had more of a rural feel.”
Other than the city being dangerous, it is common for people to not know much about St. Louis. Many often get their only knowledge from TV programs or media outlets.
“[Before moving,] I hadn’t really heard much about St. Louis,” Matthew Naes, a math teacher who moved to the area 14 years ago, said. “I knew it had the Arch and that was about it…That was the only other thing that I knew, other than that St. Louis had good barbecue, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Arch.”
Beyond the surface level places that almost everyone has heard of, the city has a wide variety of cost-effective things to do, like going to the zoo, the Science Center and just walking around Forest Park.
“I always feel like there’s so much to do on the weekends, and a lot of our major attractions and the things that make St. Louis great are free and accessible to everyone,” Freeman said. “So that’s something I immediately noticed and just absolutely fell in love with. Like, I love that you can go to one of the country’s best zoos for free, and we have some amazing parks here.”
Along with the different places to explore, St. Louis has many different food options to choose from. The food has even won a couple of awards for how great it is.
“We are really fortunate, because the St. Louis food scene has done a great job of telling their story the past couple years, and we have been awarded more national accolades, and more people are kind of noticing St. Louis food,” Freeman said. “But I love that we have so many different cultures, and I really consider it to be a melting pot of a food scene here in St. Louis.”
With this great food scene and great community is a great opportunity for new businesses to grow and develop.
“I also think we have a really cool food truck and farmers market scene,” Freeman said. “I’ve seen so many small businesses start at the Tower Grove Farmers’ Market, for example, and now they have storefronts. St. Louis people love farmers’ markets and a quality product, and they will be loyal to that. So that loyalty helped them to get a storefront… We have so many opportunities for food trucks and small businesses to start really small and plant their seed and then grow into a bigger, financially strong business.”
While there is a lot of room for growth, the city also has a rich history from Lewis and Clark to sports teams and even the Rockettes.
“…The New York City Rockettes started here in St. Louis,” Freeman said. “I have seen the Rockettes many times growing up on the East Coast, and I never knew that, and I don’t think a lot of people know that, but they have such a cool history that is rooted right here in St. Louis.”
Along with the city’s vast history, the neighborhoods surrounding it have their own sense of history, from their different architectural styles to their different cultures.
“We have neighborhoods that totally changed the culture,” Freeman said. “St. Louisans have their neighborhoods that they love and grew up in, and there’s such a sense of a small town community feel in those neighborhoods, but I feel like everybody also is open to trying new things and the different pockets of St. Louis and the new cultures.”
The food scene, local places and neighborhoods create a unique community that is rarely found. And despite the things that people hear outside of the city, St. Louis really is an interesting city that bridges many gaps and has become a place that is greatly loved by its natives.
“For every one crime that’s committed, and every one criminal in our region, there are 10s and 1000s of amazing people doing amazing things,” Freeman said.
It’s no secret that St. Louis doesn’t always get a great reputation due to its crime rate. However, what these statistics fail to capture are the vibrant communities that are constantly emerging around the city. And, for a lot of them, the city has food to thank for that. The local restaurants and shops that pop up around STL attract many residents and visitors alike because of their unique environments and menus.
“We’re in Fox Park,” Craig Rivard, an owner of Little Fox, a local restaurant, said. “We live just about a block and a half from the restaurant, and it’s just a really cool neighborhood with a really great cross-section of people who’ve been very supportive of us. Previously, when we’ve had snowy nights where we decided to stay open, we’ve had the neighborhood really show up for us, even losing a lot of reservations… I think everything’s a little more supportive with people rooting for you.”
While the small communities these local places create can seem shallow on the surface, they tend to run a lot deeper in STL. These restaurants offer residents, visitors and tourists a taste of local cuisine, as well as an opportunity to make their own communities and connections in otherwise unexpected places.
“We’ve always been immersed in that sort of farm-to-table thing,” Craig said. “So supporting the communities around us, such as farmers, has always been really important to us. Working off of what people are growing around you locally has always been an inspiration for the menu changes. We work with a couple of brokers for farmers that gather up what everyone’s growing, they send out a list, and then we’re able to order from that.”
STL is home to many of these mutually beneficial relationships and communities, especially through food. Behind the scenes, owners of restaurants also become customers to people like farmers, extending the range of these communities even further. These restaurants connect STL in ways that may be hard to find anywhere else.
“I really like Honest,” junior Ayushi Singh said. “It’s a local Indian restaurant near St. Louis. I like eating there because it has a really welcoming atmosphere, great customer service, and, obviously, the food is great. My family is also friends with the owner, so it’s nice when we go there and get to see family friends. I’d say that’s my favorite thing about St. Louis.”
Check out an interactive map of the St. Louis area, including various tourist locations such as the Arch, the Fabulous Fox, the City Museum, and more.
I have lived in the St. Louis area for most of my life, but I had never truly gone into the city all that much, from what I thought. But I started to realize that much more of my childhood was spent here than I remembered, though I still won’t ever have the true experience of someone who was born and raised here. There’s only a few places I’ve ever been, compared to people who have places where they take their friends or know where to get the best ice cream in town.
When I was in Kindergarten and first grade – which I call Before Ireland – we only ever went into the city for Cardinals games. A few when I was too young to remember, and one when I was in first grade choir and sang before the game. Me and my sister were sometimes taken to the Zoo or the Magic House, but not very often, I thought.
It was always a dream of my parents to live in Ireland someday, and someday just so happened to be my second and third grade years. During Ireland, I experienced cities in a completely different way. I went to a fancy Irish school where, while the Irish kids had a time in the day where they were taught Gaelic, they carted all of us American kids into a small classroom with the oldest woman I have personally ever seen to learn about American history, which I wasn’t too pleased with. I had only ever gone to public school. We walked from our gated neighborhood, down the street, and to a bakery on the corner where we bought sourdough. Or we walked to the beach, Seapoint, fairly regularly. Sometimes we even went all the way to Dún Laoghaire – pronounced Done Leary – to see the ocean and get 99s, which is a cone of vanilla soft serve with a Cadbury Flake stuck in it that always cost 99 cents. We lived near Dublin, though not in the city proper. It was a town called Blackrock, and people barely drove anywhere. Some of my friends didn’t even have cars. Me and my sister ran around our neighborhood with the two sisters our age that lived a few doors down without fear because it was gated. Compared with St. Louis, it was very different, but there were things and places in St. Louis that I have never experienced anywhere else.
When I got back to America, the year in which I came back to school in the Francis Howell School District was the year in which we left for spring break and never came back. You couldn’t go anywhere or do anything during the pandemic, so my first two years back were mostly confined to my house. Then I started middle school, and that is when I became really busy for the first time in my life, and it was the first time in my life I had to take school very seriously, because I was taking high school classes starting in seventh grade.
Later on, when I heard people talking about their experiences in the city of St. Louis, I didn’t think about the many times I have gone to the botanical gardens or the big stone turtles outside of the Zoo or going to Forest Park or the science center. I just thought about the Cards games and the Arch, which I visited this last year. I didn’t realize that all of those places were actually St. Louis, even if they aren’t truly in the city area. I thought of them as nice places around where I lived that I enjoyed going to, but I realize that St. Louis can indeed be as dramatic and fun as any place I have ever been.
When standing at the entrance of The Foundry, people see the beautiful flowers in front of them. There are people walking all around the different shops and the different places. Laughter, talking, doors opening and closing can be heard, even the cackling of fire. People smell the different foods from inside the Hall.
But where to go first? When walking, people see all the different shops and things to do. A bright pink sign reads ‘Golden Gems’ is seen outside the store.
Opening the door, deciding to take a look, as soon as people walk into the bright bubbly atmosphere, they are greeted by a kind worker, Lauren Knicl, a shipping lead and guest experience manager.
The business and its community is very open and fun, within their store, and the foundry.
“We were the first store to be part of the foundry,” Kincl said. ”We were just supposed to be a pop up, but then it was so successful that we ended up staying, and now we’ve moved into a bigger space. We were a couple doors down, but the traffic has been great. It gives a lot of influence to people who are traveling.”
While there are so many stores to choose from, there are also some activities that are fun to do. All of the stores and experiences inside of the foundry are what makes the foundry so unique, and makes it fun and interesting to go to.
“The foundry itself is a great tour spot because there’s so many activities,” Knicl said “and so it’s fun to be a part of that,”
One of the many activities that people can choose from is The Museum Of Illusions, a place of many different things to see and do. Whetherif it’s looking at themselves in a mirror, or looking through a telescope and seeing different shapes and objects. Walking in and seeing all the different things, customers are greeted by Ariana Habiou, a worker at The Museum Of Illusions.
“Before, I was just a regular customer,” Habiou said.”Just coming in, it’s really fun. I’m really a people person, so I like to interact with the people here and help them take photos. It’s really amazing working here, seeing people’s different reactions to the illusions.”
Everyone Has different reactions towards the illusions, but they all have the same reactions towards the foundry as a whole.
“I feel like it’s a good place,” Habiou said, “because you have plenty of different experiences here. Like, we have a great big food wall with over, like, 25 different restaurants. We have more than just the illusion. Means in here, we have the sandbox VR, the skate games, the great big game show. I just feel like it’s nice for you to come here with your family. “
The point is St. Louis is still a good place at heart, these are just two places that help it be better, and make it look more appealing to outsiders.
“Every place has that bad area or bad rep for their city, but I just feel like it’s certain parts of St. Louis that you can come to and really enjoy yourself,” Habiou said.
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