Hi all,
So I have a job offer in St. Louis? Any dopers from St. Louis? Any positive or negative comments about St Louis? Any advise for a new St Louis(er)? What neighborhood should I live in? Where are the good schools? Whats the best hospital? Best grocery store? Should I buy a 3 bedroom 2 bath ranch in the 'burbs? Any comments on city living in general?
note: I currently live in a small town in southern Louisiana.
Any good internet links? Any good on-line maps?
Positive comments?
Sure:
The St. F*cking Louis Rams!!!
WooHoo!!! Go Rams!!!
St. Louis rocks!
My web page (little red house at the bottom of this message) has some St. Louis info. I would highly suggest clicking on the Metropolis link and accessing their tons of information.
St. Louis is architecturally beautiful, clean, friendly, and affordable. There’s a good job market. The zoo is FREE, as is the art museum and history museum. There is a diversity of cultures and religions.
Sure, we have our problems, but we’re overcoming them. It’s a WONDERFUL place to live, and I’m never, never leaving unless I had a chance to move to Ireland for good.
Go Rams!
Go Cards!
Go Blues!
Need I say more?
I grew up in St. Louis. It’s not a bad town, but certainly not a very exciting one. Downtown is dead. There are actually two downtown areas - Clayton is the other one, which is a bit nicer than downtown. We just got a new mass transit system about 5 or so years ago that’s been a resounding success by all accounts.
Cool things about St. Louis:
I’d think of more, but I have to go to work now…
Check out: http://www.mstl.org They are an organiation that is trying to get people to live in the city. It’s a hard battle…
Another cool thing about St. Louis:
Four words - Ted Drewe’s Frozen Custard!
Hi Avumede,
I don’t want to say anything that will get us sent over to Great Debates, but downtown is far from dead. There are more downtown residents now than there have been for decades. Any building that could conceivably be made into luxury lofts has been bought and is being rehabbed. In a way this is a mixed blessing: it used to be that artists could have affordable art lofts on Washington Ave, but now the luxury ones go for $1500 a month. Still, nothing succeeds like success, and having well-to-do people live downtown is a good thing. The recent TechTrek highlighted the fact that St. Louis is becoming Silicon Valley on the Mississippi (which is also way cool by the way).
The Washington Avenue loft and entertainment district is busy now and will only get better as proposed changes to the streetscape are made. Laclede’s Landing is an entertainment and dining district that rivals Clayton or University City. Every game day downtown is flooded with people coming to see the Cards, Rams, or Blues. Metropolis has pub crawls every Thursday night to cool places like Jack Patrick’s (where I saw the Rams go on to glorious victory against Tennessee in the Super Bowl), Panama Red’s, Mickey’s, and so many others.
Sorry to sound like a booster, but I am. Things are starting now, and there are so many positives on the horizon.
Me, I’m looking for the real pie-in-the-sky stuff, like turning part of the River Des Peres into a kayaking course. That’d be too cool. Vision and courage, that’s all it takes.
Yep, the job is a computer industry job. And what is a ‘pub crawl’??
I can’t link to that page. Can you help me out? I get a “yahoo cant locate page” message.
If it’s a computer job, you’ll find a thriving computer subculture here. City or suburbs is up to you. Actually both city and suburbs have old established neighborhoods, newly renovated neighborhoods, not-yet-gentrified neighborhoods and so on.
It’s a big university center with a reasonably good arts scene. Barnes Hospital is one of the best in the U.S., and there are several others I’d certainly trust my health too.
If there’s a downside to St. Louis, it’s that there’s an automatic mindset that you grew up here, married someone from here, moved to the suburbs and are well on your way to having two kids and a minivan or SUV. There’s also a fair amount of black-white racial tension here – although I hasten to point out that in the computer industry subculture you’ll find people who don’t share the typical mindset.
Kick back, order in an Imo’s pizza, wash it down with one of our fine micro-brewery beers (save the AB products for parties) have some Ted Drewe’s for dessert and listen to Jack Buck broadcast a Cardinals game. You’ll love it.
For an older city, St. Louis is rather boosterish and insular. You get judged a lot by where you went to high school.
The best advice is: make one up. Say it went out of business.
Mispronouncing a French name is another way to show you’re a native.
BobT, you’re cynical. I like that 
My website is http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/lobby/2677/myhome.html
metropolis is http://www.mstl.org as Avumede noted
Yahoo!/Geocities is icky and does occasionally say the page is not there, but it is. Keep trying
Metropolis is big on overcoming the whole “Where did you go to high school?” thing. I kind of wear it as a badge of honor that I can say “Jackson High School, Jackson, Missouri.” People don’t MEAN anything by it, unless they’re surreptitiously trying to find out if you’re Catholic. St. Louis is in many ways a small town, and it’s kind of a thrill for a girl to say “I went to Rosati Kain,” and have people know where it was.
The race problem is definitely there, but I think it’s getting better. Being white myself, I don’t know if that assessment is shared by others.
Mispronunciations 'R us:
Gravois–Gravvoy
Spoede–Spadey
Bellefontaine–bellfountain
and many others too numerous to mention
Pub crawl = going to three or more bars in one night. In Metropolis it’s called “The Walk,” and it allows you to find out about a lot of new places.
Ted Drewes ROCKS! Frozen custard all the way. And it’s on old route 66; who could ask for more?
Where you want to live depends on where you will be working. If you are downtown, then keep in mind MetroLink will be in operation deep into the MetroEast side (Illinois) by next year.
If you work around Westport or Earth City, then you might want to take a look at the O’Fallon, St. Charles, or St. Peter’s areas (out I-70). Fenton, Pacific and Eureaka are growing out I-44 and Imperial and Arnold are growing out I-55.
If you have the luxury of finding a place AFTER knowing where you will work, you could save some serious drive-time headaches by finding a location that avoids the usual morning and evening bottlenecks.
Regards.
I was going to warn you about the humidity but if you’re from Louisiana you’ll probably think you’ve moved to the desert.
Yeah, but this is after almost all the “slums” downtown were demolished. There’s just not a lot of places to live there. Last time I was in St. Louis (about a year ago), there were a LOT of abandoned buildings downtown. I know that a few were slated to become apartment buildings, but I’d be suprised if these buildings were all inhabited.
The downtown looks nice in a way, since it is old and generally has nice architecture. But it simply needs more buildings. If you could put Clayton in there, it would look great. But now, there is too much space between the tall buildings - it looks too wide-open. It’s hard to put this into words, but compare it to Chicago, for example, where you have a lot of tall buildings right next to each other. I would say the Chicago downtown is more beautiful.
Yeah, but every place says that they are becoming Silicon Valley. No one yet is close. There just isn’t the VC money in St. Louis, yet. However, perhaps this has changed in the last year or so. But still, tech companies does not a Silicon Valley make.
But really, it’s a nice town in a lot of ways. It needs some improvements, though, to be truly great.
“Yeah, but this is after almost all the “slums” downtown were demolished. There’s just not a lot of places to live there. Last time I was in St. Louis (about a year ago), there were a LOT of abandoned buildings downtown. I know that a few were slated to become apartment buildings, but I’d be suprised if these buildings were all inhabited.”
Amen! Unfortunately, here’s where the planners are being truly shortsighted. County people gripe all the time that downtown has inadequate parking. In fact, it has a great deal more parking per capita than almost any other city in the country. It’s also cheap compared with other cities. Unfortunately [generalization] county people can’t seem to deal with the fact that they may have to pay for parking or walk more than a block to get from their car to their job/shopping/dining, etc.[/generalization]
This has led to rampant tearing down of buildings to build parking lots, in a downtown that as you say does not have a lot of building density to begin with. The Arcade had been threatened this way; it’s going to be saved. The Syndicate Trust, on the other hand, will probably NOT be saved.
People come downtown for the buildings, not the parking lots. If we’re not careful, we’ll lose more of our lovely architecture. But hey, at least we’ll have plenty of parking.
I lived in St. Louis for a year, and my sister and her husband have lived there for about 10. I visit often.
I really like St. Louis. I can always find stuff to do there. Many already mentioned. They have a good symphony.
Actually, I lived in the Creve Coeur/Chesterfield area. I loved it.
BTW, don’t get confused and settle in East St. Louis. Oh, no. You don’t want to do that.
This topic will get a better response in MPSIMS. I’ll move it there for you.
moving up and hoping for more comments.
If I were you, move to the county. That’s where I live. West County tends to be more upscale and ritzy (and expensive). North and South County are about the same socially, with North County (generally) being slightly more white collar. Living in the county, you are only about 20 inutes away from downtown (or take the Metrolink, save your gas money and don’t worry about parking downtown) and you don’t have to pay the city taxes.
Washington Avenue has become a pretty good club district the past few years. And you can always go bar hopping on Laclede’s Landing. If you like Italian food, you’ll find plenty of great spots to eat on the Hill, which is a predominantly Italian neighborhood.
East St. Louis (mentioned earlier) is not part of St Louis, MO. It is a separate city in Illinois, just over the river, and is NOT somewhere you want to find yourself lost.
As divemaster said, the Creve Coeur/Chesterfield area is nice, I lived there myself for a few years.
I’ll probably think of more things later.