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Old Posted Dec 28, 2009, 6:52 AM
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ardecila ardecila is offline
TL;DR
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: the city o'wind
Posts: 16,356
Quote:
Originally Posted by mmourning View Post
And so passed the Vieux Carre of the North.

Seriously, the New Orleans influence is crazily omnipresent.
Well, you guys DO have a Mardi Gras.

I've always viewed St. Louis as what New Orleans would be without the harsh geographical limitations (surrounded by wetlands, zero elevation). Of course, outside of a strip from the French Quarter to the Lower Garden District, New Orleans looks nothing like St. Louis. Brick construction went out of fashion here for almost a century, as big logging outfits cut down cypress forests for hundreds of miles and sold the wood at rock-bottom prices, making brick unaffordable by comparison. The vast majority of New Orleans neighborhoods are populated with these detached wooden structures rather than the brick rowhouses of St. Louis.

But seriously, these pictures are amazing. The posted passage compared it to Dickensian London, and the comparison is extremely apt. St. Louis is really the only place where you can make that comparison, except for maybe Boston's North End and a few streets in Lower Manhattan. I can't imagine what it must have been like to walk around the streets of St. Louis in wintertime, with all the beautiful brick buildings, but also all the grime, vagrants, and criminals as well.
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