The Locust Business District

The Mid Town Alley Grand Prix bicycle race takes place within the heart of the Locust Business District. Fast racers meet fast track development. Here’s a bit more information regarding the first day of the Tour de Grove.

Locust Business District is a special tax district in the heart of St. Louis, Missouri, with the express objectives of stimulating community morale and facilitating “spin-off” investments in new construction and rehabilitation.

The Locust Business District (LBD) was enlarged in 2000 by the St. Louis Board of Aldermen to provide a catalytic force in the area with the express objectives of stimulating community morale and facilitating “spin-off” investments in new construction and rehabilitation. Since its incorporation, the Locust Business District has made a concerted effort to stabilize the area and to attract new investment within its boundaries. This area has the potential of being revitalized as a viable commercial and institutional core for the City of St. Louis. Major businesses located within the LBD include: Blue Cross Blue Shield of Missouri, AG Edwards, AT&T, SJI and St. Louis University’s Amelia Earhardt School. Additionally, smaller, exciting business entities such as The Charles Motor Company, St. Louis Brewery and Tap Room, Panama Red’s, Mulligan Printing and Signcrafters all contribute to the character and stability of the District.

Here are a few snapshots of  the neighborhoods history.

T.S. Eliot Home

Thomas Stearns Eliot (T.S. Eliot) was born in St. Louis on September 26, 1888, the seventh and youngest child of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Champe Stearns.

Eliot lived in St. Louis for 18 years and attended Miss Locke’s School and Smith Academy. During his last year at Smith, he visited the 1904 World’s Fair and was so taken with the fair’s “native villages” that he wrote short stories about primitive life for the Smith Academy Record.

T.S. Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1948, “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry” and won general attention and critical acclaim in the 1950’s with his two verse dramas, The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk. More recently, his name was again before the public due to the immense popularity of the play Cats, adapted from his, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

Because of Eliot’s close ties to St. Louis, the family chose to remain in their urban, Locust Street home long after the area had run down and their peers had moved to other areas of the city. The location of he Eliot home is now part of the AT&T parking lot on the 2600 block of Locust Street on the north side. A commemorative plaque on the sidewalk marks the location.

Scott Joplin House

Among those who were drawn to St. Louis in the 1880s was a teenager named Scott Joplin.

Of all the houses and clubs in which Joplin lived and worked in St. Louis, only the brick fourplex into which he and his wife Belle Hayden Joplin moved in 1901 survives. It was here that the former itinerant pianist composed not only “The Entertainer,” “The Cascades” (for the 1904 World’s Fair, despite the fact that his music was considered to lowbrow to be performed on its stages!), and “The Gladiolus Rag,” but also his first (alas now lost) ragtime opera “A Guest of Honor.”

Despite its designation as a national historic landmark in 1976, the last surviving St. Louis home of Scott Joplin was almost razed a year later. In 1983, it was turned over to the state of Missouri by Jeff-Vander-Lou, Inc., the neighborhood development association that had preserved it from demolition.

In 1991 the Scott Joplin house was opened as a museum dedicated to Scott Joplin’s life and music, and to the vibrant community that surrounded the building at the turn of the century.

Other Interesting Locations

Automobile Row: The District was once an important regional center of automobile sales, manufacturing and parts support.

For information on this exciting neighborhood: