St. Louis’s most beautiful neighborhood grew up around a park with a claim to fame: Lafayette Park, established in 1836, is the oldest public park west of the Mississippi River. Around its 30 green acres — bandstand, lake, grotto and all — the Lafayette Square neighborhood assembled the city’s grandest collection of Victorian ‘painted lady’ mansions.
The neighborhood’s story is pure St. Louis resilience: a fashionable 19th-century district, a devastating 1896 cyclone, decades of decline, and then one of America’s great urban revivals, as preservationists restored Benton Place and Park Avenue house by house. Today the square’s concerts, house tours and garden tours draw the whole city back to admire it.
Walk it slowly, preferably with coffee in hand, and read the plaques.
Lafayette Square sits just southwest of downtown. Neighborhood information at lafayettesquare.org.
