The Classroom

The classroom is the heart of the American Studies experience at SLU. Classrooms on the SLU campus are well-appointed multimedia spaces, ranging from the intimate seminar room to the large lecture hall. However, we think of the "classroom" as any place students and professors gather for the purpose of learning. This includes rooms on campus, of course, but it also extends beyond campus, to museums, galleries, archives, organization offices, music clubs, literary and artistic events, and to the city itself.

The classrooms beyond the University are varied and diverse. Students in Professor Matthew Mancini's introductory course view landscape paintings at the St. Louis Art Museum. Professor Shawn Smith takes American Photography seminar students to view the Easterly Daguerreotype collection at the Missouri Historical Society. Students in Professor Joseph Heathcott's course on the American City undertake urban scavenger hunts using public transit. In all cases, extending the classroom beyond the campus connects students to the world around them, and engages them in the public life of the city.

The Humanities Building

The Department of American Studies at Saint Louis University is located in the Humanities Building, along with History, Philosophy, English, and Theological Studies. The Humanities Building is situated along Lindell Boulevard, one of the major East-West arteries of the city. Originally the headquarters of IBM in St. Louis, it served for a time as the regional administrative office of the Salvation Army. Completed in 1960 in a Modernist style, the building features a cantilevered massing, with wall-sized windows facing Lindell Boulevard, screened by a series of honeycomb grill panels.

In 1995, the University purchased the building and put it through a complete interior renovation. Dubbed the Humanities Building, this co-location of departments supports a high degree of faculty and student interaction, as well as productive interdisciplinary conversation. Each department has an administrative suite, a seminar room, graduate assistant carrels, and faculty offices. There is ample common space, including a large meeting room, two kitchens, a vending room, and comfortable lounges.

The Campus

The Humanities Building is located on the St. Louis campus, one of two in the Saint Louis University system. The other campus is the Saint Louis University Madrid campus in Madrid, Spain. Founded in 1818, Saint Louis University is the oldest institution of higher education west of the Mississippi River, and one of the oldest graduate schools in the United States.

The University's campus is the geographic center of the City of St. Louis, anchored by the magnificent St. Xavier church at Lindell and Grand. The campus is an intimate and historic part of the urban fabric, and showcases a range of architectural styles in its buildings, from the Richardsonian Romanesque Samuel Cupples House, to the red brick gothic DuBourg Hall, to the Modernist Pius XII Library.

The old section of campus, established in 1881 when the University moved from its downtown location, lies to the west of Grand. The new section of campus spreads to the east of Grand on 60 acres of land given to the university by the city in 1958 during the massive Urban Renewal of Mill Creek Valley. The campus is a work in progress, with a number of buildings under construction or renovation at any given time.

In all respects, Saint Louis University is an urban research institution committed to playing a vital role in the life of the city that surrounds it. As it occupies one of the chief crossroads of the city, the campus provides stability for its surrounds, and is one of the largest employers in the city.

Take a virtual tour of the campus.

The Neighborhood

Saint Louis University is the chief anchor of Midtown St. Louis, which surrounds the main campus to the north, east, and west. To the south of campus runs Forest Park Parkway, Highway 40, and a dense band of rail tracks that include the Metrolink line. To the east lies the light industrial frame of the downtown, while the Central West End stretches from the western edge of campus. The area of Midtown to the north of the campus is a special redevelopment district known as Grand Center.

Grand Center is home to a range of excellent arts and cultural institutions, housed in buildings that exemplify the best qualities of early twentieth century architecture. In fact, many of the major American architects of the era designed buildings in the blocks near the university, including Thomas Annan, William Ittner, Louis Spiering, H.H. Richardson, Howard Crane, George Rapp, and Eames & Young.

The mission of the Grand Center redevelopment district is to support existing arts and cultural organizations, and to encourage new institutions to locate in the area. Grand Center already houses the Sheldon Concert Hall, the Emerson Galleries, Jazz at the Bistro, Powell Symphony Hall, the Fox Theater, Grandel Center Cabaret, and the Black Repertory. A celebrated Art Deco skyscraper built in 1928, the Continental Building, recently came back on line as renovated apartments, with the adjacent Moderne Woolworth's store following close at heel.

Other major buildings in Grand Center include the University Plaza, the O'Donnell Building, the Coronado Hotel, the Masonic Temple, the Scottish Rite Cathedral, Washington Avenue Baptist Church, and St. Alphonsus Luguori "The Rock" Church. One can also find in Grand Center institutions such as the Veteran's Administration Hospital, the Urban League and Vaughan Cultural Center, and the public television station.

The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts recently unveiled its superb new building, the first major American commission by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, just one block north of the University campus. Soon, the Contemporary Art Museum will open its new facility adjacent to the Pulitzer, with galleries, lecture halls, and a cafe. Finally, two new high schools can be found in Grand Center: the Cardinal Ritter College Preparatory School, and Metro Academic Magnet High School.

The City

In many respects, St. Louis is a city of dramatic contrasts, and is therefore an excellent place for American Studies teaching and research. It is a borderland city, blending traditions and cultures of the North and South, while fully charged with the industrial heritage of the riverine Midwest. A predominantly Catholic city, it has strong Jewish and Protestant communities. An old French outpost, then Spanish, St. Louis was a bustling American port city before Missouri was even admitted to the union.

Settled first by native peoples, Creole military outfitters, fur trappers, Jesuit priests, slaves and freedmen, the city was remade in the nineteenth century by waves of immigration from Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Bohemia, and Russia. It was remade once again in the twentieth century by huge numbers of African-Americans from the rural south, and more recently by the influx of some 50,000 Bosnians, Vietnamese, Somalis, Ethiopians, and Mexicans. The city's architecture, parks, building practices, industries, politics, festivals, and commerce reflect the deep imprint of this polyglot mix of peoples and purposes.

Long a laboratory for the innovation of urban planning, St. Louis records some of the worst failures and excesses of that tradition. For much of its life St. Louis ranked among the principal cities in America, but plummeted from a population of 850,000 to 400,000 over the past five decades. A seat of vibrant labor and civil rights activity over the years, St. Louis remains a city deeply troubled by racism, poverty, and a declining employment base. It is a city with immense challenges ahead of it.

Yet signs of life are everywhere. The city retains a vital array of first-rate cultural institutions, such as the St. Louis Art Museum, the Zoo, the Missouri Historical Society, the Missouri Botanical Gardens, the Symphony, the Municipal Amphitheater, the Riverfront Bike Trail, and some of the great urban parks of America. It is the site of the second largest Mardi Gras celebration, and is home to one of the oldest continually operating city markets in the country, in the same location since 1779. Despite decades of decline, many of the city's neighborhoods are thriving or rebounding.

The city also holds an extraordinary repository of nineteenth- and early twentieth century vernacular architecture, with many neighborhoods still largely intact, and an abundant material culture of the industrial age in the homes, shops, taverns, parks, warehouses, factories, train yards, bridges, grain silos, breweries, churches and synagogues. Creative people have fashioned experiments out of the derelict landscapes, from the baroque City Museum to the Black World Wax Museum, the Lemp Arts Center, MadArt Gallery, the Venice Cafˇ, the Loft District, the annual Venus Envy celebration, and the great Paint Louis Wall, a mile long graffiti mural.

Indeed, packed into this relatively small and compact city are the many arts, languages, beliefs, politics, celebrations, sports, and institutions of diverse peoples--the very stuff of American Studies.

The Metropolis

The gleaming Gateway Arch marks Ground Zero of metropolitan St. Louis, which stretches into Illinois through East St. Louis and surrounding towns and counties, and west through St. Louis county and beyond. It is home to some 2.5 million people, sprawling along the traffic corridors that act as major arteries of growth. Though relatively stable in population, the region grows larger in size every year.

At the same time, the suburbs themselves are far from the cookie-cutter image presented by media and critics; they are, in fact, diverse in their race and ethnic composition, class, religion, and built environment.

In the inner-ring suburbs, hugging the city proper, are municipalities such as Wellston, Afton, Richmond Heights, Clayton, and cosmopolitan University City. St. Ann, an early post-World War II tract development for white working class families, arrays in compact curvilinear streets lined with trees and small Cape Cod houses. African-American middle class families have made a community out of the ranch homes of Ferguson in North County, while a metropolitan elite occupy the large estates of Ladue and Creve Coeur. Further out, a thriving Asian Indian community, drawn to the high-tech software development firms of the outer I-270 Loop, clusters in the Planned Unit Development townhouses and apartments of Maryland Heights. St. Louis's new Chinatown stretches along Olive Boulevard through the County, with groceries, restaurants, and shops.

In all, 99 separate municipalities constitute the metropolitan polity, a proliferation so intense that one scholar described the region as "fragmented by design." Much of the new wealth, jobs, and hi-tech development are concentrated in the Edge Cities that ring the periphery and cluster astride the major traffic ways.

The metro area is served by Lambert International Airport, the Metrolink trains and Metrobus routes, Amtrak, and the standard tangle of expressways, spurs, loops, and interchanges. The region is home to a number of great institutions and attractions found outside of the center city of St. Louis, such as Cahokia Mounds, Laumeier Sculpture Garden, Jefferson Barracks, Grant's Farm, and historic St Charles.

The region boasts an abundance of universities and colleges, archives, libraries, historic buildings and sites, research centers, leisure activities, and internship opportunities. Students in metropolitan St. Louis have the benefit of exposure to a range of experiences beyond the classroom; these serve to strengthen their education, and add depth to the American Studies experience.