Laclede's Landing: Ghosts of the Riverfront

The oldest neighborhood in St. Louis is also one of its strangest.

Today, Laclede's Landing is much quieter. Smaller. You can wander the cobblestone streets for stretches without seeing another pedestrian. A few restaurants remain. A wax museum still lures the curious. Empty warehouses wait patiently for another chance at life.

But if these bricks could speak, they would tell several different stories.

Mine included.

The old and the new at Laclede's Landing

The first time I came here, I was a college student with more enthusiasm than money. A group of us scraped together enough cash to spend an evening at Mississippi Nights, one of the Landing's legendary music venues. We stayed late and met the band, Blues Traveler. You could do that, back then.

If you never experienced it during its heyday, it's difficult to explain.

In the nineties, The Landing wasn't merely a collection of bars. It was an ecosystem.

Liquor licenses stretched until three in the morning. Buses unloaded bachelor and bachelorette parties by the dozens. Dance clubs pulsed from one end of the district to the other. Every weekend felt halfway between Mardi Gras and organized chaos.

The cobblestone streets demanded respect.

Women in high heels learned quickly that fashion and nineteenth-century paving stones had declared war on one another. Sometimes a stumble ended with a gentleman catching someone in his arms. Other times it ended considerably less romantically, somewhere near a gutter after one drink too many.

The Landing had a reputation as a bit of a meat market.

Nobody pretended otherwise.

Some of my favorite memories came from places my friends worked. Some worked at a comedy club called Laughs on the Landing. Others performed at The Royal Dumpe.

Laughs on the Landing added standup comedians and improv troupes to the nightlife. Walking through the doors of the Dumpe felt less like entering a restaurant than stumbling into a medieval tavern.

Actors in period costume insulted the audience, flirted shamelessly, threw food, dragged unsuspecting patrons into the performance, and filled the room with terrible puns and even worse innuendo.

Large wooden tables forced strangers together.

Nobody stayed strangers very long.

Long before bars and comedy clubs arrived, however, this was where St. Louis began.

In 1764, French fur traders Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau established a trading post overlooking the Mississippi River. Steamboats eventually crowded these docks, bringing immigrants, cargo, languages, fortunes, and failures into one of America's great river cities.

Many of the red-brick warehouses standing today are survivors from that era.

Some have been lovingly restored.

Others seem to be waiting patiently for gravity to make the final decision.

Walking these streets feels less like visiting a tourist attraction than wandering through a surviving fragment of nineteenth-century St. Louis.

That atmosphere made Laclede's Landing an easy choice when I began writing my novel.

Anne's journey takes her through the Laclede's Landing Wax Museum, which is every bit as delightfully strange as it sounds. When my family visited, my youngest son made it through the museum just fine.

Then we reached the Chamber of Horrors.

He had to be dragged through it, screaming.

I still feel a little guilty. Only a little. Character building, right?

Snow White leaning with her forehead on the glass of her display seemed... odd

The chamber of horrors - fun for the whole family!

Just down the street sits one of my favorite buildings in the city: The Old Spaghetti Factory.

I have always loved its atmosphere. The original stained glass. The massive timber beams. The carved woodwork. The old trolley car tucked inside the dining room.

Even before I knew about the ghost stories associated with the restaurant, I felt a weight inside. With the dim lighting, brick, and deeply-stained wood, it felt like a place for where sinister patrons could mingle with cursed spirits.

When I needed a setting for one of Anne's most unsettling dates with her husband Nick, I found myself returning here.

Some buildings seem eager to become part of a story.

This is one of them.

Perhaps that is why Laclede's Landing fascinates me today more than it did when I was younger. The excitement has faded. The crowds have moved elsewhere. The music is quieter.

What remains is history.

And history is often much more interesting than nightlife. When I walk these streets now, I don't hear dance clubs. I hear echoes.

College friends laughing outside Mississippi Nights.

Actors shouting across crowded tables.

Steamboats unloading cargo.

Families exploring a wonderfully odd wax museum.

Characters from my novels beginning journeys they never wanted to take.

Every city has places where its past refuses to disappear.

For St. Louis, Laclede's Landing is one of those places.

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