The Levee and the Doggeries

Mark Twain remembered a mile of foul riverfront dives where St. Louis met the Mississippi.

The St. Louis levee was once crowded with steamboats, freight, workers, saloons, cheap drinking establishments, and the rough businesses Mark Twain called 'doggeries.'

The Story

The nineteenth-century St. Louis riverfront was the city's front door: a dense working landscape of steamboats, warehouses, freight, laborers, travelers, saloons, lodging houses, and vice.

Mark Twain later remembered the river edge after its commercial decline and described the survival of a mile of cheap, foul 'doggeries'—rough drinking establishments along a waterfront whose steamboat crowds had largely disappeared.

Today the same river edge forms the monumental landscape beneath the Gateway Arch. The contrast between the manicured national park and the vanished levee world beneath it is one of downtown St. Louis's most dramatic transformations.