Wildcat Chute

One of nineteenth-century St. Louis's most notorious slum districts.

A vanished North St. Louis enclave remembered for overcrowded tenements, poverty, vice, and disease.

The Story

Wildcat Chute was one of the notorious nineteenth-century tenement districts north of downtown St. Louis. Contemporary and later accounts grouped it with places such as Clabber Alley and Castle Thunder, neighborhoods where poor and immigrant residents lived amid severe overcrowding and deteriorating housing.

The district also became associated with prostitution and vice. Historian Norbury Wayman described conditions there in stark terms, while later histories of St. Louis's Social Evil era remembered Wildcat Chute as part of the city's rough northern vice landscape.

The physical district disappeared as downtown and the near north side were repeatedly redeveloped, but the name survives as a reminder of the communities erased by urban change.