Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
St. Louis was "supposed" to be the alpha metropolis of the interior, but then Chicago flashed outta nowhere like a lightning bolt and stole much of its thunder.
It was a much more palpable thing a century ago when that usurpation was fresher in the mind; now it's mostly just a silly baseball and hockey thing.
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What really added to the bitterness on STL's end was the fact that it was St. Louis's own damn fault.
ALL the railroads wanted St. Louis, not Chicago, to be their central hub.
St. Louis is far more centrally located. The number of cities one could get to in a single day's train ride from St. Louis was greater than any other city in the US at that time, despite it being somewhat on the western periphery, because of its location at the intersection of the river and the flatlands. Even if you go around the appalachians to the east, the piedmont region from Virginia down to Alabama is still rugged enough that the fastest route from New Orleans to New York was via STL. Its straight and flat the whole way up and over until you get to basically Columbus, Ohio.
Chicago, which was also on the western periphery, was additionally on the northern periphery. The "big cities" we always think of as being close to Chicago, like Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Des Moines, Indianapolis, and even Detroit, were tiny at the time.
Anyway, in a spectacular example of good old American shortsightedness, the initial attempts by the big railroads to create a hub were sabotaged by St. Louis's leadership, because of lobbying by the riverboat companies.
They convinced everyone that the railroads would replace the employment of tens of thousands of workers, with just a few engineers who needed only to pass through (unlike boats, trains dont need to be loaded and unloaded except at their destination), destroy the city's living connection to its river heritage, all with NO benefit to the city itself, as the profits would just to go east coast railroad barons like Vanderbilt.
A large station and railyard was eventually built, but the critical few years of initial setback was enough to give Chicago the edge, and the rest is history. Indirectly, that initial setback is also largely responsible for the growth of Omaha, which would today look more like, say, Sioux Falls, if not for the northern rail route becoming the main line.