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Saint Louis, Missouri, is the home base for the St Louis Cardinals, a Major League Baseball team and several other sports franchises; Saint Louis Blues (National Hockey League), Saint Louis Rams (National Football League). Saint Louis city is named after Louis IX of France. The city Borders, but is not part of Saint Louis County, Missouri. The Saint Louis metropolitan area, which includes counties in both Missouri and Illinois, is the 18th largest in the United States. The population of the metropolitan area has been increasing, while the population of the City of Saint Louis which is 348,189 has been declining since the 1950s, as many have moved to the many suburbs in Saint Louis County. Pierre Laclede and his stepson, Auguste Chouteau, founded Saint Louis as a trading post in 1763. The city proper was established on February 15, 1764. St. Louis was in Louisiana Territory, which had belonged to France but, after the settlement of the French and Indian War in 1763, was controlled by Spain. Louisiana Territory was returned to France in the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso in 1800. Saint Louis was acquired from France by the United States under President Thomas Jefferson in 1803, as part of the Louisiana Purchase. In 1904, the city hosted the World's Fair and made the United States become the first English-speaking country to host the Olympic Games. The uranium used in the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb was refined in Saint Louis by Mallinckrodt Chemical Co., starting in 1942. The Pruitt-Igoe housing project, built in 1955 and demolished in 1972, is one of the most infamous failures of urban planning. The buildings were the first major work by Minoru Yamasaki, who later designed the World Trade Center. Historically, Saint Louis has been a de facto segregated city. The City's African-American population has been concentrated in North St. Louis. While some North St. Louis neighborhoods such as Baden, Penrose, and O'Fallon are stable and have a large number of middle-class residents, many northside neighborhoods suffer from poverty, unemployment, crime and dilapidated housing. Most white Saint Louisans, especially white males, who tend to hold the better jobs in the region and enjoy higher pay scales than women and minorities, have moved their families into the better-off suburbs. In an attempt to counter this problem, Saint Louis has implemented a school desegregation program: some inner city African-American students are bused into Saint Louis County schools, and, in exchange, some County students are bused into City magnet schools. Saint Louis for many years has been a major center for corporate headquarters. The city is well known as being the center of operations for Anheuser-Busch Breweries, as well as Monsanto, formerly a chemical company and now a leader in genetically modified crops, and Solutia, the former Monsanto chemical division that was spun off as a separate company in 1997. Two local brokerages, A.G. Edwards and Edward Jones. It is also the site for the headquarters of Energizer, the battery company. Saint Louis has various attractions; the Municipal Theatre ("The Muny"), the largest and oldest outdoor musical theatre in the United States, The Saint Louis Science Center and Observatory with its architecturally distinctive McDonnell Planetarium, The free Saint Louis Zoological Park, The Missouri History Museum, Plenty of lakes and scenic open areas. All this attractions are located on the western edge of the central corridor of the city of Saint Louis called Forest Park. Saint Louis remains home to major car plants; two DaimlerChrysler plants in the nearby suburb of Fenton, Missouri, where minivans and pickup trucks are built; a General Motors plant in suburban Wentzville, MO; and a Ford Motor Company plant in Hazelwood, MO, where SUVs are built. Nikola Tesla made the first public demonstration of radio communication here in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail the principles of radio communication. The apparatus that he used contained all the elements that were incorporated into radio systems before the development of the vacuum tube. |
