St. Louis and Dayton: A Juxtaposition of Cities

St. Louis and Dayton: A Juxtaposition of Cities

Natalie Merline, 2020 Cohort

I grew up in Eureka, Missouri, a town outside the city of St. Louis. If you look at a map of my town, you see that it’s mostly surrounded by the Meramec River, something I never fully realized until I left home. I would drive to high school every morning not realizing on the other side of the trees across the street was the river.

If you zoom out a little farther, you see that the boundaries of St. Louis are made mostly by the convergence of two rivers, the Missouri and Mississippi. One side of the Missouri River is St. Charles County and the other is St. Louis County. One side of the Mississippi is Missouri and the other Illinois.

I grew up surrounded by rivers that I never truly saw. It’s only as I sit here in my apartment in Dayton, Ohio, 391 miles away, that I see the beauty in that. It was only when I learned about the many rivers that converge here in Dayton and how important rivers are to Dayton, that I realized how important the rivers in my hometown and city are.

They are also quite a juxtaposition, Dayton and St. Louis. Both consist of three major rivers converging and both have certain boundaries laid out by the river, however the treatment both cities have of their rivers could not be more different. In Dayton, the rivers are prized, protected, and beautified. They are used to get people outside, they are beautified with river walks, bike paths, and parks in order to get more people to want to enjoy the rivers and come to Dayton. In St. Louis, the rivers are trashed and not held in any sort of high regard. There are no plans, at least that I know of, to beautify the rivers and make them a point of attraction. I think that’s why it took me coming to Dayton to actually see the rivers I left behind in my hometown.

Even in their disgraced form, brown, seemingly lifeless, and surrounded by concrete, I now have the ability to see the beauty within these rivers and how much they’ve shaped the culture and history of St. Louis and my present life.