Explore St. Louis

The Old Courthouse is a former federal and state courthouse in downtown St. Louis, begun in 1839 in Greek Revival style and given its cast-iron dome in the 1860s. Dred Scott's suit for freedom was heard here in 1847 and 1850. Part of Gateway Arch National Park, it reopened in 2025 after renovation with four museum galleries and restored courtrooms.

The Basilica of Saint Louis, King of France, known as the Old Cathedral, is a Catholic church built in 1831–1834 in Greek Revival style near the St. Louis riverfront. It was the first cathedral west of the Mississippi and was kept when the surrounding blocks were cleared for the Gateway Arch, which now rises behind it. Pope John XXIII made it a basilica in 1961.

The Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis is the Catholic cathedral of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, on Lindell Boulevard in the Central West End. Built from 1907 and dedicated in 1914, it has a Romanesque Revival exterior with a green-tiled dome and two towers. Its interior is covered with mosaics of 41.5 million glass pieces, completed in 1988.

The Saint Louis Science Center is a science museum at the south-east corner of Forest Park, which began as the McDonnell Planetarium in 1963. A skybridge over Interstate 64 links the planetarium to the main building, which has more than 700 hands-on exhibits on the earth and life sciences, physics and technology, a dinosaur hall and a five-storey OMNIMAX dome theatre.

Forest Park is a public park of about 526 hectares in western St. Louis, dedicated in 1876, which hosted the 1904 World's Fair and the 1904 Summer Olympics. Its woods, lakes, prairie and the Grand Basin below Art Hill surround the Saint Louis Zoo, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Missouri History Museum, the Science Center and The Muny open-air theatre.

The Saint Louis Zoo is a zoo in Forest Park, established in 1910 after the city bought the walk-through Flight Cage built for the 1904 World's Fair. Its areas hold elephants, great apes, big cats, penguins, sea lions and reptiles among other animals, and the narrow-gauge Emerson Zooline Railroad runs around the grounds.

The Saint Louis Art Museum stands on Art Hill in Forest Park, in the Palace of Fine Arts that Cass Gilbert designed for the 1904 World's Fair; an East Building by David Chipperfield was added in 2013. Its collection runs from ancient and Asian art and European painting to American and contemporary art, with changing exhibitions.