If visitors follow the standard recommendations, they see the Arch and the zoo and the Cardinals. If they turn off the tourist trail, they stumble into what looks like an urban war zone of gutted nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century buildings. They wonder what happened to make our city look this way, failing to grasp that what happened in St. Louis was nothing. Our war wasn’t lost, but loss. There was no attack, just abandonment and apathy. Here the world ended, as St. Louis–raised poet T. S. Eliot wrote, “not with a bang but a whimper.”
