St. Louis Is Audacious to the Bone

By Bedouin Bourdain

A still Friday morning, the Gateway Arch doubled perfectly in a reflecting pool that didn’t move for anyone. Some monuments you photograph. This one photographs itself. That was the calm opening act for a city that spent the next two days refusing to be just one thing.

Two Miles of Wall That Outdoes the Museums

Wedged between a Mississippi River flood wall and a working rail yard sits one of the best surprises in American travel: two miles of floodwall canvas running wild with color, a legal graffiti gallery that holds its own against half the museums in this country. Walk it slow. Somewhere along that wall a black and white portrait of Percy Green stops you cold, “Why We Must Raise Hell” painted beside him in letters too big to argue with. This is the man who climbed the Arch itself in 1964 to demand Black St. Louisans get a fair shot at building it. Sixty years later, the city is still painting his sentence on its walls, and it still lands.

A Mural That Paints Through the Grief

A few panels down, a mural dated May 16, 2025 does something different. A tornado spins a house into the sky over the St. Louis skyline, a woman in blue gingham clutches a small dog, the words “We’re Not in Kansas Anymore” across the top. It’s a joke that isn’t really a joke. That tornado tore through the city’s north side for real, and the artists here didn’t paint around it. They painted through it. Grit as a coping mechanism, audacity as memorial.

And Then There’s Pappy’s

A cinderblock building, a pig on the sign, a line out the door that tells you everything before you’ve read the menu. Purportedly the best barbecue in America, and after a plate of it, I’m not in a mood to argue with that claim either.

The Takeaway

Great neighborhoods, a river that means business, and artists willing to paint grief and defiance on the same wall two blocks apart. That’s St. Louis. Audacious to the bone.