A Sewer Runs Through It

The River des Peres tells the history of St. Louis -- our relationship to nature, to this place, to our own waste. Now there's talk of "beautifying" the river we never got around to cleaning.

Comments (0) By Jeannette Batz Wednesday, Dec 6 2000

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Prehistory's forays opened the way for a mound-building civilization as large and sophisticated as medieval London's. But with the fall of Cahokia in the 1300s, the entire area abruptly emptied, and the tall-grass prairie around the River des Peres remained unsettled until the 1600s, when Illiniwek tribes, driven south by the Iroquois, canoed in just ahead of the French fur trappers. In 1700, two French Jesuits, Father Gabriel Marest and Father François Pinet, built the area's first official settlement: a mission at the mouth of what became known as the River des Peres, or "River of the Fathers." The Illiniwek Nation's Kaskaskia and Tamaroa Indians joined them, impressing the Jesuits with their ingenious jokes, and the village grew to an amicable assortment of about 2,400 Indians and 100 Frenchmen before it dissolved in 1703. Enraged Sioux were accusing the villagers of encroaching on their land, so the entire settlement hurriedly moved downriver to what is now Kaskaskia.

Sixty-one years later, Auguste Chouteau landed just north of the old River des Peres site and staked out the village of St. Louis.

A stretch of the "natural" River des Peres in University City, free of concrete but corrupted by runoff, junk and the occasional corpse.

Jennifer Silverberg

A stretch of the "natural" River des Peres in University City, free of concrete but corrupted by runoff, junk and the occasional corpse.

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The River des Peres posed environmental problems from the start, because people insisted on settling near its swampy mouth, where malaria-carrying mosquitoes clouded the air and feces contaminated the stagnant pools. Cramped with the dysentery they called "bloody flux," the settlers must have felt plagued indeed. Before "civilization" set in, humans had scattered their waste on land, the soil had absorbed its nutrients and the water had remained clean. Now people lived close together and dumped their waste into the water, letting it dilute their stench at a comfortable remove.

In 1842, city engineer Henry Kayser designated St. Louis' natural limestone sinkholes and caves as further repositories for the fast-mounting waste. But the sinkholes soon turned yellow-green, and the caves clogged with debris. When the storms of 1848 deluged the city with 17 inches of rainfall, the wastewater tumbled forth, creating a huge open sewer the citizenry dubbed Kayser Lake. It became a Petri dish for the 1849 cholera epidemic, and when more than 5,000 died the first year, the city decided to drain both the "lake" (repository for the Biddle Street sewer) and Chouteau's Pond (repository for the Poplar Street sewer). The new solution? Dump that waste directly into the Mississippi, which another city engineer proudly christened the "Great Trunk Sewer" of St. Louis.

The River des Peres, however, was not yet a sewer; it was still the "wild and uncontrollable prairie stream" that had carved the meadows, valleys, wetlands and bluffs of Forest Park. As the park's planners civilized that topography for the 1876 opening, they tamed the very idea of the River des Peres, holding a champagne party by its "golden waters" and describing it as "a romantic little stream."

The little stream soon burbled with the contents of porcelain chamber pots, dumped daily from the sewerless mansions of the Central West End. Alarmed, city engineers drew up a plan in 1887 for interceptor sewers to take wastewater straight to the Mississippi, ending such rude discharges into the River des Peres. In an act that would set the pattern for the next century, the city government approved the conceptual plan but not the expenditures necessary to make it work. Feces, urine and gray dishwater continued to flow into the River des Peres, and in 1894, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch branded it "a monster open sewer, poisoning the air" with its "thick gummy exhalation."

By 1901, St. Louisans were so ashamed of the stream they'd polluted that they buried it alive beneath Forest Park. The original plan was to restore the park to its wild, natural state after the 1904 World's Fair. But by then, engineers had enclosed nearly a mile of the stream in a wooden box and sliced off its bends and meanders, nearly halving its length. (The truncated channel also sped the water flow, compounding flood problems downriver.) Meanwhile, those novel World's Fair flush toilets (5 cents to use one, 5 cents more if you wanted soap and water afterward) had dumped more ick into the river. George E. Kessler, chief architect of the Fair, pronounced the River des Peres "now nothing more than a great sewer" and advised that St. Louis permanently treat it as such.

Then he left town.

In 1910, Mayor Frederick Kreismann announced a dramatic plan to enclose the River des Peres -- if it was a sewer, let it be hidden -- but the project cost $4 million, so the city abandoned it. People continued to build right up to the river's edge, sealing the earth with asphalt and concrete. The rainwater that used to soak into the ground streamed into the river, which flooded frequently in retaliation. By 1913, at least three children had drowned in its foul waters. The next mayor, Henry Kiel, urged the city to fork over $10 million and fix the River des Peres' problems permanently, implementing changes outlined in engineer Horner's 1916 report. Again, the city demurred.

Finally, in 1923, St. Louis passed the largest municipal-bond issue in U.S. history, $87.4 million, financing Kiel Auditorium, electric streetlights ... and the channelization of River des Peres. Excavations began during the heavy spring rains of April 1924, with the river's banks sliding like a potter's slurry. A June flash flood drowned one of the partners in the contracting company. It took until summer of 1926 for crews to blast their way through the rock just south of Forest Park and, heading toward Skinker, reroute the river into horseshoe-shaped pipes. Soon the park's meandering river was completely "entombed" in two underground concrete sewer tubes, leaving only swampy lagoons at the surface.