The “Twain” sculpture by Richard Serra, located in downtown St. Louis, garnered an excessive amount of media attention in the early 1980s. This was due, in part, to its expense and because it was promoted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch while simultaneously being criticized by the declining St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

In September 1985, novelist and professor William Gass took another look at Serra and his legacy in an essay for the St. Louis Journalism Review.*

Gass, taking note of the fact that much of St. Louis was in decline, wrote:

Well before the post-war exodus, St. Louis planners were sounding the alarm about the rapid development of St. Louis County while the city was stagnating.

Newspapers across the country noted the death in 1910 of Henry Ziegenhein, a former St. Louis mayor who became famous a decade earlier for a flippant remark about the street lighting situation in the city.

“We got a moon yet, ain’t it?” is what old “Uncle Henry” supposedly said, a quip that was widely repeated, and immortalized by Lincoln Steffens, who used it in “Tweed Days in St. Louis,” the famous expose on St. Louis published by McClure’s in 1902.

The line, in fact, has been repeated over and over — including by the Post-Dispatch — whenever there’s talk about the provincialism and corruption of what was once the nation’s fourth-largest city.

But a review of the archives suggests the quote is an invention of the Post-Dispatch. Or at least the product of creative license.

The currently popular origin story of the Order of the Veiled Prophet describes the organization as a reaction by the St. Louis establishment to the labor turmoil of 1877. The Veiled Prophet was racist, elitist, secretive and maybe even violent.

Exhibit A has been an illustration of the very first Veiled Prophet, published by the St. Louis Republican on Oct. 6, 1878, two days before the organization’s first-ever parade.

The tragic stories of otherwise obscure St. Louisans filled the pages of the Post-Dispatch in the late 19th century, a sideshow of freaks and curiosities that showed how brutish and uncertain life could be during the first Gilded Age.

Here are three women whose tales of woe were highlighted 125 years ago:

In 1922, Joseph Pulitzer II, publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, asked his business manager A.G. Lincoln to approach E. Lansing Ray, publisher of the morning St. Louis Globe-Democrat, with a confidential proposition: agree to cut the number of comic pages to four in both Sunday papers.

An editorial cartoon by Paul Frederick Berdanier, published July 4, 1913 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Berdanier worked as an illustrator for the Post-Dispatch from 1902 until 1918. While in St. Louis, he did several covers for The Mirror, William Marion Reedy’s acclaimed literary journal. The St. Louis Public Library has an online collection of some of Berdanier’s work here: https://rb.gy/s8j6k

Several years ago, as I looked for coverage of a long-ago dairy show (I was helping a friend research a book), I spotted a brief article on page 4 of the Oct. 14, 1909 edition of The Missourian. It was a short report about a new campus organization.

Here’s the lede:

The Day Book, E.W. Scripps’ Chicago-based ad-free daily, in 1916 reported on an unusual fight between the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and all of St. Louis’ major department stores.

The Post-Dispatch introduced a slick new rotogravure section to showcase its photography, but the department stores balked at the 50 cent per line ad rate, the highest “ever charged in St. Louis for newspaper advertising,” The Day Book reported.

The wholesale demolition of Mill Creek, the elimination of historic structures along the riverfront and urban renewal share a dark legacy in St. Louis. But long-forgotten is the wretched condition of most of the city’s housing stock immediately after World War II, when one out of every three residences lacked a toilet or bath.

Only five major cities — all in the South — were worse off, the Federal Housing Administration and the U.S. Census Bureau found.

In 2015, I wrote about a century-old insurance industry study that examined murder in selected U.S. cities, including St. Louis. The study linked high homicide rates, in large part, to the “unrestrained sale of firearms.” It also found rates tended to be higher in cities with “persons of color.”