Anyone from St. Louis is well aware of this city’s identity crisis.  Yes, we are a decidedly Midwestern city, but do we have more in common with the North or the South?  We delve into this question with these facts in mind:

Southern:  St. Louis has a vaguely New Orleans-esque, lazy Mississippi River demeanor.

Northern:  Our industrial history is much more intertwined with places such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee than with any city in the South.

Southern:  Missouri was a slave state, and the notorious Dred Scott decision was handed down in St. Louis.


Jacob Lawrence's The Great Migration

Northern:  St. Louis was a bastion of pro-Union sentiment, and the city’s huge German population is what arguably prevented the entire state of Missouri from officially joining the Confederacy.

Southern:  We have debutante balls (Veiled Prophet, Fleur-de-Lis) and an old-school provincialism (“Where’d you go to high school?”)

Northern:  The unmistakable St. Louis accent is a northern urban dialect, with more traits in common with dialects of the Great Lakes and northeast than with any Southern accent, as assessed by a linguistics study by the University of Pennsylvania.

Image courtesy of University of Pennsylvania

Northern:  You’d be hard-pressed to find sweet tea and grits on most menus in this city, nor is “ya’ll” a feature of our local speech.

So while there are undeniable southern influences in St. Louis culture, there’s nothing about this place that screams “Dixie.”  In STL-Style’s opinion, St. Louis has economic, demographic, political and developmental characteristics much more similar to northern industrial cities than to southern cities.  So what do you think?