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This is one of my favorite artifacts at the moment. We were doing a project looking for maps in our library’s collection that didn’t show scale on them, because we had a volunteer who was going to help us develop the scale, and we came across this map that had not been catalogued. It’s a manuscript; it’s ink on linen, so this is the only copy. It depicts St. Louis in 1932, so the depression is under way. One of the things that caught our eye right away is how lovely, how artistically this map is drawn. All around the border there are little vignettes, and if you look at them closely, most of them are vignettes of early St. Louis. Some of them are maps; some of them are buildings that are no longer standing. Down at bottom there’s a little skyline of downtown St. Louis in 1931, and there’s a medallion at the bottom where the map was signed by someone whose handwriting was very scribbly. So we didn’t quite know who it was, but using our city directory research we found that it was a woman—May Steinmesch—who was listed in our directory of 1932 as an architect. So that made sense here that someone who had aesthetic and design as well as engineering talents had done this map. We don’t know why it was made—we don’t if it was a special project, or just a hobby, or a whim, but it’s just lovely. It’s also sort of poignant, because this is a time in St. Louis’s history when there were beginning to be plans to raze the buildings along the riverfront and build a riverfront memorial, which became what is today the Arch grounds. So all the buildings that were clustered along the riverfront in the footprint of the original village of St. Louis, which is right down here, were being bought out by the government and getting ready to be torn down in the 60s. So this is a moment in time. There’s a lot of interesting things packed in here. Just the loveliness of the renderings of these buildings has great charm, and our volunteer found that in fact this map is drawn to scale, even though there’s no scale bar on it, so that was gratifying as well.

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