Seeing St. Louis is a website dedicated to telling the story of St. Louis's past, present, and future. Amy Fontinelle, a freelance writer, editor, and photographer, is the owner of this site.
People often ask me why I care so much about St. Louis when I only lived there for a short time, don't live there now, and may never live there again. All I can say is that I feel an electric charge whenever I'm in the city. I seem to have an innate fascination with its old buildings and the stories behind them. Perhaps this attachment exists because so many of my ancestors called St. Louis home. I can trace my roots back to neighborhoods like Penrose, Tower Grove, Old North, and JeffVanderLou. My family had a traveling circus that performed at the 1904 World's Fair. Starting when I was just weeks old, I visited relatives in St. Louis every summer and winter. By accident or by fate, I ended up at Washington University for college. I moved away a few months after graduation to pursue a lifelong dream (it worked out--sort of), but St. Louis is and always has been my second home.
Since moving, I've returned to St. Louis multiple times a year every year for my obsessive photography and research missions. I won't pretend that St. Louis's issues affect me as deeply as they affect its residents, and I won't pretend that I can help the city as much from afar as I could by living in it, but I hope that visitors to this website will appreciate that my concern and passion for the city and its issues are serious and genuine.
If you have any information or stories about any of the buildings or neighborhoods shown on this site, please drop me a note. I'd love to learn more.
Unless otherwise indicated, all images and text on this site are created by me and are copyrighted. For questions or comments about this site or permission to use an image, please contact me at seeingstlouis [at] gmail. To learn more about me, please visit my personal site.