Capturing the City: Photographs from the Streets of St. Louis, 1900 - 1930

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the St. Louis Street Department generated one of the most extensive troves of photographs ever taken of the city. Ostensibly created to document municipal challenges and improvements, the images inadvertently captured richly detailed scenes of everyday life. Largely led by Charles Clement Holt (1866-1925), St. Louis’s photography operation expanded until it produced about six thousand images per year in 1914. Many of these photographs w...