I was digging around in the vaults when I came across some twenty year old photographs of Philadelphia. They’re so old that they pre-exist my move back to St. Louis from the East Coast and the founding of St. Louis Patina. This is about five cameras back and lots of growth in my picture-taking abilities.

Philadelphia’s City Hall is a famous building, and one of its most notable features is its tower with the statue of William Penn at its summit. For over a century no building could be built taller than the statue. It resulted in an ugly and stunted skyline, and eventually it was abandoned, allowing for the construction of much taller skyscrapers, giving Philadelphia a skyline that befitted a metropolitan area that is the eighth largest in the United States. Or at least that’s the legend.

I think about that when I muse about St. Louis and how it’s held back so much by ossification and how so much of what happens around here is because no one will change anything, even when it’s the wrong way to do it.

I looked at the population of the Philadelphia metropolitan area, and it is only just over twice as large as St. Louis, but having visited Philadelphia twice, it feels like it’s ten times larger! It’s the same with Chicago when I visit. Chicago is only four times larger than St. Louis but for some reason it has what seems like twenty or thirty times more skyscrapers in its downtown. What’s up with that?!

Some St. Louisans think that there’s a law that you can’t build a skyscraper taller than the Arch. There’s no law. There isn’t a need for a law restricting building height in St. Louis because nobody has ever come close to building a skyscraper that tall.