Kirkwood, MO

Kirkwood’s 1893 train station still performs the function for which the city was planned. In 1853, the Kirkwood Association bought 240 acres along the new Pacific Railroad about thirteen miles west of St. Louis and named the community for railroad engineer James Pugh Kirkwood. The city identifies it as the first planned residential commuter suburb west of the Mississippi River. A street grid placed homes, shops, and public buildings within reach of the tracks; the commercial and governmental center remains around Kirkwood Road and Argonne Drive. The station is now a stop on Amtrak’s Missouri River Runner, staffed by local volunteers, and the surrounding Downtown Kirkwood Business District is on the National Register of Historic Places. Kirkwood counted 29,461 residents in 2020. The railroad core supports more than commuting. Shops and restaurants line downtown streets, and Kirkwood Farmers’ Market operates one block east of the station with produce seasons, holiday markets, and Saturday music.

City recreation extends across more than 300 acres of parkland. Kirkwood Park brings an aquatic center, ice rink, outdoor amphitheater, ballfields, racquet courts, playgrounds, and picnic sites into one central complex. It also hosts the three-day Greentree Festival on the second weekend after Labor Day, a tradition running for more than fifty-five years with music, arts and crafts, a folklife program, children’s activities, a car show, and a model-sailboat regatta. A different regional institution occupies a Victorian house on Kirkwood Road. The Magic House opened there in 1979 as the St. Louis region’s first children’s museum and has expanded from 5,500 to 55,000 square feet. Its current public programming combines hundreds of hands-on exhibits with science demonstrations, field trips, family learning nights, scout programs, and summer camps.