The flag of St. Louis is a map you can read in one glance. Two wavy blue lines come in from the left edge, meet in the middle, and leave as one: the Missouri emptying into the Mississippi at the city's front door. A gold disk with a blue fleur-de-lis marks the spot, the way a pin marks a map, and the whole thing floats on a solid red field. It was designed by a Yale art historian for the city's 200th birthday in 1964, and it has aged into one of the most admired civic flags in the country.
A committee for the bicentennial
St. Louis turned 200 in 1964, counting from Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau's founding of the fur post in 1764, and Mayor Raymond R. Tucker wanted the anniversary marked properly. On November 28, 1962, he appointed a five-member flag committee stacked with credentialed taste: Charles Nagel, director of the City Art Museum, as chairman; Dr. Arthur W. Proetz, a retired physician and local historian; George R. Brooks, director of the Missouri Historical Society; Charles van Ravenswaay, a former director of the same society; and Theodore Sizer, professor of art history and director emeritus of the Yale University Art Gallery.
Sizer, a Manhattan-born scholar known to colleagues as "Tubby," was the committee's heraldry man, and the design the group put forward was his. The Board of Aldermen adopted it on February 3, 1964, in time for the bicentennial celebrations. It is that rare committee product that looks like the work of one confident hand, because it was.
Rivers drawn in heraldry
Sizer built the flag from proper heraldic vocabulary rather than pictorial illustration. The rivers are wavy bars, the standard heraldic convention for water, colored blue and edged in white so they read cleanly against the red. One bar enters at the upper hoist corner, one at the lower, and they join at the center of the flag before flowing together to the fly edge. That is the Missouri meeting the Mississippi, the geographic fact that explains why the city exists where it does.
Some readings add the Meramec, which joins the Mississippi just south of the city, and call the design the Three Rivers flag. The committee's own emphasis was the great confluence, but the extra river costs the design nothing either way.
At the junction sits a bezant, a gold roundel, carrying a blue fleur-de-lis. The lily is France twice over: the emblem of the royal house under which the city was founded, and a direct pointer to Louis IX, the sainted thirteenth-century king the city is named for. The disk itself has been described as the city, and also as the Louisiana Purchase, the 1803 transaction that made St. Louis American. Either way it does its cartographic job, marking the settlement at the meeting of the waters.
Four flags in four colors
The palette is an argument about history. Red, white, blue, and gold were chosen to recall the four regimes that have flown flags over the site: Spain, which held the west bank of the Mississippi when Laclède arrived; Bourbon France, whose subjects actually built the town; Republican France, which briefly reacquired the territory under Napoleon; and the United States, which bought it in 1803. St. Louis spent its first four decades changing sovereigns without changing character, a French-speaking fur town administered from afar, and the flag compresses that whole shuffle into its color choices.
The proportions are 5:8, slightly longer than the common American 3:5, which gives the converging rivers room to travel.
The flag it replaced
The 1964 design was not the city's first flag, and the story of the previous one is stranger than the flag deserved. A design contest in 1916 produced a winner credited to A. P. Woehrle. The actual designer was Edward A. Krondl, whose original entry the judges had rejected; he reworked it and resubmitted under his friend Woehrle's name, and that version won. The flag then sat in civic limbo for three decades, only receiving formal recognition in 1946, and never established itself in public life. When the bicentennial committee convened in 1962, replacing it outright was an easy call.
Fifth in the country
In the North American Vexillological Association's 2004 survey of 150 American city flags, St. Louis placed fifth, behind Washington, D.C., Chicago, Denver, and Phoenix. Vexillologists tend to hold it up as proof that a flag can be symbolically dense without being cluttered: four colors, no words, no seal, and every element carrying specific local meaning.
Locally, the flag has followed the trajectory of the country's other good city flags, migrating from municipal buildings onto T-shirts, team merchandise, and neighborhood bars. Sizer died in 1967, three years after adoption, having given the city a design that outlived the bicentennial it was made for by a comfortable margin.
References
[1] "Flag of St. Louis," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_St._Louis
[2] "Theodore Sizer: Designer of the St. Louis City Flag," Landmarks Association of St. Louis. https://landmarks-stl.org/learn/resource-center/theodore-sizer-designer-of-the-st-louis-city-flag/
[3] "St. Louis, Missouri (U.S.)," Flags of the World. https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/us-moslo.html
[4] North American Vexillological Association (NAVA), "American City Flags Survey" (2004). https://nava.org/digital-library/design/surveys/2004-American-City-Flags-Survey.pdf