Dogtown, St. Louis

The Name: A Mystery With Several Explanations

How a neighbourhood in southwest St. Louis came to be called Dogtown is genuinely unclear — there are at least three competing origin stories, and the truth may involve elements of all of them, or none.

The most popular explanation connects the name to the 1904 World's Fair, held in Forest Park immediately adjacent to the neighbourhood. According to this story, Irish workers involved in the Fair's construction found themselves short of food during the long construction period and supplemented their diet by catching and eating the neighbourhood's stray dogs. The story has a basis in the fact that stray dogs were genuinely a problem in working-class St. Louis neighbourhoods in the early 20th century, but the cannibalistic element may be an embellishment — the tale has the quality of a piece of folk mockery rather than literal history.

A second explanation holds simply that the neighbourhood had an unusually large population of stray and semi-wild dogs — a common feature of poor urban neighbourhoods in the pre-dog-control era — and that the name described a physical reality rather than a culinary practice. A third explanation traces the name to a single family named Doggett or Dodgson whose property anchored the early settlement. None of these accounts can be definitively proved or disproved.

What matters more than the etymology is that the name has been embraced enthusiastically by the neighbourhood's residents, who have made it a source of pride rather than embarrassment. Dogtown St. Patrick's Day merchandise sells the name. The annual parade does not use the official name Clayton-Tamm. When people in St. Louis say "I'm from Dogtown," they mean something specific: they are from a working-class Irish neighbourhood that has outlasted most of its contemporaries.

The Clay Mines and the Irish Workers

The Irish came to Dogtown in the same period and for the same reason they came to The Hill two miles to the east: the fireclay deposits of south St. Louis County were among the best in North America, and the brickyards needed workers. The Hill attracted primarily northern Italians from Lombardy; Dogtown attracted the Irish who had already been in St. Louis for a generation, working in Kerry Patch on the north side, and who were moving south and west as they accumulated enough to leave the Patch.

This gave Dogtown a different character from Kerry Patch. It was not a neighbourhood of first-generation immigrants in desperate poverty. By the time the Irish arrived in significant numbers in the 1870s and 1880s, they were second-generation workers — American-born, English-speaking, with some capital and more ambition than their parents. They built the brick two-flats and small houses that still define the neighbourhood's housing stock. They established the church that became St. James the Greater, which has been the neighbourhood's institutional anchor ever since.

The 1904 World's Fair transformed the area around Dogtown. The construction and operation of the Fair brought thousands of workers into Forest Park, directly adjacent to the neighbourhood, and the economic activity of the Fair years gave Dogtown Irish families access to wages and opportunities beyond the clay mines. Men who had been quarry workers became small contractors, plumbers, and carpenters. Women who had worked in service became shopkeepers and boardinghouse keepers. The Fair years marked the transition from Dogtown as a workers' enclave to Dogtown as a stable working-class community with its own institutions and commercial life.

St. James the Greater: The Anchor of the Neighbourhood

St. James the Greater Catholic Church, founded in 1861, predates the Irish settlement of Dogtown as a distinct community — the original parish served a mixed population of early settlers on the south side. But as the Irish moved in over the 1870s and 1880s, St. James became their church, and the relationship between the parish and the Irish community has defined both ever since.

The present church building, constructed in the late 19th century in the Romanesque Revival style with the red brick that was Dogtown's native material, is a substantial structure that speaks to the ambition of the community that built it. Parishes in poor Irish neighbourhoods often made sacrifices to build churches that were more magnificent than the houses around them — not because the community was unaware of the irony but because the church was the community's statement about its own worth. St. James said: this neighbourhood matters. These people matter. The building has stood long enough to prove them right.

St. James Parish School educated generations of Dogtown children. The Catholic school system in St. Louis — heavily Irish in its staffing and ethos — was one of the primary mechanisms by which Irish-American families achieved the economic and social mobility that their parents could not. Boys who went to St. James and then to the Catholic high schools of St. Louis had access to networks and credentials that the public school system of the era did not provide. The lawyers and politicians and businessmen who came out of Dogtown in the 20th century had usually started at St. James.

The St. Patrick's Day Parade: An Annual Return

The Dogtown St. Patrick's Day parade, established in 1996, has become one of the definitive St. Patrick's Day events in the St. Louis region. Unlike the downtown St. Louis parade, which is a civic event, the Dogtown parade is a neighbourhood event — it runs through the streets of Clayton-Tamm, past St. James Church, through the blocks where the Irish families have lived for four or five generations. The crowd is partly Dogtown residents and partly diaspora Irish from across the region who make an annual return to the neighbourhood on March 17.

The parade has achieved the status of a pilgrimage. Families who moved out of Dogtown in the 1960s and 1970s — following the pattern of post-war suburban migration that emptied so many urban ethnic neighbourhoods — come back on St. Patrick's Day specifically because Dogtown still exists, still has its character, still identifies as Irish in a way that the suburbs cannot. The parade is both a celebration and a demonstration: Dogtown is still here.

The neighbourhood's Irish bars and restaurants — O'Connell's Pub, the Dogtown Tavern, and others — are central to the St. Patrick's Day experience, but they are also venues for Irish culture throughout the year. O'Connell's Pub, which has been at its present location for decades, is one of the oldest Irish bars in St. Louis and one of the few places in the city where the atmosphere is genuinely pub-like rather than bar-like — a distinction that matters to the people who drink there.

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