Brickline Greenway - Market St

St. Louis, MO

2026

The Gap

The Seed

The Sprout

Market Street between 22nd Street and Compton Avenue runs through the footprint of Mill Creek Valley — a thriving Black community of 20,000 residents the City of St. Louis demolished in the late 1950s to make way for urban renewal. For more than six decades, that corridor carried traffic and held no acknowledgment of what was erased. It also held no safe, connected path for students at Harris-Stowe State University, workers at Energizer Park, or residents on either side of it.

Gap

Seed

Sprout

Mill Creek's Mile

St. Louis City Planning Director Don Roe said it plainly at the opening: the Brickline Greenway didn't follow an old railroad. The city chose its route. The route was chosen to connect history, culture, people, and place.

Market Street between 22nd Street and Compton runs through the footprint of Mill Creek Valley. Gwen Moore, curator at the Missouri History Museum, described it at the opening as a community of Black-owned banks and hospitals, institutions that met every need a segregated city denied elsewhere. Twenty thousand residents built a vibrant, self-sustaining neighborhood under the conditions of segregation and Jim Crow. The city demolished it in the late 1950s. The greenway runs through where it stood.

Client

Great Rivers Greenway

Size

0.85 Miles

Photogrpahy

Matthew Gold

Acknowledgement

Work Completed by the Kanopi Gap team while Employed at LJC Design & Engineering

The design extends along the north side of Market Street between Jefferson Avenue and 22nd Street, connecting Energizer Park to Harris-Stowe at Compton. Dual pathways serve different modes of use — one for movement, one for slower passage. Native planting, traffic calming, and accessible crossings make the corridor safe and functional for students, workers, and residents who cross it daily.

The art carries equal weight. Damon Davis's Pillars of the Valley, anchored at the CITY SC stadium's southwest corner, extends further west along this segment. Davis described the work as a monument, not a memorial: the people it honors are alive in what they built and left behind. A mural at Stars Park, created by St. Louis ArtWorks with teen apprentices in summer 2025, honors the St. Louis Stars — world champion baseball team and Mill Creek community institution. Both are permanent. Both are part of the greenway's public realm.

Great Rivers Greenway, the City of St. Louis, Harris-Stowe State University, private donors, and community members who shaped the design through engagement built this segment together. Students cross campus on it. Neighbors gather on it. Families walk it. Artists are shaping it. Construction continues west.