GTA 6 City of the Week is a weekly article series here on GTA BOOM. Every week, we will evaluate a different city in the United States, gauging how well it would fit GTA 6 as a setting. First though, a recap of the week's GTA V news...
Those of you familiar with the reputation of St. Louis might have wondered why we didn't cover this city in the past. In all honesty, initially I was shooting for coastal cities, though I had St. Louis in mind. Then, after a while the articles drifted in-land while St. Louis drifted out-of-memory. In any case, a helpful commenter (who also happens to be from St. Louis) on last week's Charlotte post pointed out that the city just got rated as the most dangerous in America yet again, so what better opportunity to make up for its absence than now?
St. Louis
In spite of its current state as a relatively small city on a national scale with not exactly the best reputation in terms of public safety, St. Louis has a history to be proud of. At one point the city was the fourth largest in the country and became a major economic hub due to its busy inland port, facilitated by the Mississippi. St. Louis even hosted the 1904 Summer Olympics, which was notable for the fact that out of 651 participating athletes, only 62 were foreigners due to the difficulty of accessing the city, as well as the international tension caused by the Russo-Japanese war.
St. Louis today dropped down to being the 60th largest city in the USA with a population of barely over 300,000. That said, it is the second largest city in the state of Missouri, and the surrounding metropolitan area is home to around 3 million souls. Taking a look at the map, we'll see a large urban sprawl growing out of St. Louis itself, making it look like most much larger cities, however from an administrational point of view, the city proper actually forms a relatively small chunk of the sprawl in its middle.
The city is independent, meaning it isn't part of any state or county within the USA. I imagine this is one of the main reasons why it hasn't been unified with the large surrounding sprawl — in fact, here's a question for US based readers who know about such things: Several cities we've examined have large areas around them of contiguous settlement, but cut up into different cities or towns from an administrational point of view. In some cases, we've seen a town physically inside another, being bordered on all sides by the same settlement.
In such cases, why aren't the settlements unified? Is there some kind of legal issue preventing this? In Hungary it is relatively common practice to turn small settlements into districts of larger cities which have "consumed" them through growth, and this has happened on several occasions with the Capital, Budapest. Many of the outer districts were once independent towns, but were added to the jurisdiction of the capital for convenience and for the sake of administrational optimization.
