getting around in 19th century St. Louis

A reader asked,

"I'm a St Louisan myself, so I know that Hyde Park is a good long distance from Carondelet. These days, it would take two hours to walk it, and I bet it would have been at least double that in those days. Did your characters ride, take the horse drawn omnibus or streetcar, or what?"

This is one of those things I like to think about, and one of the unexpectedly frustrating bits of research I had to do for the book—calculating travel times. How far was it between these places I was writing about, and how did people get there? Figuring this out actually affected the story-timeline in parts of CURSE.

I was able to find a good map of St. Louis published in 1879, but sadly for me it had no scale on it to indicate distance. Then I hit upon the bright idea of using Google Maps.

According to the Almighty Google, it's about 10 miles from Hyde Park to Carondelet Park in modern-day St. Louis. Those two points, by the way, were roughly the far northern and far southern points of the incorporated city in 1880. That's right, the whole of St. Louis was only about 10 miles top to bottom, and about 350,000 people, according to census records.

According to Google, in 2016 it would take a person about three hours to walk that distance. I'm not sure why my reader assumed it would take LONGER "in the old days" (on the assumption that everything moved more slowly back then?), but I figure a little over two hours for a tall, fit man like Trace to walk that distance, assuming he was carrying nothing, and figuring there were fewer obstacles—traffic, stoplights, construction detours, etc.— in 1880. (It takes me about 30 minutes to walk 2 miles to my favorite coffee shop, over flat ground, carrying a backpack, and I walk fast for a girl, but not near as fast as, say, a 6'2" army ranger or firefighter who runs every day.)

St. Louis about 1880 (source needed)

If Trace was in a hurry, he'd take his horse. In fact at the beginning of the second story, "Printer's Devil," he and Boz are riding their horses south to Carondelet to work for the day. Later, I mention several times about Trace riding Blackjack to Miss Fairweather's house, because it would be a good deal further north than the working-class neighborhoods and businesses where he'd spend most of his time, and he's usually in a hurry to visit her. I figure a horse and a modern bicycle could be calculated at the same average speed—between 10 and 25 miles per hour at a non-racing speed, depending on traffic and terrain. Google maps says it would take about an hour for a bicyclist to get from Hyde Park to Carondelet, so figure an hour, max, for Trace to ride to Miss Fairweather's house from anywhere in the city.

There were horse-drawn street cars, but much like modern bus lines, they probably were slower than horseback, because of meandering routes and frequent stops. Also, they cost money to ride, and a man whose livelihood depended on a working horse would want to get him out for daily exercise, to keep them both fit.

So there you go—a taste of what historical writers think about.

Here's the Google Maps link, if you want to play with the numbers yourself.