Riverview Neighborhood Overview

Location

Riverview comprises the extreme northern section of the City, bounded by the Mississippi River to the East, the City limits to the West, Chain of Rocks Road to the South, with the Northern boundary lying on a third of a mile north of I-270.

History

Columbia Bottoms road, now known as Riverview Drive, was laid out about 1830 as a farm-to-market road leading to Baden and then St. Louis. Traffic from a farming area of more than 100 square miles in northern St. Louis County followed this road and others through the present-day Riverview and Baden area to reach the St. Louis market. Land divisions in the Baden-Riverview area were originally created from a series of large land tracts, or survey, which represented American confirmations of the early French and Spanish land grants made in the late eighteenth century. Eventually, these surveys were subdivided into farming areas in the early 1850s. The Riverview section of the land extended from the river westwardly beyond the present City limits. Major landowners in the area included William Carr Lane (first mayor of St. Louis), Nicholas A. Destrehan, Samuel B. Wiggins, and Amadee Valle. Residential construction began again in the southern end of Riverview in the early 1870s, and again in the early 1890s, coinciding with the construction of the new Chain of Rocks waterworks. An electric trolley line was operated by the Water Division from Baden to Chain of Rocks for several years. Today this line operates as a freight hauling line with connection to the Burlington Railroad.