Forest Park's Aviation Field

In the summer of nineteen twenty, Forest Park in Saint Louis opened one of the earliest urban airmail landing strips in the country. Established that summer, the Aviation Field linked Saint Louis with Chicago as part of a federal airmail network that was just beginning to stitch the country together by air. The service was short-lived.

Budget cuts ended flights here in nineteen twenty-one. But the field didn't disappear immediately. Barnstormers and early aviation exhibitions used the grass strip for some years, giving Saint Louis residents their first close look at the flying machines that would reshape the century.

The field sat within one of America's great urban parks, the same grounds that hosted the nineteen oh four World's Fair just sixteen years before.