Visualizing Early St. Louis

3D model of part of the city of St. Louis as it stood in the late 18th century, created using Sketchup.

Moore authored “Visualizing Early St. Louis,” a chapter in the anthology French St. Louis, Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy, edited by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey and Peter J. Kastor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021). The chapter is about the recreation of vanished landscapes of the past, in which Moore has an intense personal interest. Using Sketchup he recreated the entire city of St. Louis as it stood in the late 18th century as a 3-D model. Primary sources utilized in this creation included an 1820s survey map of the city with each property measured to the nearest ¼ inch, colonial real estate records translated from French and Spanish, and probate inventories of estates detailing outbuildings, gardens, personal belongings, etc. The hope is that in the future, a virtual reality version can be created so that people can walk the downtown area and see the historical structures in real time. Fly-throughs of the historical city were created from the model and are displayed in the new museum under the Arch.