Busch Stadium: The Ballpark and Downtown St. Louis

Busch Stadium is served by the Red and Blue Lines of the St. Louis MetroLink light rail system, at the Stadium station. Those two lines share the same 16-station downtown alignment, which also includes the Union Station, Civic Center, 8th & Pine, Convention Center and Laclede's Landing stations — which is why so much of this guide is reachable on one alignment. The Old Courthouse is described as accessible from the 8th & Pine station.

The regional transit agency puts it plainly on its own site: "With access to Busch Stadium, Enterprise Center, Energizer Park and The Dome, Metro makes it easy [to] enjoy the game without worrying about parking and traffic."

Two gaps, both stated rather than filled. No official parking price is published here: the club's ballpark page references game-day parking and links to a dedicated parking and directions page, but both sub-pages returned HTTP 406 to direct fetch and no price could be retrieved from any other source reached. And no specific city or regional bus route serving the ballpark could be confirmed from any source reached in this research. That is a gap in the record, not a statement that no bus route exists.

Ballpark Village sits at 601 Clark Avenue, on the footprint of the demolished Busch Memorial Stadium. Phase One opened on March 27, 2014 and Phase Two began opening in June 2020. In August 2026 the operator's own site listed Prairie Farms Ice Cream Barn, Sports & Social St. Louis, Pizza Bar, Salt + Smoke, AVA Garden Bar, Live! Arena and PBR St. Louis, with retail at Baseballism, Cardinals Authentics, New Era Store, Scott Credit Union and CardVault by Tom Brady, plus the Live! by Loews hotel, and a further venue, The Clydesdale, listed to open on August 27, 2026. That is the operator's own tenant list, and this guide presents it as one.

One name is missing from it. Wikipedia lists a Cardinals Hall of Fame and Museum among Ballpark Village's venues; the operator's own August 2026 list does not carry that name. Whether the venue closed, moved, or was renamed or absorbed into another could not be determined, and nothing here should be read as a closure.

Salt + Smoke's Ballpark Village branch serves St. Louis-style barbecue: ribs with a signature rub, smoked with cherry wood, plus chicken, brisket and pulled pork. It is one of eight Salt + Smoke locations in the St. Louis area, alongside Delmar Loop, St. Charles, South County, Kirkwood, Edwardsville in Illinois, Hampton and Ellisville.

Gateway Arch National Park holds two of this guide's entries. The arch itself is 630 feet, the world's tallest arch and the tallest memorial in the United States; visitors enter by the west entrance, which faces Fourth Street and the Old Courthouse, and an underground visitor centre of 70,000 square feet houses the Museum of Westward Expansion. The Old Courthouse is the older building by a century and a half: begun in 1816, its Federal-style core finished in 1828, a Greek Revival addition in 1839, portions redesigned from 1851, and William Rumbold's Italian Renaissance cast-iron dome — modeled on St. Peter's Basilica — added between 1861 and 1864. At 192 feet it was Missouri's tallest habitable building from 1864 to 1894. It hosted the proceedings of Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which the Supreme Court ruled against Dred and Harriet Scott in 1857, and it has held four National Park Service history galleries and two restored courtrooms since the city abandoned it in 1930 and the site joined the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in 1940.

Two Gateway Mall parks follow. Kiener Plaza runs 1.9 acres between Chestnut and Market and between Broadway and 7th Street, adjacent to the Old Courthouse and the national park, with William Zorach's statue and fountain "The Runner"; its eastern half opened in 1965, its western half and the Morton D. May Amphitheater in 1986, and it closed in February 2016 for a $23 million rebuild before reopening on May 19, 2017. Citygarden runs 2.9 acres between Eighth and Tenth and between Market and Chestnut, built for $30 million and opened to the public on July 1, 2009, holding 29 sculptures by artists including Keith Haring, Aristide Maillol, Jim Dine, Igor Mitoraj and Julian Opie. It is free, with no admission fee.

St. Louis Union Station is at 1820 Market Street. It opened as a railroad station on September 1, 1894, to Theodore Link's design with the civil engineer George H. Pegram, with 31 tracks under an enclosed train shed, and on completion it was the world's largest and busiest railroad station. Amtrak stopped using it on October 31, 1978. It has been a National Historic Landmark since 1970, and an adaptive-reuse renovation begun in 1985 turned it into a 567-room Curio Collection by Hilton hotel, the St. Louis Aquarium — opened December 25, 2019, described as featuring more than 13,000 animals across over 250 species — and the St. Louis Wheel, a 200-foot Ferris wheel with climate-controlled gondolas. The Grand Hall keeps its gold-leafed ceiling, Romanesque arches, 65-foot barrel vault and stained glass; the building is Indiana limestone and its clock tower is 230 feet.

The City Museum is at 750 North 16th Street, in the former International Shoe Company factory and warehouse that Bob and Gail Cassilly bought in 1993 and opened as a museum on October 25, 1997. It holds a life-size walk-through bowhead whale sculpture, the multi-slide Enchanted Caves, a Wurlitzer pipe organ from a historic New York theater, a rooftop Ferris wheel and the outdoor MonstroCity structure of repurposed aircraft fuselages and industrial materials.

Laclede's Landing lies north of Gateway Arch National Park, separated from it by the Eads Bridge, bounded by Washington Avenue, North 3rd Street, Dr. Martin Luther King Drive and the Mississippi. It marks where Pierre Laclède founded St. Louis around 1780, with his 14-year-old stepson Auguste Chouteau tasked with preparing the land, and its brick-and-cast-iron warehouses of 1850 to 1900 — the only remaining section of the city's 19th-century commercial riverfront — have been converted into shops, restaurants and bars. No source reached names one of them, so none is named here.

The Anheuser-Busch Brewery is a 142-acre complex of 189 buildings, added to the National Register and designated a National Historic Landmark District on November 13, 1966, and a City of St. Louis Landmark. Much of it is red brick Romanesque; the Brew House of 1891 to 1892 is noted for multi-story hop chandeliers, ornate ironwork and natural light. The Budweiser Clydesdales can be seen in their exercise field and carriage house, and the Lyon Schoolhouse Museum is on the grounds. The brewery's own tour site states tours every day from 10am to 5pm in five formats and states no price.

One thing to know about the record behind all of this. Four of these places — Ballpark Village, Salt + Smoke, the City Museum and the brewery — rest on an operator's own site for whether they are trading, and an operator's own site cannot establish that. This guide therefore says nothing about whether those four are open now. It does not say they have closed either: there is no evidence of that, and none should be inferred. Telephone first.

The St. Louis Cardinals franchise was established in 1882 and competes in the National League Central Division. It has won 11 World Series championships — 1926, 1931, 1934, 1942, 1944, 1946, 1964, 1967, 1982, 2006 and 2011 — the second-most in Major League Baseball history behind the New York Yankees, and holds 19 National League pennants, third-most among all teams.

The current Busch Stadium broke ground on January 17, 2004 and opened in 2006 at a cost of $365 million, about $583 million in 2025 dollars. Populous, formerly HOK Sport, designed it with Kennedy Associates/Architects Inc., and Jim Chibnall was lead designer. It stands on part of the site of the demolished Busch Memorial Stadium, straddling 7th and Clark Streets near the interchange of Interstates 64, 55 and 44, and seats 46,861. The Gate 3 entrance incorporates a bridge structure designed to resemble the historic Eads Bridge — the same bridge that separates Laclede's Landing from the Arch grounds.

On the name: Anheuser-Busch signed a 20-year naming-rights deal in 2004, nominally running to 2024. No source reached gives any information on whether that deal was renewed, and this guide makes no claim about it either way.

The address itself has two forms. The club's own ballpark page gives 700 Clark Street; Wikipedia's infobox gives 700 Clark Ave. Both name the same address, and no source reached settles the suffix.