Old Cathedral, St. Louis

Old Cathedral, St. Louis tickets: which one to buy

Entry is free with a donation box. A small museum in the lower level covers the history of the parish and the French founding of St Louis and asks a token sum. Guided tours are given by volunteers after Sunday mass and by arrangement for groups. The basilica stands inside Gateway Arch National Park on the riverfront, five minutes from the Arch itself, and is the only building that survived the demolition of forty blocks in the 1930s to clear the site;

parking is in the park garages. Arch tram tickets are separate and have nothing to do with the church. Nothing needs booking. Mass is celebrated daily and the church is a personal parish rather than a territorial one, drawing people from across the city. The parish office answers questions about tours and the museum entrance is on the lower level beside the gift shop.

Visiting Old Cathedral, St. Louis: what to see

Pierre Laclede set aside this block for a church when he founded St Louis in 1764, and the present building of 1831 to 1834 is the fourth on the site and the first cathedral west of the Mississippi. It is Greek Revival, which is unusual for a Catholic church in America: a Doric portico, a plain stone box and a slender tower, built when the city was still a French-speaking fur-trading town. Until 1844 it was the only parish church in St Louis.

Inside, the decoration is restrained, with a painting of the Crucifixion given by Louis XVIII of France and a set of bells cast in France. The crypt holds the city's early bishops. In 1961 John XXIII made it a basilica, the year the Arch was begun around it. The original bells, brought from France in the 1830s, still hang in the tower and are rung before Sunday mass. The interior was restored in the 1960s to its 1834 appearance, removing Victorian additions, and the sanctuary now shows the plain Greek Revival scheme the builders intended.

Old Cathedral, St. Louis opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily from morning to early evening, with masses several times a day and closure to visitors during them. The riverfront park is busiest in summer and around the Fourth of July fireworks. St Louis is humid in July and August and cold in January. The church is small and rarely crowded even when the Arch is queued to the road. Photography without flash is allowed.

Dress is informal. Allow twenty-five minutes. The Arch tram to the top, the museum under the monument and the Old Courthouse where the Dred Scott case was heard are all within a few minutes, which makes this a natural first stop on a walk along the riverfront. The Arch grounds around the church were remodelled in 2018 and the walk from the Old Courthouse now passes the west front.