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Clifton Heights, St. Louis — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Curving streets ring a lake and a playground in Clifton Heights, a hillside neighbourhood of St. Louis between Hampton Avenue and Interstate 44.
About Clifton Heights
Where to stay in Clifton Heights
The right area depends on your trip — here's what each neighbourhood is best for.
Clifton Heights sold its ground as house lots, so a room for the night is the one thing its blocks rarely supply. Lodging gathers at the north-eastern tip, where Interstate 44 meets Hampton Avenue and commercial frontage takes over from houses. A second choice stands further in, on Clifton Avenue, where a Methodist church was sold to private owners in 2004 and rebuilt as an inn.
Rail closes the gap. The MetroLink Blue Line calls at Shrewsbury-Lansdowne I-44, beyond the boundary to the south-west. If you want mornings that stay residential and a lake three streets from the door, take a base near Clifton Heights Park.
About Clifton Heights
What are the main landmarks in Clifton Heights?
Clifton Heights Park fills a natural bowl at the centre of the neighbourhood, 4.4 acres dedicated to the city in 1912, and it holds a lake, a fountain and a playground. Larger houses face it along curving streets. At the corner of Columbia Avenue and Clifton Avenue, the Clifton Pointe Building has carried shopfronts since the early twentieth century.
Mason School of Academic and Cultural Literacy is the neighbourhood's one public school. The Saint Louis Zoo and the Saint Louis Science Center stand more than a mile north, inside Forest Park, not in Clifton Heights.
What is the history of Clifton Heights?
Clifton Heights began as farmland inside the Gratiot League Square, a Spanish land grant three miles square held by the merchant Charles Gratiot. Railways broke the quiet. The Pacific Railroad ran the River Des Peres valley on the north-west edge in the 1850s, and the Frisco followed in the 1880s.
In 1885 the surveyor Julius Pitzman platted a subdivision for a Methodist congregation, whose church on Clifton Avenue took the name Fry Memorial. Clifton Hills, north of Southwest Avenue, came last, in the mid 1950s. Interstate 44 opened in 1972, stranding about fifty houses against the tracks and erasing a small green called Frisco Park.
Where is Clifton Heights?
Clifton Heights climbs a hill between Hampton Avenue and Interstate 44, running south to Arsenal Street and falling away toward the River Des Peres.
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Updated September 2026