United States · Missouri · St. Louis
DeMun, St. Louis — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Dark brick and limestone walk-ups line DeMun Avenue in DeMun, a 1920s apartment neighborhood straddling the St. Louis and Clayton city limits in Missouri.
About DeMun
Where to stay in DeMun
Where you base yourself shapes the visit — here's the character of each area.
DeMun is an apartment district, so a bed here sits in a 1920s brick walk-up on Southwood Avenue or San Bonita Avenue rather than in a hotel tower. Both streets run within two minutes of the storefronts and sidewalk tables at DeMun Park, on the corner of Southwood and DeMun Avenue. Not all of it is flats.
The houses on the single-family streets vary more in style than the apartment blocks do, and cars are kept to the alleys behind either way. Anyone who wants Forest Park and the Washington University campus inside a walking radius, without a hotel corridor outside the window, has found the right pocket of the map. Hotels sit elsewhere: downtown Clayton to the west, the Central West End to the east.
About DeMun
What are the main landmarks in DeMun?
DeMun keeps its landmarks small: one commercial block on DeMun Avenue and three pocket parks cut into the apartment rows. DeMun Park, a playground at 810 DeMun Ave dedicated in 1974, stands at the corner of Southwood Avenue on the former site of the DeMun Garage; the grassy median beside it once carried a streetcar track. Henry Wright Park, an eighth-acre courtyard at 6424 Alamo Ave, is wedged between two brownstone buildings and named for the planner who platted the Hi-Pointe subdivision in 1917.
Concordia Park spreads a wider lawn to the west, on the Concordia Seminary grounds. Nothing here is monumental. The shops face inward, toward the flats, and not toward the boulevards that bound the district.
What is the history of DeMun?
DeMun carries the name of Jules DeMun, a French fur trader whose wife Isabelle Gratiot DeMun was a great-granddaughter of Pierre Laclede. The tract deeded to the family by the King of Spain was later broken apart. Its eastern end went to the city of St. Louis, sold under protest, and became Forest Park; its western end was sold in 1921 to the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which built Concordia Seminary on it.
The remainder was subdivided. Henry Wright drew the layout in 1917 and the neighborhood was finished in 1923, and the Hi-Pointe-DeMun Historic District entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2005 with 441 contributing buildings across 72.5 acres.
Where is DeMun?
DeMun sits between Skinker Boulevard on the east and Big Bend Boulevard on the west, with Clayton Road below it and Northwood Avenue above. The St. Louis city line cuts straight through the plat, leaving Buena Vista Avenue on the city side and DeMun Avenue in Clayton. The ground tilts.
It falls away from the crest that gave the Hi-Pointe subdivision its name, so the tall blocks were set at the bottom of the hill and the short ones at the top. Forest Park begins on the far side of Skinker Boulevard.
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Updated September 2026