The title of this paper alludes to the lyrics of the 1929 popular song “Happy Days Are Here Again,” a typical, if now iconic, artifact of the Depression era. The difference between the simple present tense of the song’s insistent confidence and the future anterior of my promissory allusion captures what I see as the cultural, temporal, and geographical privilege and conundrum in which the city of St. Louis found itself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time, both the song and paper title have an adverb in common—again—which serves as both a synonym for, and symptom of, hope.