St. Louis: The City Where My Heart Was Born

Date Posted: July 14, 2026

Posted In: Ideas, What we are thinking about,

From Conner Kerrigan on Substack: There’s a bandaid I need to rip, and I’ve been avoiding it. But it’s time.

We are moving back to Chicago late this summer.

I want to say it was a hard decision, but that would be dishonest. My son is lucky enough to have three sets of grandparents, and they all live in Chicagoland. He’s also lucky enough to have a bunch of aunts, uncles, and cousins there, too. If you’re a parent reading this, you get it. It’s easier to raise children around family, plain and simple. With my wife’s medical residency coming to an end, the choice was clear. It’s time to go back home.

But ever since we confirmed the move, I haven’t been able to get excited about it.

Every time I try, my heart aches.

After all, my heart was born in St. Louis.

When I was 24 years old, I was living in Chicago, IL, and I met a smart, funny, beautiful young woman, and very quickly fell in love for obvious reasons. One year in to that relationship, my now-wife Ayo moved to Kirskville, MO for medical school, and I followed along. Moving from the dense, urban Wicker Park neighborhood in Chicago to the sparse, rural Kirksville was a difficult transition, and I soon found myself longing for a bigger city, and so I moved to St. Louis, 3.5 hours away, to work as a field organizer for the Human Rights Campaign. That was 2018.

Since then, I’ve worked in and around St. Louis and Missouri politics and government for my entire time in this state, eventually getting the honor of serving as the Communications Director for the City of St. Louis under then-Mayor Tishaura Jones.

I am forever grateful to Jones for hiring me, because during my tenure in that position, I got to fall deeply in love with this place.

I got to see the absolute best of St. Louis. I got to meet small business owners who were betting their future on the city, north and south of Delmar; I got to take long bike rides with advocates who were fighting to make the city safer for commuters who didn’t drive a car; I got to spend time with civic and business leaders who were determined to improve the national image of the city; I got to hear from everyday residents who love this city deeply and want to see it thrive.

And I got to work with some extremely competent and talented people at all levels of city government. St. Louis is lucky to have them.

The city is fueled by people who believe that the future will be brighter if we all do our part.

Still, there’s a strange dichotomy here – when you speak with individuals, they talk about their love for St. Louis, but the cultural consensus is much more negative. This, to me, feels like the result of a number of issues plaguing the region that often feel unconquerable.

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