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Just as stately trees in Forest Park were coming down to make way for the 1904 Worlds Fair, elegant homes designed by the citys best architects and occupied by its elite were springing up on surrounding streets, as a vast building boom began. And that was the start of the St. Louis neighborhood called the Central West End, which quickly grew from a sleepy rural outpost to an address for fashionable people and shops, fine cultural institutions and congregations, high-class hotels and hospitals. That halcyon period did not last, however. Through the years, various factors the growth of the suburbs, white flight, the cost of maintaining huge homes, the rise of rooming houses, the disheartening effect of smoke and urban smells drove some of the well-to-do farther west, and the Central West End foundered.