Forest Park
Urban Park · St. Louis, Missouri
Thirteen hundred acres in western St. Louis, about half as large again as Central Park, opened in 1876 and given over in 1904 to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition and the Olympic Games of the same year - the only time a World's Fair and an Olympics have shared a city and a summer. What the fair left behind is the shape of the park and the Palace of Fine Arts, now the art museum. Five major institutions sit inside it and four of them are free, which makes this arguably the best-value square mile in America.
5595 Grand Drive, St. Louis, Missouri, 63112, United States
Open daily, generally 6 AM to 10 PM, FREE. The institutions inside it - the zoo, the art museum, the history museum, the science centre - keep their own hours and several are also free. The visitor centre keeps daytime hours. Roads through the park are open to traffic; several loops are closed to cars at times for events.