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The organizations that shape St. Louis, charted from STL.org, every connection sourced. Click a star you know to light up who it touches.
The organizations that shape St. Louis, charted from STL.org, every connection sourced. Click a star you know to light up who it touches.
I charted this because I wanted to see it. St. Louis runs on a web of organizations that fund each other, found each other, and hold each other up, and nearly all of it sits on the public record: 990s, annual reports, press releases. But the record lives in ten thousand PDFs nobody reads side by side. Laid out as one sky, the region looks like what it actually is, a small galaxy where a hotel stay becomes a mural and a century-old bequest still bends everything around it. Every connection here is cited. If I couldn't source it, I didn't chart it.
Star size comes from each organization's operating budget on a log scale, taken from IRS Form 990 filings and annual reports. Staff counts and finances reflect the most recent public filing I could find.
Glow is what a star gives off, not what it collects. Documented support flowing outward (grants, space, founding) sets the shine, weighted by dollars where the record shows them. Every line is cited. Solid lines are money or founding. Dashed lines are looser association. Thicker lines carry more money.
Every star also carries an apparent magnitude. That one is my editorial read, and I use the astronomer's own scale: magnitude 1 is brilliant, 10 is barely there, and around 9 is the edge of naked-eye visibility. Zooming in gathers light, so fainter stars appear the closer you look. The telescope shows everything at once.
Comets are recurring events. They blaze for a stretch and return on a cycle. The faint clouds are districts, neighborhoods like Grand Center where stars gather. Small points orbiting a star are its venues.
A few stars are for-profit, marked with a hollow core. They earn a place only when their cultural pull is real and their tie to the rest of the sky is cited.
Star types, decoded: a red giant is an old institution grown enormous. A protostar is still forming. A neutron star is small but impossibly dense, a tiny staff with outsized pull. A supernova just exploded. A white dwarf is the compact remnant of something once larger. A black hole no longer exists, and still bends everything around it. The star types are my frankest editorial layer, and every card says so.
By default you see the whole sky. Discovery mode darkens it: you start from the stars everyone knows and chart the rest by following their ties, the way you actually learn a city.
Solar wind animates the documented dollars. Every mote of gold is support moving from giver to receiver; denser streams carry more. The motion compresses each grant or gift into a loop. It is a portrait of the record, not a live feed.
Gravity is its counterpart. Cool blue dust falls inward and settles on the biggest public draws, scaled by the crowds they pull each year. Attendance and readership figures are cited like everything else. Solar wind shows money moving between stars; gravity shows people. The two rarely gather at the same star. Where they do, you are looking at cultural weight.
Placement and sector groupings are editorial. This is the sky as seen from STL.org, and I can only view the stars from the point where I stand. If you think a star is rising or dimming, tell me. I read every suggestion and decide what the chart reflects.
Created by Chris Ryan for STL.org. Spot an error, or want your organization corrected or added? Write hello@stl.org.
© 2026 STL.org. Organization data compiled from public sources; every connection cited. Share with attribution.