Forest Park is one of the great American urban parks and almost nobody outside St. Louis knows how good it is. Thirteen hundred acres, mature canopy across most of it, the World’s Fair grounds still legible in the road layout. The half-mile lap around Post-Dispatch Lake — at the park’s eastern center, behind the Muny — is the shadiest stretch, ringed by bald cypresses that were planted for the 1904 fair and are now ninety feet tall with knees in the lake shallows.
The picks below are all morning loops, all starting from a MetroLink stop. The cypress cover is densest on the western side of the lake. The eastern side opens up at the Pagoda Circle, where the path runs into the rose garden — a useful detour but not in shade. The Muny’s east wall throws a long shadow across the lake before 8 that adds a half-degree of cool to the south end of the lap.