ST. LOUIS - The fireworks reflect on the nation's signature river, and that's very interesting. But it's more than that.

There's something especially marvelous about celebrating the Fourth of July in a quintessentially American Midwestern city that celebrates America year round. The Gateway Arch, symbol of the place, and the museum beneath it represent the nation at its swaggering best, symbols of a Western expansion that would define us in so many ways.

That we're talking about St. Louis - a city that's seen its share of rough times and that, like the country, isn't exactly in swagger mode right now - in a way adds particular power and poignancy to this year's celebration.

And the arrival 10 days later of baseball's All-Star Game, the summer classic of the national pastime, adds an all-American exclamation point.

These days St. Louis, as a city and as a tourist draw, doesn't have the best buzz. Once a thriving American metropolis, its population has shrunk to 350,000, down half a million since 1950, when Stan "The Man" Musial and TWA were both major players here.

(Boosters will remind negative nabobs that the population of the St. Louis metro area has stabilized at near 3 million. Realists will remind boosters that the soul of a metro area is the city at its heart, and that this soul is troubled.)

Downtown's retail district, aside from the old Famous-Barr department store that's now a Macy's, is no longer a retail district. Union Station, which tried to be a mall, is now essentially a food court and a construction zone. (Marriott, whose hotel adjoins it, is converting much of what was shops to a lobby, fitness center, and other amenities.)

A downtown condo boomlet designed to take advantage of the city's under-occupied commercial architecture - some of it classic - was a spotty thing even before the current financial situation and today is largely in limbo; a multipurpose "Ballpark Village" meant to accompany, enhance, and help pay for the Cardinals' new Busch Stadium next door is still a vacant lot three-plus years after the ballpark's 2006 debut.

Vast stretches of the city's north side, especially, look like what was left after a successful World War II bombing run on (choose your favorite target city).

And yet - like the seedling conifers poking through the rubble and ash short years after Mount St. Helens blew her volcanic top - there are signs of life, downtown and in places where decayed apartments, an obsolete hospital, and fetid public housing towers were mercifully flattened.

There is new housing, at a variety of price points and created largely without displacing earlier residents. And where folks settle, grass grows and children play.

"The rot," says Chris Hayden, "has stopped."

When he isn't helping maintain the Scott Joplin House, Chris Hayden shows visitors around this pleasant tribute to a remarkable musician and different time.

Joplin, whose largely forgotten ragtime compositions were reintroduced to audiences in the 1973 movie The Sting, lived from 1900 to 1903 in the modest red-brick building on what's now Delmar Boulevard, a short drive from downtown. Today, we're all invited to walk through the two-story home, designated a Missouri Historic Site.

Downstairs is a pedal-powered player piano, with ready-to-roll rolls of "The Maple Leaf Rag," "The Entertainer," and other Joplin classics. Up narrow stairs are rooms authentically furnished with pieces including an old upright piano.

"It was in this place when they came in here to renovate it" in the 1980s, Hayden said of the instrument. "It is a piano from the period, so it's possible he played that piano up there."

Speaking of music:

"It's known as a music city," blues singer and musician Eric McSpadden, fresh from a gig at Beale on Broadway, says of his hometown, "but it's not known like Memphis or Nashville."

That one of St. Louis' prime music venues is named for a Memphis street says something in itself: There is no single iconic "music street" here - no Beale Street, no Bourbon Street. This, in many things, is a city of pockets: ethnic and cultural and residential and entertainment pockets, some too small to qualify as actual neighborhoods.

And so, on this otherwise dull patch of Broadway just south of Busch Stadium - the Broadway Triangle, it's sometimes called - there is this pocket of live music bars, primarily blues but also some folk and rock, all with food: Broadway Oyster Bar, the Beale on Broadway, and BB's Jazz, Blues & Soups the most inviting, with token (if any) cover charges and, on the right nights, wonderful performers.