St. Louis Lambert International Airport

The Missouri Aeronautical Society leases a 170-acre field that becomes the nucleus of the future airport; it is renamed Lambert-St. Louis Flying Field in 1923 after aviation promoter and Olympic medalist Albert Bond Lambert, who later purchased and developed the site.

The City of St. Louis leases and later purchases the field after a $2 million bond issue, making it one of the first municipally owned airports in the United States.

Architect Minoru Yamasaki's distinctive three-domed terminal (a fourth dome was added in 1965) opens at a cost of $7.2 million; the design predates and influenced terminals later built at New York JFK and Paris Charles de Gaulle.

TWA merges with Ozark Air Lines, consolidating St. Louis as a major connecting hub; by the late 1990s, following TWA's 1993 headquarters relocation to St. Louis, the airport handles over 500 daily TWA flights to more than 100 destinations.

American Airlines purchases bankrupt TWA in April 2001; TWA ceases independent operations on December 1, 2001, and American inherits — then gradually reduces — the St. Louis hub, cutting it from roughly 200 daily flights to about 36 by 2010.

Runway 11/29 opens on April 13, 2006, the centerpiece of a roughly $1.1 billion expansion — among the costliest public works projects in St. Louis history — which required relocating major roads and demolishing about 2,000 homes in Bridgeton.

An EF4-rated tornado hits Terminal 1 on April 22, 2011, destroying jetways and breaking more than half the terminal's windows and damaging four aircraft; the airport closes temporarily and Concourse C repairs are not completed until April 2012.

Following American's hub downsizing, Southwest Airlines expands to become the airport's leading carrier, eventually accounting for roughly two-thirds of passenger traffic.