Welcome to the Virtual City Project

The Virtual City Project employs three-dimensional imaging technologies to create electronic representations of lost historic landscapes. Utilizing our palette of editing tools, users can create their own 3-D cities and link both text and images to landscape features. Currently, our generated landscapes are viewable in Google Earth.

The Virtual City is pleased to announce the availability of guided historic landscape tours. To take one of these tours click here.

View any of the following St. Louis districts in Google Earth:

Riverfront District
Old Courthouse area
Block 33
Sample Blocks
Henry Shaw's Block
Old North St. Louis

Note: Users must have Google Earth on their computers in order to view these files. After downloading the .kmz (Google Earth) file, please wait for buildings to load before navigating. Premature navigation will interrupt the building-loading process. Most districts will load fully in 3-5 minutes. When the circle on the bottom right turns a solid blue color, the loading process is complete. Once in Google Earth, uncheck all options in the bottom left panel.

Build your own Virtual City with

The Virtual City toolkit

Download User’s Guide to Virtual City toolkit
Download Instructions for Gerteis Class

To acquire the Neglight(Texture Grabber) program only, please download the following two files:
File 1
File 2

Enter Editor’s Page
(requires username and password)

Notes on Software Bugs and Updates

The Virtual City Project is grateful for support and funding received from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Missouri State Library.

For further information on the project contact, Louis Gerteis, gerteis@umsl.edu, or Andrew Hurley, ahurley@umsl.edu.
For technical support, contact Jerrold Siegel jerrold_siegel@umsl.edu