Missouri's wedding venue landscape is anchored at its two ends by cities with very different personalities. Kansas City — on the western edge — has a barbecue culture, jazz heritage, and an arts infrastructure that has produced one of the Midwest's more interesting venue clusters in the Crossroads Arts District and the River Market neighborhood. The renovated Union Station, the Kemper Museum adjacency, and the Country Club Plaza's Spanish Baroque architecture all contribute to a Kansas City wedding venue portrait that reads unlike Chicago or Minneapolis.
St. Louis occupies the eastern gateway position, with Forest Park's Grand Basin and the Art Museum, the Missouri Botanical Garden's Japanese and Victorian display gardens, Laumeier Sculpture Park, and the Anheuser-Busch historic brewery campus providing an extraordinarily dense concentration of cultural venue options. The Gateway Arch and the riverfront give St. Louis a geographic emblem recognized globally.
Between the two cities, Missouri offers the Ozarks — Lake of the Ozarks resort venues, the wineries and bed-and-breakfast inn culture of the Missouri River valley wine corridor between Hermann and Augusta, and the arts community of Columbia.