Fairview Heights is where Metro East St. Louis goes shopping, a grid of retail parks and chain restaurants on the Illinois bluffs, and the Radisson Hotel Fairview Heights – St. Louis sits squarely in the middle of it on Fountains Parkway, near the St. Clair Square mall. Until recently a Four Points, the hotel was rebadged rather than rebuilt, and its real identity is the Fountains Conference Center attached to it, which supplies most of the weekday trade in the lobby.
The rooms, just over a hundred of them, are standard conference-hotel issue: clean, neutral, adequately quiet, with the slightly interchangeable feel that flag changes leave behind. There is a fitness room, free parking in quantities only a retail park can offer, and breakfast on site, with every chain restaurant known to the American interstate within a five-minute radius for everything else. As a piece of hotel-keeping it is unremarkable and perfectly serviceable, and midweek it is often strikingly cheap.
The arithmetic works if you have a car. I-64 puts the Gateway Arch and downtown St. Louis about twenty minutes away, and the MetroLink from the Fairview Heights station rolls into the city without the parking bill, a genuine advantage on Cardinals game days. Cahokia Mounds, the pre-Columbian city and UNESCO World Heritage Site that most St. Louis visitors never quite reach, is fifteen minutes north-west and better than almost anyone expects. Stay here for a conference, a concert run, or a budget-conscious family weekend pointed at the Arch, and spend the savings across the river.
