The Old Courthouse is one of those St. Louis buildings that can make tourists feel patriotic right up until they learn what happened on the steps.

Before it became the place people associate with Dred and Harriet Scott’s freedom suit, it was also a site where enslaved people were sold under court order. Probate law, debt, estate settlement, bankruptcy — bureaucracy supplied the paperwork, and the courthouse supplied the stage. Human beings were appraised, advertised, displayed, and sold in the middle of downtown. St. Louis managed to make atrocity look administrative, which may be the bleakest talent a city can develop.

The National Park Service notes that the final slave auction held at the Old Courthouse took place on New Year’s Day in 1861. Seven enslaved people were brought there to be sold. According to the historical record preserved by the city, members of the crowd refused to let the bidding rise. It is not a story neat enough to count as redemption, but it is one of those moments where public shame flickers into public resistance.

That tension is the courthouse in miniature. The building is tied to legal challenges against slavery and to slavery itself. It was a place where freedom suits were argued and where people were treated as property. Both things are true. St. Louis prefers symbolic architecture, and here the symbolism is cruelly efficient: a dome above a contradiction.

Now that the courthouse has reopened, visitors can walk into restored spaces and carefully interpreted exhibits. Good. They should. But the building does not become more noble because we renovated it. It becomes more honest only if we remember that the same steps led upward into law and downward into the auction trade.

That is harder to package. It is also the point.