The St. Louis Arch
My great niece and I ran to touch the arch while my son was parked illegally. Let me back up.
We were on our way to Branson, Missouri and stopped to visit my son and daughter in-law on the way. They live in St. Louis. My great niece had never been to the arch so we decided to drive to the river front and let her see it. Well, she wanted to touch it so I agreed to run up the zillion stairs with her and she was able to touch the arch. No one else in our group wanted to go so my son let us hop out of the car instead of searching for a place to park and then walk several blocks to the arch.
We were talking about the arch and how it came to be. I couldn’t remember all the details so I looked up the information and this is what I found.
From Wikipedia:
It was built as a monument to the westward expansion of the United States. At 630 feet (192 m), it is the tallest man-made monument in the United States, Missouri’s tallest accessible building, and the largest architectural structure designed as a weighted or flattened catenary arch.
In late 1933, civic leader Luther Ely Smith, returning to St. Louis from the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park in Vincennes, Indiana, beheld the crumbling St. Louis riverfront area and envisioned that building a memorial there would both revive the riverfront and stimulate the economy.
In December, the JNEMA discussed organizing an architectural competition to determine the design of the monument.
The competition comprised two stages—the first to narrow down the designers to five and the second to single out one architect and his design. The design intended to include:
“(a) an architectural memorial or memorials to Jefferson; dealing (b) with preservation of the site of Old St. Louis — landscaping, provision of an open-air campfire theater, reerection or reproduction of a few typical old buildings, provision of a Museum interpreting the Westward movement; (c) a living memorial to Jefferson’s ‘vision of greater opportunities for men of all races and creeds;’ (d) recreational facilities, both sides of the river; and (e) parking facilities, access, relocation of railroads, placement of an interstate highway.”
Saarinen the winner of the competition and awarded the checks—$40,000 to his team and $50,000 to Saarinen. The competition was the first major architectural design that Saarinen developed unaided by his father Eliel.
On May 25, the United States Territorial Expansion Memorial Commission endorsed the design. Later, in June, the NPS approved the proposal. Representative H. R. Gross, however, opposed the allocation of federal funds for the arch’s development.
The design drew varied responses. While an architectural critic from The New York Times designated the arch “a modern monument, fitting, beautiful and impressive,” some local residents likened it to a “stupendous hairpin and a stainless steel hitching post.” The most aggressive criticism emerged from Gilmore D. Clarke, who compared the proposal to an arch imagined by fascist Benito Mussolini, rendering the arch a fascist symbol. Wurster and the jury refuted the charges, arguing that “the arch fform was not inherently fascist but was indeed part of the entire history of architecture.” Saarinen considered the opposition absurd, asserting, “It’s just preposterous to think that a basic form, based on a completely natural figure, should have any ideological connection.”
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