Photograph by Frank Di Piazza
Tucked away in a quiet South St. Louis neighborhood, at the corner of Brannon and Delor, a redbrick storefront photography studio blends in seamlessly with the bungalows that surround it. On the outside hangs the company logo, part of which is so familiar in this region that it has become cliché: an A in the shape of an arch, that Arch you’ve seen at least a hundred times on body shops, strip malls and sandwich shops.
Inside, a father and son, Eldon and Brad Arteaga, wait for a family to show up for a portrait. The Arteagas always take portraits—even when they’re shooting construction sites or sports. Over three generations, this family has seen, through the camera’s lens, more than its share of St. Louis history: The last section of the Arch being lowered into place. The last streetcar to leave downtown. The last train to leave Union Station. The last pitch in Busch Stadium—the first pitch in the new stadium. Whenever history was made, an Arteaga just happened to be there.
And it all began with a photograph of a train chugging along the riverfront, a picture taken by a 17-year-old immigrant who figured out that capturing an image on film meant you could stop time in its tracks.
I’m That Idiot
Robert Arteaga immigrated from Spain to St. Louis as a teenager. His parents were looking for a better life in America, and they found it in the city’s Spanish neighborhood, near Carondelet. On Bob’s 17th birthday, his dad gave him a camera. At the time, he was working in a stove factory—and spending every free minute dreaming of photography. One day he climbed into an upper window of the factory with his new camera and waited for a train to come chugging along the elevated riverfront tracks. He went home and developed the picture himself in a makeshift darkroom, and as he saw the twin-engine steam locomotive materialize, his life changed.
It was the first picture he’d ever taken, he told his friend R. Ted Pepple, that you could feel as well as see.
Eighty years later, that train photograph hangs in the lobby of the studio on Delor. Bob’s son Eldon says it captured the essence of all the work that followed. “That was my dad’s big thing about photography,” he says. “Once you freeze something, your body goes forward, but that image stays. You look at that train and say, ‘How could that have ever been, because there are no tracks there anymore?’—but yet it’s there.”
The urge to freeze time drove Bob Arteaga’s life. At 24, after realizing that he wasn’t going to make a living building stoves, he apprenticed—for no pay—with local photographer Rudolph Mussler. Arteaga’s early assignments included photographing a local beer baron toasting the repeal of Prohibition and a young barnstorming pilot by the name of Charles Lindbergh.
But he was more than just a photographer. Bob Arteaga had a knack for being in the right place at the right time, and he had a sense of history like no one else’s, keeping a written diary and a reel-to-reel recording of each shoot.
Eventually he went to work with George Dorrill, who had a contract to shoot baseball games at Sportsman’s Park.
It was a friendship with St. Louis Browns player Eldon Auker that gave Arteaga’s second son his name. Eldon, now 71, recalls an encounter he had with another ballplayer: “One day—I was maybe 5—my dad asked me to go with him and put me in a dugout while he was working. So I’m sitting there, and this player sits down and says, ‘You like baseball, son?’ I said, ‘No, I think it stinks. I’d rather be home riding my bicycle.’ So the guy finds my dad out in the field and says, ‘Bob, this kid doesn’t like baseball! He’s nuts!’ You know who it was? Lou Gehrig.”
In 1946 Bob Arteaga went out on his own and opened a studio at 19 S. Third, directly across the street from the Old Cathedral. For his company logo, he adopted Eero Saarinen’s design for the riverfront memorial—15 years before the Arch was completed. As Eldon tells it, Harry Truman walked by the studio one day and saw the new company sign: “Truman walks over to my dad and says, ‘Hey, what idiot put that sign up there? It’s not even OK’d yet!’ And my dad says, ‘I’m that idiot.’”
Later in life, Arteaga was instrumental in saving St. Joseph’s Church on Biddle Street when the St. Louis Archdiocese was going to tear it down. He also was one of the first to herald the architectural merits of the Old Post Office.
“He spent as much time trying to retain treasures as he would have spent photographing them,” says Pepple, who became his friend’s biographer when he wrote Dreams and Images: The Life and Works of St. Louis Photographer Robert F. Arteaga in 1982. “Nothing stopped him—he was willing to do battle with anyone. I think about Bob every time I look at the Arch, because he took special care over the course of four years to produce a library that no one else had.”
Gateway to Glory
It was the Gateway Arch that propelled the Arteaga family to prominence. In his book, Pepple calls Arteaga’s contract to photograph the Arch “either accidental, providential, or both.” The day the Arch grounds were dedicated, newspapers in town were on strike, and Arteaga was in the crowd, snapping pictures. A friend introduced him to executives from the MacDonald Construction Co., which already had the building contract. Arteaga reportedly landed his own contract that day.
Once he got the commission, he had to have the right camera. Arteaga got a local engineer, Gene Marschner, to build a special camera that would shoot from the widest possible angle so as to capture every technical detail. It was an innovation for its time; supposedly a Chicago firm had told Arteaga that a camera able to shoot 4- by 5-inch film in that way was impossible. But Marschner was able to build Arteaga’s vision, and the camera sits in the shop on
Delor today.
Once Arteaga had the camera he wanted, he needed film. Technology was then advancing toward color film, but he didn’t trust its stability.
“My dad insisted on shooting in black and white,” recalls Eldon, “because there was no way to project how long that color film would last. When the Arch was going up, everybody said, ‘Why don’t you do it in color?’ But they didn’t have color film perfect yet. We shot these color transparencies, and they looked good then, but they’re wiping out now.”
Although the contract called for only four pictures a month, the Arteagas—Bob and his sons Wayne and Eldon—took 12,000 pictures of the building of the Arch. “You think that’s a lot, but it really isn’t,” says Eldon. “They’re not all perfect—but my dad, he had it covered.”
On the last day, when the final section was going in, Bob rode in a helicopter, shooting from afar, and Eldon was on top of the Arch. That morning, crane operator Bill Quigley, who was to lift the final piece into place, “was shaking like a leaf,” Eldon recalls. “I said, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ He said, ‘All the pressure’s on me.’ And I said to him, ‘Not only that, you better take it slow, because I’m using three different kinds of film. I need to get all those shots taken.’”
He laughs, then turns reflective: “Last year, on the day they celebrated the Arch’s 40th anniversary, they invited me to be with the guys who constructed the thing. I looked at the crowd and thought of my dad, who told me when we were going through this project that he wasn’t doing this for me or my brother. He said he was doing this for future generations, so they could see how it was built. When I looked out over the crowd and saw that there were few people over 40, I thought, ‘You’re the group he was trying to contact’—and it made me feel like a million bucks.”
Get That Arch Man
After the Arch assignment was completed, the family’s reputation was secure. “People said, ‘Get that Arch man!’” Eldon says, chuckling. “I was able to do some different things, like shooting Six Flags as it was being built.”
One day he was called to the Teamsters Union office to take a picture of a cement truck and asked whether he ever took anything other than stills. “They gave me another assignment for the weekend, and it turned out to be Jimmy Hoffa.”
That led to assignments shooting celebrities who performed at St. Louis union events in the 1960s and ’70s, including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Roy Rogers and Lawrence Welk. “The Rat Pack came to town for a Teamsters show,” Eldon says, “and I met Johnny Carson, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. I was there for the whole day.” He laughs one of those laughs that imply there may be more to the story that he’ll never tell. “They were a lot of fun.”
Like his father, Eldon has a knack for being in the right place at the right time, plus a sense of history. He shot the last streetcar to leave St. Louis and was there in October 1978 when the last train left Union Station.
“So I went down there, and they were playing the death march. It was sad. As the last train was getting ready to leave, I went up to the front, put some coins on the tracks—I only had three in my pocket—and the train smashed them. I got them back and put the exact time it left, the date and
the track.”
He’d heard his father lecture for decades about the importance of dating every photograph; now he was going one better.
Seeing the last streetcar to leave was a happy coincidence: Eldon was driving around town, shooting symphony placards for the arrival of his uncle, noted maestro Alfonso D’Artega. He remembers being on Tucker Boulevard and seeing a streetcar from the Hodiamont line heading to the station for the last time: “I photographed four guys that were standing next to the trolley there. Never got their names or anything, just shot and left.”
About three years ago, Eldon was making one of his regular visits to a South Side White Castle. He brought in his picture of the last streetcar to show a fireman who was also a regular. “I said, ‘Do you remember this date?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s me standing there.’” Eldon laughs heartily. “What were the odds of that?”
It took Eldon a while to make his own name: “The first time you go on a job your father sent you on and he ain’t with you, the guy looks at you and says, ‘Are you as good as your dad?’ I say, ‘Well, no.’ He says, ‘Then what the hell are you doing here?’ So you learn to say, ‘Hell yes, I’m as good as my dad,’ and they say, ‘Well, how can you be? He’s been doing this for years!’ After a while, they accept you. It takes time. You learn on the street, not in the classroom.”
Now Eldon is the bridge between his father and his son. “You can look at a picture and say, ‘Well, my dad took this,’” he says. “It’s like he’s still with us. The influence he had on us was just unbelievable. When I see my son working on things like he did, it’s as if nothing ever changed.”
Ah, but it has: “Brad is in the position that he can do things better. He’s advanced even further than my dad now, with computers.”
A Future in Film
Brad Arteaga says he learned at the feet of both his father and grandfather. “I started following them around when I was 3,” he says. “Any big event, my grandfather was there. It’d give me something to talk about at school on Monday.”
Now 42, Brad makes a living doing mainly architectural and industrial photography, and he’s discovered a talent for aerial shots. A helicopter will land near his St. Louis Hills home—the Metropolitan Sewer District gave special permission for a landing area on an access road near the River Des Peres—so he can take off and get going, not that any aerial job takes him more than an hour or two.
“When you think about it, St. Louis is actually kind of small from an aerial perspective,” he says. “You can zip across the whole region in about 15 minutes.”
On the ground, he’s had a front-row seat for some notable St. Louis events, among them the hot August day in the early 1990s when then-President Bill Clinton came to
St. Louis for a rally and, in 2005, the last home game at the old Busch Stadium, when Brad had a bird’s-eye view of the game from the rooftop behind the plate.
He feels the pressure of carrying on the family’s reputation. “It’s kind of what it must be like for [Cardinals outfielder] Chris Duncan to play on the same team his dad coaches. What happens if you don’t live up to that legacy? You try to be your own person and break away, but you still rely on your reputation. I have a lot more respect for my grandfather now.”
Bearing the Arteaga name is an honor, Brad says. As adept as he is with Photoshop and website design, he respects the craft his grandfather and father taught him—and heeds their cautiousness.
“Photography has changed in the last six years more than any other time,” he says, “but every advance they make in digital photography, they make in film. Films are a lot better now than they were 20 years ago, but the demand for them is less and less. You hate to see that.”
Asked whether he takes digital pictures of his kids, Brad smiles: “I use film. I know it will last. White House photographers, the pope’s photographers, those guys still shoot everything in film so they can archive it.”
He points to the picture of Charles Lindbergh that his grandfather took. “I can go downstairs right now, find the negative and make a print just like it was shot yesterday. Who knows in seven years if you’ll be able to do that with a digital image? With film, you have it the best of both ways. Sure, you can always turn it into a digital image, if you like, but there’s nothing like a photograph in print.”
