To gain the best view of the Gateway Arch, I drive to the other side of the river, crossing the Mississippi to East St. Louis. This is not a trip St. Louisans usually take.
East St. Louis is one of the most abused towns in America. Most of its old brick structures are burned out and abandoned. The streets are violent. Even in the light of day, the east bank of the river is sullen and forbidding. When I find my way to the dirt road that crosses the levee, the sight of a police car on patrol gives me comfort.
Yet the battered cars parked along the roadside belong to men taking their ease and fishing on a warm, sunny day—a proper activity to see along the Mississippi, be it the actual or the imagined river.
The Mississippi of the imagination is the river of Huck and Jim, of Lewis and Clark, Ol’ Man River that divides America into east and west, that winds from the north of Protestant strictures to the south of laissez-faire appetites. America’s river, the Mississippi winds through a country once divided between the dream of freedom and the crushing bonds of chattel slavery. It is a marker, a crossing point. Encompassing our contradictory sensibilities, timeless and indiscriminate, the Mississippi carries, cleanses, floods. It rolls along.
The actual river, however, as it passes by St. Louis, is a diminished thing. The novelist Jonathan Franzen, who grew up in the tree-shaded suburb of Webster Groves, chooses the adjective “diarrheic” when describing his hometown river.
Because the upper Mississippi is dammed and dredged along its length, it is a purely utilitarian river when it reaches St. Louis—its sole purpose, it seems, to keep the barge traffic moving north and south. St. Louis is the second-largest inland port in the country. Here, the bottom-line claims of commerce transform the river into an interstate throughway.
Not an advantageous setting, it would seem, for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, the official name for the site from which America’s most ambitious monument rises. Yet the Gateway Arch—as viewed from a mud beach in Illinois, among lean shrubs and refuse cast up along the shore—outshines the workaday river and the lackluster architecture behind it.
Even as the Arch is bound to earth, it soars.
It resists gravity. Anchored by tons of concrete foundation, it nonetheless conveys lightness.
It guides the eye skyward.
The technological achievement of its time—eclipsed only by the space program—it is, paradoxically, an ancient form.
Thomas Jefferson, our only architect president, would have recognized the symbolism. The arch—a form Jefferson himself replicated at Monticello and the University of Virginia—represents the formal purity inherent in the classical mind.
Jefferson revered nature, the sublime order and symmetry and power found there. In his home state he admired a natural sandstone bridge honed by time and wind and water. He undoubtedly would have recognized its likeness in the manmade structure by the banks of the Mississippi, a single line of glistening steel, extracted from nature, bridging earth and sky.
It is of the city, yet separate: an ideal to be realized.
It was the first modernist work to succeed as a public monument. Since its completion in 1965, only Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (“the Wall”) has been so revered as a modernist work of high art that also fulfills the complex demands of public art.
Like Lin’s design, Saarinen’s Arch is minimalist: simple, compelling and evocative. Built in a century characterized by fragmentation and dissonance, both works stand out for being fully resolved, complete, whole. They are tight, devoid of excess yet uncompromising in scale.
The Gateway Arch does not possess the emotional power of the Wall. The Wall mourns loss. It carries the dramatic weight of tragedy, and its journey is a descent into a grave. The Arch ascends. Exuberant, unbound, it celebrates progress.
If the Arch is a monument to anything, it is a monument to the boldness of America—its ambition, its drive to attain the unattainable, its relentless pursuit of happiness.
Yet seen from the grimy beach across the river, as it stands in the foreground of a depressed St. Louis, the Arch’s magnifi-cence begs the question: How could such abeautiful object not inspire more inthe city that it inhabits?
In his earliest conception of a memorial, the first image that came to Eero Saarinen’s mind was that of a forest. To memorialize the men and women who led America westward, the Finnish-born Saarinen wanted to replicate the West they first perceived—the uncultivated land.
But Saarinen sought more than a reconstructed paradise. Just as pioneers had remade the land into a cultured space, Saarinen wanted to make a cultured form rise from the forest. He contemplated the national monuments to Presidents Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson and their distinct geometric shapes: a vertical line, a cube and a globe. He considered building an arch across the river, but there were already several bridges, including the revered Eads Bridge. Also, crossing the river would require the arch to be more of a semicircle, a form he found unsatisfying. A pointed arch seemed to Saarinen “too ecclesiastical.” Finally he found the shape he preferred and, with it, the metaphor “Gateway to the West.”
The Arch was the central structure in Saarinen’s first renderings for the site, but he intended the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial to be much more than a monumental sculpture. He had learned from his father, Eliel Saarinen, to consider “the next-largest thing.” Design was never about the single object or building but about the relationships between the new structure and everything around it. Consider “the next-larger context,” Eliel preached to his son, “a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”
In designing the Gateway Arch, Eero Saarinen considered the next largest thing: the city itself. The Arch would reinvigorate the city. Within the forest from which the sculpture rose, he drew trails leading to open-air theaters and museums. He planned a riverside restaurant. He considered an entryway into the monument through the Rock House—Manuel Lisa’s fur-trade warehouse, the oldest structure in St. Louis—“thus tying together the past and the present.”
He intended the memorial to draw the city back to the river on whose bank it began.
Beyond the memorial grounds, he proposed a grand boulevard on what was then Third Street. A stroll along the Mississippi, he believed, could be as pleasurable as a walk beside the Seine. This American promenade would include an arcade, shops and river-view apartments. Special zoning ordinances would make the “buildings physically more harmonious” and maintain the integrity of the Arch itself. Saarinen even proposed a great greenspace stretching from the Arch to the western border of the city, 6 miles away.
The east side of the river was to be turned into greenspace “so that it, too, would become part of one great composition,” Saarinen wrote. Where a Cargill Ag silo now stands and the Casino Queen is moored along the muddy Illinois shore, he imagined forest, museums, a marina and boat basin, gardens, a nearby sports stadium.
In Saarinen’s plans, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial was to inspire St. Louis both commercially and spiritually. Once again, St. Louisans would gather at the river.
Lawyers, businessmen, professors and legislators met in 1934 to begin the machinations of creating a memorial. They thought that the project would take five years to complete. It would take more than 30. Saarinen would never glimpse the final resolution of his plans. He would die of a brain tumor in 1961, at the age of 50, before construction of the Arch had even begun.
St. Louis changed in many ways in response to the monument, but city planners did not take the direction Saarinen intended. They were more inspired by the wrecking ball than by an archway to the sky. “Urban renewal” was the direction the city would take—an enterprise entirely at odds with Saarinen’s vision.
Toward the end of his life, Saarinen had taken a keen interest in the urban-renewal projects that were rapidly transforming American cities—and he lamented what he saw. “We have these tremendous redevelopment projects, well financed, scientifically planned. They all look good on paper. Then you see them when they are up, and you wonder whether they are really better than what they replaced,” he said. “These are terribly torn things, and in many cases the architecture is very bad.”
Saarinen’s plans for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial were doomed to compromise. Allocations for federal funding would run into obstacles for decades. Such an ambitious gewgaw as a stainless-steel arch would be deemed a frivolous expenditure during World War II and the Korean conflict. The forested trails, the museums, even the Rock House would eventually be excised from Saarinen’s original proposal. The memorial grounds would be cut off from the city by an interstate highway. Skyscrapers would obscure Saarinen’s epic sightlines. Neighborhoods would be destroyed in the name of progress.
Where Saarinen proposed design meant to benefit and inspire a city, city planners chose to efficiently level urban “blight.” Seen in that context, the monument would become a hollow symbol: a foundation, not for unity but for division; a memorial, not to history but to forgetting.
The Arch would be built, a whole and magnificent composition, yet stand isolated from the city it was meant to inspire.
St. Louis, “the next largest thing,” would be terribly torn.
A 40-block riverfront district was cleared to make way for a monument—but to what? To Jefferson, to Lewis and Clark, to the Louisiana Purchase, to thousands of faceless and nameless pioneers, to Native American genocide, to manifest destiny? The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial’s commemorative purpose has never been as precise as the form constructed to symbolize it.
Even those involved with the memorial’s planning were dubious. Was not the memorial little more than a Depression-era job-creation project with a thin veneer of historical relevance? Would not the city benefit more if these old riverfront warehouses were rehabilitated as housing?
In 1939, the riverfront district was razed.
In the decades that followed, Mill Creek Valley, home to much of the city’s African-American population, was erased in the name of urban renewal. Civil rights leaders labeled the area “Hiroshima Flats.” Its residents moved to the Ville, placing economic strain on that formerly prosperous black ghetto, until the Ville, too, was “blighted.”
The new federal highway system broke up urban neighborhoods. Federal housing projects began to appear in the early 1950s, culminating in the colossus: Pruitt-Igoe.
Completed in 1955, Pruitt-Igoe consisted of 33 11-story buildings. Designed by the local office of Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum (now the largest architectural firm in the world), Pruitt-Igoe was the urban dream of the future. Gone were the ramshackle tenements, crooked streets and rat-infested lots. People lived aboveground in clean, modern, well-ordered spaces. Pruitt-Igoe emerged from the same modernist aesthetic as Saarinen’s catenary curve.
Yet Pruitt-Igoe lacked the resilience of high art. In a short time the dream of efficient low-cost housing for the poor turned into an urban nightmare that still plays in the imaginations of Americans. Without services such as groceries and pharmacies, without a neighborhood, without jobs nearby, the residents of Pruitt-Igoe were isolated and left as prey for criminals—as the poor so often are.
In 1965, thousands of St. Louisans watched on television as the stainless-steel keystone was wedged into place to bind the legs of the Gateway Arch. With that fusion, it became one solid, beautiful, inviolable object.
In 1975, a monument to disaster, Pruitt-Igoe was imploded as television viewers around the world watched by satellite.
St. Louis, which just a decade previous had been praised for its progressive vigor, had become a terribly torn thing.
Other cities have suffered as St. Louis has. The effects of federal and state highway programs, of federal housing programs, of urban renewal, of white flight—all have been well-documented in accounts of the decline of American cities.
Yet in the last 20 years of the 20th century, many cities found themselves in the midst of renaissances. Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, D.C.—all towns that had seen their economies shattered—resurrected themselves, eventually landing their names on lists of “most livable” cities.
Not so St. Louis.
Throughout the 20th century, St. Louis looked to artistic enterprise to inspire its citizens. Early reformers initiated the 1904 World’s Fair, the 1914 Pageant and Masque [a five-day theater epic staged at the base of Art Hill, see p. 184] and the Milles fountain, across from Union Station.
The Arch was built in the same spirit. Once again, public art was expected to draw St. Louisans out of their lethargy and propel the city toward greatness. Once again, St. Louis was seeking a symbol to which it could cling—at the expense of confronting real issues. Denying or erasing its most unsightly and demanding problems, the city preferred to concoct fabulous designs out of air, even—especially—as its infrastructure crumbled.
It takes a Midwesterner to understand and illuminate such disastrous yearnings. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes of “what foul dust floated in the wake” of Jay Gatsby’s dreams.
From the other side of the river, the Gateway Arch is an undeniably beautiful thing. It is a beauty that compels us. In recent years, lights have been projected onto the Arch (as Saarinen had proposed), the steps on the riverside have been broadened and there is talk of connecting the memorial to downtown with a costly canopy-like bridge over the busy thoroughfare. These ideas at least contain some hope for rediscovering Saarinen’s vision—and making that beauty function as a civic beacon.
But the beauty has come at an extraordinary cost. The Gateway Arch was an incomplete dream, and, rather than inspire us toward restoration and renewal, it inspired erasure and neglect. For 40 years, St. Louis has lived in the foul dust of its wake.
