While AALL celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2006 St. Louis’s famed Gateway Arch (aka The Arch) celebrates its 41st anniversary. The 630 foot tall monument had its beginnings in 1933 when lawyer Luther Elm Smith came up with the idea for a memorial in St. Louis as a way to beautify the city’s run-down waterfront - the first glimpse many visitors got of St. Louis. The memorial would mark Jefferson’s role in the nation’s westward expansion and the 19th century migration of hundreds of thousands of people to the West, at a time when St. Louis was the last major city before the frontier. Smith began raising $225,000 for a national design competition and even went back to one large donor, who pointed out that he had already contributed!
While work was done to secure and clear 90 acres, the idea for a memorial was not revitalized until two years after World War II. In 1947-48 the design competition had 172 submissions - including ones from Eliel Saarinen as well as his 38 year old son Eero. The winner in the competition was architect Eero Saarinen whose idea of a giant stainless steel arch in the shape of an inverted catenary curve is a complex engineering feat. He constructed his first model of the arch out of pipe cleaners. In 1963, construction began on The Arch and was completed in 1965. Unfortunately, Eero Saarinen died in 1961.
The Gateway Arch, one of the newest monuments in the National Park system - and its tallest - is 75 feet taller than the Washington Monument and more than twice as tall as the Statue of Liberty. The park contains a Museum, two movie theatres, and exhibits underneath the Arch, and a 40-passenger tram system in each leg of the Arch which delivers visitors to the top for stunning views of the city. The Arch and the nearby Old Courthouse make up the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.