The Gateway Arch National Park Stamp

Where Gateway Arch is

Gateway Arch, for people who count parks

The memorial is older than the Arch by thirty years. Franklin Roosevelt created the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in 1935 to commemorate the Louisiana Purchase and the westward expansion that ran through St. Louis, and some forty blocks of the old riverfront were leveled to make room for it. What would fill the space was decided by a design competition in 1947–48, which produced one of architecture's better telegrams. Both Eliel Saarinen and his son Eero entered. Officials mistakenly notified the father, and the family had already toasted him with champagne when the correction arrived: the winner was Eero, then in his thirties, with a plan for an enormous steel arch.

The curve is a weighted catenary, the shape a hanging chain makes, inverted, with the proportions adjusted so the legs carry their loads straight down. It is 630 feet tall and exactly 630 feet between the legs. Construction ran from 1963 to October 28, 1965, with crews building each leg out over empty space and creeper cranes climbing the sides. The actuarial tables used in planning assumed thirteen workers would die. Zero did. On the final day, sun expanded the south leg enough that fire hoses were turned on the steel to cool it before the last section could be forced into the gap. The tram that carries visitors up through the hollow legs was designed by Dick Bowser, a self-taught elevator man who was given two weeks to figure out how to move people through a curve.

The Old Courthouse is the moral weight of the park. Dred and Harriet Scott filed suit for their freedom there in 1846, beginning the case that ended in the Supreme Court's worst decision and helped push the country to civil war. In the 1870s Virginia Minor's fight to register to vote passed through the same building on its way to the Supreme Court. A green-domed courthouse framed between the Arch's legs is the oldest thing in the park and the reason the word "memorial" was never just about geography.

It became a national park on February 22, 2018, by act of Congress, and the arguments started immediately: it is tiny, it is urban, and it commemorates rather than conserves. All true. It is also the one park on the list where the protected resource is an idea: expansion, and what it cost. That makes it a different kind of visit, not a lesser one.

Official Gateway Arch park site (nps.gov)

What lives at the Arch

The Mississippi is the habitat here. The park fronts the largest river system in North America, and the corridor over it is part of the Mississippi Flyway, the route a huge share of the continent's waterfowl and songbirds follow between breeding grounds and the Gulf. In migration season the traffic over the Arch (geese, ducks, gulls, swallows working the river air) outnumbers anything on the ground.

Under the surface, the river still carries old fish. The big muddy channels of the Mississippi and Missouri are home to species that predate the dinosaurs' extinction by a wide margin: paddlefish, and the pallid sturgeon, an armored bottom-feeder that has been federally endangered since 1990 because dams and channel engineering rewired the rivers it evolved in. Standing on the levee, you are looking at habitat, not scenery.

The grounds themselves are a designed landscape, laid out by the landscape architect Dan Kiley to Saarinen's plan: curving allées of trees that echo the Arch's geometry, ponds, and open lawn where a rail yard and warehouses once stood. It is nature with the intent showing, which, in a park about what people did to a continent, is honest.

The Gateway Arch designs

Arch with Mississippi

The classic view: 630 feet of stainless steel on the west bank with the river running past, the surface of the monument changing with every hour of light. It is the tallest arch in the world and the tallest man-made monument in the country, and it reads differently from every angle, which is why most people who visit fill a camera roll with one object.

Arch Under Construction 1965

The two legs rising over the riverfront with creeper cranes clinging to them, before the gap closed on October 28, 1965. Planners had budgeted thirteen lives for the job and lost none, and on topping-out day they hosed the sun-expanded steel with water to fit the final piece. A stamp for people who like the story more than the postcard.

Old Courthouse

The green cast-iron dome framed between the Arch's legs. Dred and Harriet Scott sued for their freedom here in 1846, and Virginia Minor's voting-rights case passed through in the 1870s. It is the oldest structure in the park and its conscience, which is a reasonable thing to want on a stamp.

How to record your Gateway Arch visit

Gateway Arch, asked and answered