Gateway Arch National Park

As iconic as the Gateway Arch is, you just can’t appreciate the scale and audacity of it until you stand under it in person. On a family road-trip when I was kid, we passed through St. Louis but didn’t have time to stop...so when I found out I would be attending a work-conference here, and that my hotel would be across the street from this landmark, I couldn’t wait. Early-morning and late-afternoon runs took me under and around this 630-ft.(192m) tall structure, (taller than the Space Needle), and some colleagues and I took the 5-person-'pod’ elevator (not for the claustrophobic) to the top of what is technically a ‘catenary curve.’ The metal soars, effortlessly, above a vast lawn overlooking the Mississippi River. From the top, you can see 30 miles in any direction... From a frontier French settlement to a bustling city that hosted the 1904 World’s Fair and Olympics, St. Louis might no longer be the center of American migration, but history has left grand public spaces, and the downtown is reviving... Plan to visit at sunrise or sunset, when the stainless steel surfaces gleam warmly, almost blindingly... Observation deck hours: summer--8am-10pm; winter--9am-6pm

Beneath the St. Louis Arch is a wonderful underground museum, a key part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial run by the National Park Service. It is not well known even to people in St. Louis. Totally below ground beneath the Arch itself, it is as large as a football field. The Museum of Westward Expansion preserves some of the rarest artifacts from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which started from St. Louis over two centuries ago and began a century of western expansion. Yes, it is also the way to enter the vertical tram ride up the Arch, but I recommend you skip that ride and spend the time touring the museum. The museum has some fantastic exhibits and the lines for the Arch ride are long. Remember, if you go up in the Arch, you will be disappointed that you cannot any longer see the beautiful Arch (because you are in it)!

I’d passed through St. Louis on a couple of family road-trips when I was a kid, but we never had time to stop. This past spring, I was there for a work conference; fortunately there was time for morning runs along the Mississippi River...running with my iPhone in hand... The Gateway Arch is such an iconic landmark, but despite the visual familiarity, it is truly awe-inspiring to stand under its audacity: sheer mathematical simplicity on such a large scale--it’s taller than the Space Needle. The arc of steel seems to fall out of the sky, a frozen ray of reflective solidity.

This shot was taken looking straight down and then westward over St. Louis from the top of the Gateway Arch. (If you look at the bottom corners of the photo, you’ll see the two bases of this audacious structure, 640 ft/192m below.) The city is laid out on a grand scale, with a long corridor of monumentally lined parkland reaching into the city from the Mississippi River. In the middle of the skyscrapers, the Old Courthouse (dating to the 1850s) was the scene of a pivotal court case leading up to the Civil War: Dred Scott. Slavery and westward expansion—inescapably, important shapers of the U.S. I was in St. Louis for a conference; mornings and late afternoons I was able to go for runs beneath the Arch in the park along the Mississippi River. On the last day of the conference, some colleagues and I took one of the claustrophobic elevator-pods up to the surprisingly small observation deck in the apex, with windows angled so you can look straight down over the empty space below. (I only had my phone-camera with me; the above scene is stitched together from about eight or nine shots.)

The was amazing!!