Arch cultural companion: Testament to tomorrow
Let me repeat my prejudices:
I think Sen. John Danforth’s and the Danforth Foundation’s big idea of developing a brilliant cultural institution as a companion to the Gateway Arch — housed in a structure and situated at a place on the Arch grounds to be decided through an international design competition — is thrilling.
I also think this: Altering the Arch grounds will be a hard sell to the National Park Service.
Parks and the people who run them, after all, are about conservation, and that’s as it should be.
But if ever there were a project that should enable parks people to move outside their comfort zone, this would be it:
Danforth would be a first class sponsor. What’s more, the park surrounding the Arch is not hallowed ground, not in the sense of a site with specific archaeological or historic significance such that disturbing the landscape would be sacrilege — such as with Mesa Verde or Gettysburg.
Rather, the Arch grounds is a gathering place that surrounds a symbol (a symbol that happens to be one of the great works of Western architecture and engineering).
What kind of cultural institution could be sufficiently sublime and noble to complement and further uplift that symbol?
The idea most widely circulated is a museum devoted to American migration — a kind of inland Ellis Island. Which is interesting, substantial, sound, and sensible — an idea that fits literally within park’s Westward Expansion theme and should be seen as safe by conservative park planners.
The problem is, it might be too safe. Park planners could say, fine, but there’s no special reason it needs to sit on the Arch grounds. Build it downtown.
Maybe the best chance to achieve an energizing and liberating Arch 2.0 is to not be so literal.
Let’s go deep, like Eero Saarinen went deep.
Let’s consider a use that so closely and directly draws its inspiration from the Arch that it demands to be an integrated part of the larger National Park enterprise.
Here’s what occurs to me:
The Gateway Arch rose from stirrings of history. But it is a quintessentially forward- looking symbol.
As generations of St. Louis school children know (thanks to Charles Guggenheim’s film documentary) the Arch is a “monument to the dream.” It is a symbol that celebrates a staging ground and point of embarkation of one of the great movements in human history, of peoples from throughout the world provisioning and charting their course before heading across a vast unsettled continent at great personal risk to start new lives.
How could a cultural companion to the Gateway Arch build on that forward-looking epoch, and possibly itself become a great staging ground and point of embarkation?
Before moving back to St. Louis this summer, I had spent six years in Dayton, Ohio. There I heard many people speak of a memorable event in Dayton’s community life. It had occurred a few years before I arrived, but to me was moving in the retelling.
Dayton is an Air Force town, home to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. In November 1995, Wright Pat was the site of the conference that led to the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, also known as the Dayton Accords.
The local community did not have a detailed understanding of the political issues, but it knew the importance of the negotiations and was captivated as Richard Holbrooke and Wesley Clark helped broker a deal between Serbian President Slobodan Milošević and political leaders of Croatia and Bosnia.
The participants convened at the base behind closed doors. But they took some meals around town, and some were said to be moved by the local outpouring of good will.
Here’s what Holbrooke told the Dayton Daily News on the first anniversary of the accords:
“We came here, now famously, almost by accident, but we could not have found a better place,” said the 55-year-old Holbrooke, who served as a diplomat in Vietnam, wrote a volume of the Pentagon Papers, worked on the opening of diplomatic relations with China and served as ambassador to Germany in a career that began in 1962.
“We came here and found something extraordinary, from the signs in the windows to the lighted candles along the roadways,” Holbrooke told the audience at the banquet, sponsored by the Dayton Council on World Affairs.
The UD campus ministry recreated some of that atmosphere with a vigil of 45 candles outside Kennedy Union as the diplomats and civic leaders arrived for the dinner.
“The spirit of Dayton really did matter,” he said…
Asked afterward if the war will resume, Holbrook showed some of the brusk frankness for which he is known.
“The war ended here in Dayton, it will not resume next year,” he said.
Those three weeks became a part of the community’s identity.
So as we survey in our minds the Arch grounds and consider what else might belong there, perhaps rather than Smithsonian, Williamsburg or Ellis Island, maybe we could think Camp David, Dumbarton Oaks or Bretton Woods — only better.
This cultural companion to the Gateway Arch could be a place where serious people seek to meet and make ambitious advancements at what in a sense would be a gateway toward peace and other forms of social progress — all in the shadow of Saarinen’s masterpiece.
A permanent endowment could help pay costs of travel and lodging of participants. The region’s great universities could combine with counterparts throughout the world to help organize such conferences.
The structure designed as part of the international competition would include not just a meeting forum but a permanent place to curate public exhibits — exhibits that explain the forthcoming conference or the one just past, with a hall devoted to presenting evidence of the best and most promising things to have transpired at this cultural gateway. The conference space would be surrounded by theater seating, enabling ordinary people to become witnesses to progress, if not history.
Fully realized there would be nothing else quite like it. Just as there is nothing else quite like the Gateway Arch. It could be the kind of place that people would take that extra day to see and experience — a place from which local and world citizens walk the same path to the Arch, sensing the inspiration it offers to advance human possibilities.
(Pictured: Eero Saarinen, Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Drawn by J. Henderson Barr. Conceptual scheme for Jefferson National Expansion Memorial 1947 colored pencil on tracing paper. )
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Eddie Roth writes about education and social justice. He recently joined the Post-Dispatch editorial page after six years as an editorial writer with the Dayton Daily News. But he is not new to St. Louis. Eddie grew up in Webster Groves and south St. Louis County. He's a lawyer who for many years practiced with a downtown firm. He and his wife, Jeanne, and their three daughters, Emily, Julia and Alice, lived in the Shaw Neighborhood, where he was active in neighborhood affairs, and now have made it their home again. He also served a term on the St. Louis Police Board. When it comes to community organizing, he endorses Quentin Crisp's advice: Rather than keeping up with the Joneses, it's better to pull them down to your level. 
There already an effort to build an architectural museum here (see http://www.buildingmuseum.org). The project is cool and distinctly local. And it invokes the sprectre of the old riverfront district that the Arch replaced. Rather than re-invent the wheel — which is rather all too common in museum/cultural instituation planning — why not take an underground project and propell it to the world’s eyes as testament to the great architecture of the region?