The Arch unbounded
Conceptual scheme for Jefferson National Expansion Memorial 1947 colored pencil on tracing paper. Cranbrook Archives.
The finish line is within sight for a process the National Park Service began nearly a year ago. The public has until midnight Monday to weigh in on a proposed new management plan for the most distinctive and widely admired St. Louis landmark, the Gateway Arch.
The options are exciting and the plan, once finalized, will start a new era for the Arch and the 91-acre Jefferson National Expansion Memorial of which it is the centerpiece.
There’s still time get involved, to have an impact. A highly readable document explaining the options can be found online. Comments can be sent directly to the planning team with the click of a button.
Four possible options are offered to update a Park Service management plan that has been in place for more than 40 years.
One is to leave things alone. The Arch, Old Courthouse and Arch grounds “would continue to function much the way” they do now.
Two present specific plans to improve public access to the Arch grounds and better connect it with the surrounding community. One, called the “portals” alternative, involves building pedestrian bridges over Memorial Drive and a “lid” or “deck” over the depressed lanes of Interstate 70 as well as improved entrances and access from other directions.
The other is called “Park into the City” — a literal expansion of the Arch grounds westward into downtown by closing and rerouting Memorial Drive between Poplar and Locust streets, with the possibility of “large pedestrian plazas” in place of the closed roadway.
Then there’s the option the Park Service planning team calls its “preferred alternative.” It would organize an international design competition similar to the 1947 contest that yielded the Eero Saarinen masterpiece.
The idea is to elicit brilliance from the world’s best and brightest. The Arch and its celebrated surroundings would be off limits. But contestants would be free to propose substantial changes to park’s programs and its appearance — including new structures and connections — as long as they don’t interfere with “the essential character-defining features of the National Historic Landmark.”
The Park Service called for public reaction. Here’s ours:
The preferred alternative is the best choice. It doesn’t preclude use of good ideas culled from the other options. It reaches out broadly for ideas on what’s next and best for this cherished international icon.
The Park Service deserves credit for deft steering of a complicated, high-stakes process. Cynics believed that it was wired. They speculated that the Park Service would rubber-stamp proposals backed by former Sen. John Danforth and the Danforth Foundation to build a museum on the Arch grounds.
That didn’t happen. Nor did Park Service officials stand pat. They acknowledged that public access to the park is pathetic and that previous efforts to fix the problem were as inert as a stuffed bison and probably would have remained so without Mr. Danforth’s leadership.
Mr. Danforth exhorted the National Park Service to “think big.” It has.
The “preferred alternative” can be improved. The design contest should welcome dramatic solutions for improving park access, ending the park’s isolation from the community — solutions that reach broadly outside the park’s boundaries.
A vibrant conversation is underway. A loosely formed grass-roots organization calling itself “City to River,” made up of local architects, planners, environmentalists and urbanists but open to all, is taking hold as a strong, imaginative voice. Join the chorus online. The deadline is midnight Monday.
91 ACRES, MY GLUTEOUS!
For those of you who might be misled by the p-d’s description of the Memorial as containing 91 acres, here’s a little eye-opener: THE ARCH GROUNDS—the park from which the Arch rises—CONSTITUTE ONLY A LITTLE MORE THAN 60 ACRES! The rest of the oft-touted 91 acres [itself fairly miniscule for a major urban park] are OFF the Arch grounds, including the Old Courthouse and its grounds. The Arch park is in fact only about 2/3 the size that’s most commonly mentioned in print [and the p-d ALWAYS says it's 91 acres, NEVER clarifying that the park itself is only about 2/3 that pitiful size]. So grow up and don’t let the hustlers pull the wool over your eyes.
Irv Eff might rant less if he read more — or at least read more carefully.
There are links in this editorial both to the NPS report and to the comment template.
The NPS released its “preferred alternative” in October and we wrote about it then. The various options have been the subject of at least two public hearings that I am aware of, with public comment solicited now for several months.
This editorial makes it easy for anyone not aware of the process to review the material and comment, or lets those who were aware of it but had put off commenting know that time is running out.
Mr. Eff’s comments demonstrate that grievance is a poor substitute for facts.
As usual, roth, danforth’s shill, and one of the pro-plunderers [and the most hypocritical of all the p-d shills on this issue, since he writes under the very banner which pledges opposition to the privileged classes and public plunderers---see top of page] is either deliberately misleading or just totally clueless. The “links” in the above editorial [if you can find them through the trick coloration of the text] are to a series of seven documents totaling 45.6 MB. The “highly readable” document[s] require one to have a connection on one’s head that rotates 90 degrees from the vertical, in order to read ["highly"] a number of portions of the text. And the p-d’s hollow disclaimer notwithstanding, the fix most definitely IS in. The entire nps document[s] is[are] propaganda for choices that the nps and its cronies have already made. They make that all too clear [the only clarity about them] by labeling it the “preferred” alternative. Preferred by whom? By, you guessed it, the power brokers—the public plunderers and privileged classes supported by roth and the p-d.
As for what roth means by a “template”, well, perhaps in his own feverish mind it means something, but it means nothing in the context of the editorial. In architecture, which is what this discussion is all about, or should be about, it is a drafting tool. Not relevent to the editorial above.
As for the “public hearings”, what a fraud, and roth—of course—touts them! They were held on successive nights, in slouis, and after only a week’s barely-publicized “notice”. The Arch and its park host over 2.5 million visitors every year, many—I’ll bet most—from outside the slouis area, and all having a demonstrated interest in the Arch and its park. I’d bet that most are American citizens too, although the Arch and park have a well-recognized international appeal. Yet the nps “announcement” of the two “public hearings” couldn’t have been more obscure, and the hearings themselves would have required interested parties to travel to slouis from all over the country to be heard, and on short “notice”. is this really the NATIONAL park service???!!! Or, more accurately, merely an arm of the entrenched local power elite in slouis.
What a fraud, and how typical of the entire handling of these issues by the nps, the p-d, roth and the privileged classes who have pushed their agenda relentlessly. The “public hearings” were merely a cover, so the shills like the p-d, the privileged plunderers and roth could claim “I told-you-so”, just as roth has done, and try to APPEAR openminded, when in fact this entire process is a done deal, and the opinions—the “rants” [as roth so typically and snidely likes to characterize them in order to delegitimize considered opposition to his railroading of the plunderers' coming park wreckage]will have absolutely no impact on what the power-brokers and plunderers do to the park. roth has shown nothing whatever in the way of “facts” to advance in support of his malificent agenda except to attack the opposition. And that, roth, is a fact.
So take your “template” and hold a “public hearing” on it, roth—you know where.
Why not a second arch, as we commemorate the second century of the expansion? This arch would reach not to the heavens, as did the first, but with its feet where Sarrinen’s is sited, let it reach horizontally east to above the levee. Beneath it a wall of glass would let the light from the east shine into an expanded museum of the west, even upon Danforth’s hated stuffed buffalo. But on top, within this arch would be a amphitheater whose stage is a band shell at the arch’s apogee. From there music for every taste, from symphonic to swing to scat, would wend its way through downtown’s canyons and westward to trace the pioneers steps forth from this gateway. What musician or musical group would not wish one chance to make this venue, this arch, come alive?
may I add Sousa and soul? I hope the arch will be as the people of st louis want it, not the plaything of a DC bureaucracy like the NPS.