The Gateway Arch – St. Louis, Missouri.

You cannot visit St. Louis, Missouri without a visit to the Gateway Arch.

This is what we did on the 12th August, 2018 during the week in reporting on the PGA Championship at Bellerive and won by American Brooks Koepka.

The Gateway Arch is the world’s tallest arch standing at 630-foot (192 m) high along the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis and honours the early 19th-century explorations of Lewis and Clark and America’s westward expansion in general.

The mighty Mississippi River with Missouri on this side of the river and the State of Illinois on the opposite side.  (Photo – www.golfbytourmiss.com)

The Gateway Arch is the world’s tallest arch standing at 630-foot (192 m) high along the banks of the Mississippi River in St. Louis (Photo – www.golfbytourmiss.com)

The Gateway Arch is a 630-foot (192 m) monument in St. Louis, Missouri

Clad in stainless steel and built in the form of a weighted catenary arch and is also the tallest man-made monument in the Western Hemisphere, and also easily Missouri’s tallest accessible building.

Built as a monument to the westward expansion of the United States, and officially dedicated to “the American people,” the Arch, commonly referred to as “The Gateway to the West” is the centerpiece of Gateway Arch National Park and has become an internationally recognized symbol of St. Louis, as well as a popular tourist destination.

The site in 1942 of the then proposed Gateway Arch with the Mississippi River.

Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen who designed the Gateway Arch but very sadly never got to see the completed marvel.

 

The Gateway Arch in all its glory.From 1947-1948, the city held a nationwide competition to design the new monument.

Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen, who received his education in the US, won with his stainless steel arch.

On June 23, 1959, St. Louis celebrated by breaking ground, and excavations continued until construction began in February of 1963. Saarinen, who was working at the time to perfect his design, unfortunately, did not live to see the construction of the arch; he died of a brain tumour in 1961.

The stainless steel archway (Photo – www.golfbytourmiss.com)

The Arch was completed on October 28, 1965 at an overall cost of $13 million (equivalent to $82.1 million in 2018). The monument opened to the public on June 10, 1967.

In it’s first year 619,763 tourists visited the top of the arch.

On January 15, 1969, a visitor from Nashville, Tennessee, became the one-millionth person to reach the observation area; the ten-millionth person ascended to the top on August 24, 1979.

 

In 1974, the arch was ranked fourth on a list of “most-visited man-made attraction[s]”. The Gateway Arch is one of the most visited tourist attractions in the world with over four million visitors annually, of which around one million travel to the top.

The arch was listed as a National Historic Landmark on June 2, 1987, and is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

 



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