Louis’s place in history as the “Gateway to the West.” Louis to work on ridding the riverfront of old buildings and railroad yard debris and establishing an open-air park that would cement St. He diligently gathered a group of prominent civic-minded citizens in St. This would prove a sticking point that would embattle the JNEMA and Smith for years as they worked through many iterations of legislative bills in Congress.īut Luther Ely Smith was determined. The President of the United States has the authority and power through the Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish national monuments, but Congress is the authority on national memorials. The next hurdle would be the federal approval process for national monuments and memorials. The first issue was the site itself it was in grave disrepair and acquiring it would require legal assistance to ensure the completion of the future Arch. Getting the process started was a multidecade battle for those who were passionate about the project. (Records of the National Park Service, RG 79) Roosevelt's programs to pull the nation out of the Depression, was approved in December 1941.
The use of employees of the Works Progress Administration, one of President Franklin D. Louisans, known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Association (JNEMA) and led by Luther Ely Smith, an attorney who had adopted St. Yet in reality, the project began in 1933 with a group of civic-minded St. Roosevelt gave the Department of the Interior power to take land by eminent domain. The formal beginnings of establishing the Arch, its grounds, and museum date to 1935, when President Franklin D. The shifting of priorities during World War II also contributed to the long timeline. Those years were taken up with selecting a site, cleaning up the riverfront, removing buildings and utility lines, securing local approvals, adjudicating lawsuits, raising funds from government and private sources, and winning presidential and congressional approval. Yet as natural as it seems, it still took more than three decades from the time it was first proposed until its public opening in June of 1967.
Today, more than a million visitors ride to the top of the Arch each year since its opening in 1967, more than 25 million visitors have taken the tram up to the 630-foot-high top.Ī monument to the nation’s history of expansion and exploration, and its link to where two of the nation’s largest rivers merge, would seem natural. Its location was the jumping-off point at the opening of the 19th century for exploration of the nation’s newly acquired Louisiana Purchase and further westward expansion of the North American continent-what would come to be known as the country’s “manifest destiny” to occupy all the land between the oceans. Louis, Missouri, and the official centerpiece of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, “Gateway to the West,” administered by the National Park Service. This is the world’s tallest arch, the widely recognized symbol-“The Arch”-of St. It rises gracefully toward the sky, then elegantly curves back toward Earth as the combined waters of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers swiftly flow by at its base-a symbol of the accomplishments and dreams that drive the American experience.
A nighttime view of the Gateway Arch looking across the Mississippi River of the St.
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