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Published: March 12th 2012
The Arch
The icon of St. Louis, the Arch. I got this picture by standing next to the highway on the edge of the park. St. Louis is one of those cities that is indentified with one particular item.
This item dominates the skyline for miles around.
Nearly every business in town has it on their logo.
A local tourist magazine has a picture of a family looking up at it, with the quote “Now what?”
The item is so iconic that someone once produced a
coffee table book consisting of nothing but pictures of it.
Its official name is the “
Thomas Jefferson National Expansion Memorial” but everyone calls it what it looks like: the Arch.
(The title of this section comes from the Missouri Valley Conference’s annual
college basketball tournament; I hope the bad pun is obvious)
St. Louis Art Museum
I came to St. Louis to see the arch, of course, but also the other things this city has to offer.
The City Museum was described yesterday.
Today I went to the
St. Louis Art Museum.
It has the memorable acronym SLAM, which its promotion material uses to full effect.
On first seeing the museum, visitors can be forgiven for thinking they have arrived at an early 1900s train station.
The building consists of a central hall with
St. Louis Art Museum
I'd like one train ticket to Kansas City, please! a barrel vault ceiling flanked by two wings.
The correspondence is so striking that I barely resisted asking the information people for a ticket on the
Broadway Limited (a famous train that ran between New York City and Chicago).
There is a reason for the similarity.
The museum is the sole remaining building from the
1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.
It was designed by
Cass Gilbert in the then fashionable Beaux Arts style, which was also used for many train stations at the time.
The museum is yet another
encyclopedic regional museum.
As noted with many earlier museums (see
I Want to Rock Right Now), this means it shows a little bit of a lot of things, which leaves me wanting.
I prefer regional museums that collect a few areas in depth.
As it turns out, this museum does have one rare
collection not available elsewhere,
German Expressionism.
The St. Louis area has one of the higher concentrations of German descendents in the United States.
Some of them collected avent garde German Art in the 1920s, and eventually donated it to the museum.
This collection is especially important because work by these artists in Germany was declared
degenerate by the
Eads Bridge
The oldest Mississippi River crossing still in use, next to the Arch Nazis in the middle 1930s and destroyed.
The art can be very difficult to look at.
The movement used heavy lines, harsh colors, and distorted features to create an emotional effect.
The museum has work for most of the major artists involved, including
Emil Nolde,
Max Beckmann, and
Franz Marc, plus others only connoisseurs have ever heard of.
The museum has portraits that look like something from a nightmare, landscapes with mismatched colors chosen for spiritual effect, and a picture of a large blue horse.
The last was the calling card of one of the most important groups,
Der Blaue Reiter (literally, "Blue Rider").
Two of the works are heavily distorted and nearly abstract.
They were painted by
Wassily Kadinsky, who wrote the first theory of a purely abstract art in 1912, “
On the Spiritual in Art”.
Next to the German Expressionism gallery is one dedicated to
contemporary German art.
Like most contemporary art, the styles ranged over all over the place.
Some worked very well and others were so theoretical only art professionals can appreciate them.
Anslem Keifer creates large scale paintings that explore Germany’s past.
For the painting here, the canvas was covered
Arch transport capsules
Meet George Jetson. His Boy Elroy... in paint, scored with a knife, and then burned with hot lead.
The reference to the destruction of the Nazis should be obvious.
Gerald Richter created a series of abstract paintings, which he created by applying paint in multiple layers and then scraping parts away.
His stated intention was to concentrate on the process, and let the result appear without prior planning.
The series looks like distorted windows into a fantastic landscape.
Near the German gallery, be sure to see the West Grand Stairs.
Most museum staircases are either grand marble affairs or stuck in a corner somewhere.
This one was a masterpiece of decorative arts.
The designers used mirrored walls, strategically placed lights, and overlapping stairs to create the effect of a stairwell that goes to infinity.
I felt like I was in an Escher print (see
The Glory of the Game).
Eads Bridge
After the museum, I went to see one of St. Louis’s most important engineering landmarks, the
Eads Bridge.
Even though it is next to the Arch, very few people know the full significance.
In the 1850s, crossing the Mississippi had
Downtown St. Louis
Downtown St. Louis from the top of the arch. Union Station is the series of vertical white stripes on the upper left. to be done by barge.
The crossing was difficult, and people could drown.
Business leaders in St. Louis saw the railroads replacing riverboats, and feared their city would be left behind as a result.
They hired William Eads to build a road bridge across the Mississippi to make land travel easier.
He created a design of a truss over wide arches.
The wide arches reduced the number of piers in the river.
The quality of his engineering can be seen from the fact that his bridge is now the oldest Mississippi River crossing still in use.
This bridge has outlasted hundreds of later built bridges which have had to be replaced over the years.
The Arch
After the bridge, I finally went to the
Arch.
From the parking lot on the side, it appears as a tall thin metal spire.
The walk from the parking lot curves around it, so the spire slowly resolves into the famous arced profile.
The monument is huge.
I walked on the lawn directly under it and lay down to take in the full size.
Photos do not do it
Bottom from Top
Anyone want some vertigo with their view? This is what 630 feet almost straight down looks like. I took the photo by stretching to the top of the window and shooting down and slightly to the right. justice.
Seeing it in the late afternoon on a clear day gives an extra treat.
The sun reflects directly off the aluminum skin, covering parts of the arch with yellow fire.
Next to the two bases of the arch are the entrances to an underground museum.
The arch is considered a security site, so be prepared for a search on the way in.
The museum’s most famous feature is the
ride up the arch to the viewing area at the top.
Tickets sell quickly, so get them in
advance through the website.
With a ticket, I ended up on a set of stairs next to a series of doors.
When the doors opened, they revealed tiny
capsules with five seats each, which looked like something out of the old
Jetson’s cartoon.
They are a really tight fit.
The capsules are attached to something resembling a cross between an elevator and a Ferris wheel, which allow them to stay upright while rising up a curved arch.
(LATE UPDATE) I found out later that one of the trams
broke down two days earlier, trapping a hundred people for an hour. Yikes!
At
Arch Shadow
The shadow of the Arch on the Mississippi. Yes, the water level is rather high :) the top, the capsules opened on a very crowded set of stairs.
The capsules are the only way up or down, and people line up on the stairs for the ride back.
The stairs led to the viewing area at the very top of the arch.
The curve is very apparent in this room.
Slanted windows in the arch, which are visible from the bottom if one knows where to look, give a huge view of St. Louis and the surrounding area.
In the late afternoon on a clear day, the arch casts an obvious shadow on the Mississippi River below.
I was able to pick out obvious landmarks in the view, such as
Union Station, the
Edwards Dome, and the
Busch Stadium ballpark.
For visitors who can handle intense vertigo, the slanted windows provide two very special views.
Stretching to the top of the window provides a view 630 feet straight down to the base of the arch.
Tilt slightly to the left or the right, and the view is the arch curving from the bottom all the way to the viewing area.
It’s a long way down 😊
Arch Builders memorial
The memorial to those who built the Arch, with Eero Saarinen in the middle. The two cranes at the top show how the arch was built. The next part of the museum contains a memorial to the people who created it.
The idea for the memorial started in the 1930s as a way to revitalize the St. Louis waterfront.
The federal government acquired acres of derelict warehouses, tore them down, and announced an international competition to design the monument.
World War II then halted the project.
In the end, this was a good thing.
Eero Saarinen (see
Big Architecture in a Small City) submitted the daring design of the aluminum arch.
The long delay provided time for the engineering knowledge to catch up with the architecture.
The arch was built in the early 1960s.
It was welded in pieces and then assembled by a pair of cranes.
The museum has a model of how all this worked.
The last part of the museum has the official reason this place exists, the story of western expansion.
The
museum has an unusual arrangement, with everything in one large room.
The outside wall is the
story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
After Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana territory from France in 1803, he asked army
Covered wagon
The mainstay of western settlers officers
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the new area.
Specifically, they were to follow the Missouri River to its source, cross the Rocky Mountains, and follow the Columbia to the sea.
The trip as a whole was much more difficult than anyone anticipated, but with the aid of Sacagawea, the daughter of a French fur trapper and a Lakota squaw, they succeeded.
The display contains large scale photographs of the places they visited along the way, illustrated with excerpts from their trip journals.
One thing few people realize is that the expedition was actually a rather large force with lots of support personnel, not just three people scouting the way.
The rest of the exhibit divides into different areas representing the different groups of people that headed west, such as
miners, cowboys, and soldiers.
Much of the displays have quotes from diaries and journals.
(“When I boarded the train, I asked the conductor for a one way trip to hell. He sold me a ticket to Dodge City, Kansas – old cowboy joke").
A number have dioramas illustrating how different groups lived in the wilderness.
Indian tribes get their due with a
Lewis and Clark
Modern photo of a place the Lewis and Clark expedition stopped, next to an excerpt from their account. large display of chiefs, and an even larger display of broken treaties.
One thing I hadn’t seen before is the “peace medals”.
At the conclusion of every treaty, the parties exchanged gifts.
Both the English and Americans used medals of the King or President as the gift.
The museum has many of them on display.
Overall, I found the museum rather shallow.
It describes a little bit about a lot of things, which always leaves me wanting more.
Ted Drew's Frozen Custard
I had dinner tonight at a restaurant called
Bailey's Chocolate Bar.
As the name should imply, they serve chocolate everything, including chocolate beer.
Their home made truffles were a tiny slice of heaven.
I needed to pace myself, though, to save room for the real desert.
I had it at St. Louis’s most famous Route 66 landmark,
Ted Drew’s.
They serve frozen custard.
Really thick frozen custard called a concrete.
The custard is so thick customers can turn the bowl upside down and the custard doesn’t move.
The servers demonstrated this before handing it over.
The custard is really good.
Ted Drew's
A Ted Drew's server demonstrates the famous concrete: an upsidedown cup of custard! I stayed the night at a bed and breakfast called
Napoleon’s Retreat.
Most lodging in the area is bland business motels, and I wanted something more distinctive.
They are located in a neighborhood of old Victorian brownstones called Lafayette Square.
The rates are surprisingly affordable.
What makes them even more affordable is that bed and breakfasts are exempt from the area’s notorious 7.25%!l(MISSING)odging surcharge, put in fifteen years ago to finance the
stadium the city used to
lure the NFL’s Rams from Los Angeles.
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