In 1934, local business leaders promoted the idea of a memorial to Thomas Jefferson and the expansionary vision of his Louisiana Purchase. Today there’s little doubt about the gleaming monument’s visual appeal-there are three million visitors annually-but the promised “richer future” hasn’t exactly come to pass, and social critics put some of the blame for that failure on the arch itself. Eero went on to design Washington Dulles International Airport, the TWA terminal at JFK International Airport in New York and a celebrated line of high modern furniture, but died of a brain tumor at 51, fourteen years after he dreamed up the arch and four years before it was finished. Eliel uncorked the champagne-only to take out another bottle after receiving word from an apologetic official that, in fact, his son had beat him out. Completed 50 years ago this month, the Gateway Arch, the Midwest’s best-known monument, was hailed as linking “the rich heritage of yesterday with the richer future of tomorrow.”Įero Saarinen, a young, Finnish-born aesthete, won a 1947 competition for the design, but not before Eero’s father, Eliel (who designed Art Nouveau landmarks in Helsinki, including the famed central railway station), received a mistaken telegram including his name among the finalists. It’s the nation’s tallest monument, soaring 630 feet above the Mississippi River, 886 tons of stainless steel welded into a seamless curve, assembled with such precision that if either leg had veered off by just one-sixty-fourth of an inch the two couldn’t have been joined in the middle.

Gateway arch national park images