St Louis – gateway city to the Missouri River

Thursday, 26 December 2024

My December 2024 USA road trip took me from Kansas City (western edge of Missouri) to St Louis (eastern edge). From a half million population city to a quarter of a million (and declining?), but US city centre versus metropolitan boundaries numbers are always confusing. And then there’s the pronunciation, I’d always said St Lou-ee, turns out the locals call it St Lew-is.

◄ St Louis Gateway arch, framed in buildings from Lacede’s Landing on the Missouri riverside

I’d misunderstood the city’s symbol as well, the 192 metre-high (630 feet) gateway arch. It’s an Eero Saarinen design and a year earlier I’d stayed in his JFK airport masterpiece in New York, the TWA Terminal, now the TWA Hotel. The terminal opened in 1962, but although he won the design competition with his Gateway Arch in 1947 it was not built until 1963-65 and not opened until 1967.

 

 

My misunderstanding was that I thought it was a solid construction – so did my travel companions Simon and Charlotte. We’d clearly not read our guidebooks and discovered that you could go up inside the arch. #

▲ All the way to the top, those horizontal slots are lookout windows. And yes, that is snow falling across my view.

▲ And here’s my view from the top of the arch, that’s the Old Courthouse Building front and centre.

▲ At ground level, below the arch, there’s a remarkably comprehensive and informative museum illustrating the history of Missouri and St Louis and the construction of the arch. Including this model of the curious tramway which runs up each arch to the summit and lookout. In each arch leg there are eight weird little gondolas or capsules, each carrying five passengers, linked like railway carriages, but travelling mainly vertically at first and then increasingly horizontally as they approach the top.

◄ Here are the doorways to gondolas 2 to 8 at the top.

▲ and here are the passengers boarding gondolas 2, 3, 4 and 5 at the bottom.

◄ We were staying at the rather grand – at least the lobby is – St Louis Union Station Hotel. The hotel lobby is the concourse from the old Union Station, restored to the glorious look of its early days, when train stations in the USA were often decidedly grand constructions. The Beatles video projected on the high ceiling of the lobby while you’re having sundowners is fun, but the rooms are much more mundane.

Trains no longer run to the station, if you arrive in St Louis by Amtrak – perhaps on the Missouri River Runner from Kansas City – you’ll come in to the St Louis Gateway Transportation Centre, a much more utilitarian train station. And it’s a half mile walk (a bit less if you know your way to the hotel’s rear entrance) along a very-far-from-inviting urban introduction to the city. Better to take a cab. Although if you do decide to walk just look for the big ferris wheel and head straight for it.

▲ Head of Eros Bendato by Igor Mitoraj

From the hotel we walked towards the riverside, passing through the idiosyncratic collection of sculptures in the City Garden then past the Opera House and the Old Court House. The Court House building is fronted by a statue of Dred and Harriett Scott. Dred and Harriett were slaves and over many years took their case all the way to the Supreme Court which in 1857 (in a 7 to 2 decision) ruled that they were never going to be American citizens, they may have been well dressed and they may have pursued there case through multiple courts, but at the end of the day they were simply slaves and were going to stay that way. The controversial decision was one of the multiple steps which eventually led to the Civil War.

Our winding route to the Gateway Arch also took us past the pioneering Eads Bridge. Working on the submerged caissons deep below the riverbed led to construction workers suffering from a mysterious, often fatal, affliction which today scuba divers would know as ‘the bends.’ We walked out on the bridge, where they strolled a borrowed elephant across when the bridge was first opened in 1874 to prove to nervous bridge-crossers that it was definitely stable.

▲ Our St Louis strolling also took us to the utterly fascinating Campbell House Museum, the mansion of a very wealthy fur trader originally born in Northern Ireland. Because one of his children was mentally ill and became a total recluse, then retreated into his room and did not emerge for many years, the house was preserved untouched for much longer than it would have been otherwise. When the son finally died in 1938 the house was an isolated little island surrounded by later developments and it was realised that the whole place was an untouched museum, complete with all its old furniture and fittings. Which is the way it has been preserved right to this day.

Only a few steps away we stopped for lunch in the 21C Art Museum Hotel. We’d already encountered a hotel from this imaginative group in Kansas City and there are others in Louisville, Cincinnati, Bentonville, Durham, Lexington and Chicago, so this is clearly not a trendy bi-coastal invention. Founded by art collectors Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson each one is a ‘multi-venue contemporary art museum, coupled with a boutique hotel and chef-driven restaurant.’

▲  There’s an amazing amount of contemporary art through the hotel lobby and other spaces including this wonderful stairway – carpets, walls, ceiling all extravagantly decorated.

◄ We didn’t have to venture far in the other direction to reach the magnificent St Louis Public Central Library which looks just as good inside as it does externally. We also walked around Lafayette Square framed by impressive old houses.

▲ Not far from the centre the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis is definitely surprising. It’s a big, modern church in very traditional old style, built between 1907 and 1988, but it’s the mosaics which are the big attraction. They’re quite simply beautiful, there are a remarkable number of them and at the end they were completed by the ‘Ravenna Mosaic Co.’ Is there a connection with Ravenna in Italy, I was very taken by Ranenna’s much older (they were completed 1500 years ago) mosaics when I visited the Adriatic coastal city in 2019?

◄ Much of the cathedral’s mosaic work is timeless, it could have featured in those beautiful ancient churches in Ravenna, but then there are modern designs in ancient mosaic style, like this American family scene that could have been the last thing they did in 1988?

▲ It’s only a short stroll from the cathedral to the World Chess Hall of Fame, notable for its giant six metre (20 feet) high pawn, the Guinness record holder when it comes to big chess pieces.

Our final St Louis stop was at Forest Park where we noted the Statue of St Louis fronting the St Louis Art Gallery.

◄ Statue of Saint Louis

The core of the building is a survivor from the 1904 World Exposition in St Louis and the very fine collection is delightfully ‘scattered.’ You seem to go straight from one style or period to another, all mixed in together. I just wandered at random and towards the end found myself in the Pacific, on the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea, in the Solomons, on New Ireland, in New Zealand and then in indigenous Australia. Terrific!

It’s a short drive to the Missouri History Museum, also in the park. I felt I had learnt enough St Louis and Missouri history at the Gateway Arch Museum, but the replica of Lindbergh’s Atlantic crossing Spirit of St Louis aircraft is definitely worth seeing even if the original is in the Smithsonian in Washington DC.