St Louis - today we visited the amazing Arch

  St Louis, Missouri, United States
Sunday, May 6, 2007

Fairly overcast but going to get warm, we set off in T-shirts >> MJ wearing a St Louis Cardinals shirt brought in Vegas last year 'cos it was on offer. Seems as tho' they won the World Series last year (it's a baseball competition). We drove to the Metro station and found loads of fans going down to the Busch Stadium (the home of Budweiser is St Louis).

Got to the Riverview and went round the arch, we had a film about westward expansion and then took a small capsule up to the apex of the arch - 630ft, where we got shots of the baseball game. When we got down again we saw another film about how they built it.

The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial is located in St. Louis, Missouri near the start of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It was designated as a National Memorial by Executive Order 7523, on December 21, 1935. The park was established to commemorate several historical events:

the Louisiana Purchase, subsequent westward movement of American explorers & pioneers;
the first civil government west of the Mississippi River;
the debate over slavery raised by the Dred Scott case.

The memorial site consists of a 91-acre  park along the Mississippi River on the site of the original city of St. Louis; the Old Courthouse, a former state and federal courthouse which saw the origins of the Dred Scott case; the 45,000-square-foot Museum of Westward Expansion; and the Gateway Arch, a steel catenary arch that has become the definitive icon of the city.

  

Above is the interior of a tram car that takes you to the top of the arch.

The Arch is known as the gateway to the west. The Arch, designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen and structural engineer Hannskarl Bandel, stands 630 feet (192 m) tall, and is 630 feet (192 m) at its widest point. It is the tallest habitable structure in St. Louis (taller than One Metropolitan Square, the tallest building), and the second tallest in Missouri (behind One Kansas City Place in Kansas City).

The cross-sections of its legs are equilateral triangles, narrowing from 54 feet (16.5 m) at the base to 17 feet (5.2 m) at the top. Each wall consists of a stainless steel skin covering reinforced concrete from ground level to 300 feet (91 m) or carbon steel and rebar from 300 feet (91 m) to the peak. The interior of the Arch is hollow and contains a unique transport system leading to an observation deck at the top. The interior of the Arch also contains two emergency stairwells of 1076 steps each, in the event of a need to evacuate the Arch or if a problem develops with the tram system.

After a quick meal in TGI Fridays we went round Macy's >> which looks really old-fashioned. We spoke to some guy who had come out of the game - which had ended after 3 hours. The Cardinals had lost 13-0 which is a disaster (score is similiar to that in football). They have lost one of their pitchers on Thursday - he drove into a broken-down truck, seems like alcohol, cannabis and a mobile phone may have had something to do with it.

Oh yep - other news - Paris Hilton has been sentenced to 45 days in jail after being caught driving twice after losing her licence for DUI. She has to "attend" before mid-June to give her time to appeal Watch this space.

Finally on our trip back we end up in the same Metro coach as that travelled on by Bill Clinton >> what's the chances?