Am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. Okay, let's vango. Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an Art History Podcast. My name is Lindsay, and I am back after a two-month hiatus for school stuff and traveling related to school stuff. But I am back now and I've got a few more podcast episodes in the works for all of you wonderful listeners. I also just repaid my subscription to SoundCloud, so that means I have to put out more episodes. Aha! Gonna make myself do it because I can't afford not to. This is episode 17 of the podcast. We're getting up there, and today's subject is one that is very close to home for me, both figuratively and literally. I am, of course, talking about the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri. For those of you who don't know, I go to school in St. Louis, so I'm very familiar with and fond of the arch, as we call it very simply in St. Louis. Though it did serve as the backdrop and partial cause of one of my most epic personal meltdowns back in the summer of 2015. Slightly more on that later. The Gateway Arch is one of the greatest monuments of all time, up there with the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial in DC, which I covered in an earlier episode of the podcast. Of course, that's my personal opinion, but you know, I think many people would have that opinion. The Gateway Arch is awesome. The arch is also an object with a great story, and you all know that I am a sucker for stories. I'm also very fond of impossible things, or at least things that people say are impossible. And many people, like many people, thought that the Gateway Arch was an impossible thing, that it literally could not be built. Spoiler alert, they were wrong. This is that story. So without further ado, let me tell you a whole lot, and I do mean a whole lot, of stuff about a thing. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri. I am oddly nervous right now. I don't know, maybe I just haven't recorded in a long time. I'm really nervous. The Gateway Arch is the centerpiece of what is now known as the Gateway Arch National Park, formerly known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, which is like the clunkiest name for a memorial that you can think of, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. As its name suggests, the monument is an arch, though, but it's not like the arches that you would see in ancient Rome, for example. Instead, the gateway arch takes the form of an inverted catenary curve, translated into steel and concrete. And yes, we'll talk about what exactly that means in the coming minutes. It sounds super complicated, and it is, but it's also not. The arch stands at 630 feet tall or 192 meters for my metric people out there, making it the tallest man-made monument in not only Missouri, not only the United States, but the entire Western Hemisphere. Oh yeah, it's ours. It's still not as tall as the Eiffel Tower. The French, you know, they have us beat on that, but more importantly, they don't have us beat in soccer. Aha. It goes without saying, but the arch is the greatest symbol of St. Louis, and it stands as a monument to the city's history, mostly the good, but also the bad. We are going to get into all of it. The founding of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, the competition for the arch, and its subsequent construction and you know world domination as one of the best designed monuments of all time. To tell the story of the arch from the beginning, we have to go back to the year 1933, smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression, also known as the final season of Game of Thrones. Just kidding. I actually enjoyed the final season. The Great Depression lives up to its name. Everything in the United States was terrible, lots of people had no money, and it was depressing. Greatly depressing, you might say. Just like everywhere else in the United States, St. Louis wasn't doing great during that time. Back in the early 1930s, St. Louis was the eighth most populated city in the country, and the Great Depression brought the city to its knees. One of the greatest visual indications for this fall of grace was the rundown state of the riverbank. For those of you who don't know, St. Louis is right on the Mississippi River. And the riverbank, which is what all the boats saw as they went past St. Louis, had all sorts of abandoned and rundown buildings and looked it just looked not great. People, even famous people, called out the sad state of the city. Mark Twain, good old Samuel Clemens, even commented that the city looked woeful and melancholy. And let me ask you, what's your excuse, Mark? Or should I say Samuel? That is of course not what you want people to think of your city, even if everyone is poor, depressed, and living terribly, right? Something had to be done to rectify the problem. And someone did. In 1933, an enterprising citizen, the lawyer Luther Eli Smith, had an idea. What if they turned the rundown riverbank area of St. Louis into a beautiful site of celebration? Or at least, you know, that was the main reason given for the so-called beautification of the site. We will go over some less charitable motivators later in the episode. For now we'll go with the story that Luther Eli Smith took one look at the riverbank and was like, wow, that ugly. But it got potential. Smith came up with a plan. What if we turn this area of abandoned and or decrepit buildings into a site that celebrates St. Louis rather than advertises its hardships? Specifically, Smith wanted to create a memorial to St. Louis's important role in United States history as a gateway in the process of Western expansion. For those of you with little knowledge of United States history, hello, it's me. I am one of you. I will give you a quick overview of what exactly that means. As of 1800-ish, give or take a year, the territory that comprised the United States only extended from the East Coast to the Mississippi River. So basically a third of what the map now shows. Everything west of the Mississippi was a colonial possession of the French. But in terms of the white colonizers with guns, the French quote unquote owned all land west of the Mississippi, which is, you know, more than half of what is now the continental United States. In 1803, that changes. When Mr. Thomas Jefferson, President de los Estados Unidos, pays fifteen million dollars to acquire the territory of Louisiana, which is a chunk of land right in the middle of the country. In finalizing the Louisiana Purchase, the size of the United States nearly doubled, just like that, just doubled. The rest of the land west of the Mississippi, so like present-day California, New Mexico, Washington State, etc., was added into the mix over the next 50 years. But Jefferson really got things going by purchasing, you know, what will eventually comprise one-third of the country? The Louisiana Purchase also included the city of St. Louis. Speaking of Lewis, spelled differently, but who cares? Ever heard of a man named Meriwether Lewis? No? What about his buddy, William Clark? Also known as Lewis and Clark. This infamous duo were the first Americans, i.e., you know, white dudes, to launch an expedition to explore the West, and they did so under the sanction of the United States government. Again, I want to reiterate that this whole area had already been inhabited and thoroughly explored, I'm sure, by indigenous populations. While the Lewis and Clark expedition took off from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, St. Louis was the final city before Lewis and Clark went off the grid, when they, you know, really had to start expediting, adventuring, exploring. St. Louis was their gateway to the West. Wink wink wink. St. Louis was also the first city that they returned to on their way back, and everyone was like, Lewis and Clark, you alive. That's the role that St. Louis would continue to play as hundreds of thousands of people moved through St. Louis on their way to the West. That's the history that Luther Eli Smith wanted to celebrate as he stood on the riverbank of St. Louis in 1933. Smith also saw the project to build a park or a monument of some sort as a reason to put St. Louisans back to work during a time of depression and to get them federal dollars. So Smith jumps into work. He forms an allegedly nonpartisan group of people, including the mayor of St. Louis, Bernard Dickman, to help him create a vision for this memorial. Smith and this committee put in a federal request for funding, and they asked for $30 million. Excuse me, say what now? It's the Great Depression. No one has money. What the hell are you doing requesting $30 million from the government? The federal government laughed in their faces, as they should have. The St. Louis Committee was then like, okay, plan B. We propose that the city give us $7.5 million to do this project and put it up to a vote. And that's what they do. They hold a vote and the vote passes. Well that was, you know, that was pretty easy. A little too easy. A lot too easy. Way too easy. Official accounts will say that this was absolutely a valid vote and no funny business occurred during it. Because, you know, of course they would. Other accounts will say that the ballot boxes were rigged. What an odd story. No one has ever heard of that happen. Oh wait, just kidding. I will say that I do not think that the Russians had anything to do with this particular act of political skullduggery. I mean, you never you never know. Except you do, because Russia didn't exist at that point. So, yeah, moving on. The moral of this story is that this committee was more than willing to play dirty to get the money that they needed to make sure that the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial got expanded into existence. It should come as no surprise then that Mayor Dickman was like, hey, hey guys, I've got a new way to make money. And his committee members were like, yeah, let's do it. So Dickman goes to Washington, D.C., and he calls a meeting with one Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States. So Dickie sits Frankie down and he's like, Look, Frankie, we're both Democrats. I really want you to win the re-election campaign, I really do. But unless you give me money to build a massive park in St. Louis, I will do whatever I can to make sure that no one votes for you and you'll lose. Are you in or are you in? Needless to say, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was like, you're a dick, Dickman. And lo and behold, the federal government allocates funds and supports the project. Everything is a go. In the mid-1930s, construction starts on the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. And by construction, I really mean demolition. There were 37 city blocks dedicated to the memorial, but those are city blocks. They've got, you know, stuff in them. Buildings, houses, monuments. It's like, you know, it's 37 blocks. And it all needs to go. Needs to go. When St. Louisans find out that the committee plans to demolish everything in those 37 blocks, there is public outrage. Those 37 blocks held no less than three historic landmarks, and people were pissed that the committee was even considering demolishing them. There was also the unsavory fact that the demolition of those 37 blocks meant that many African Americans who had moved into those relatively cheap properties would get evicted. It's a shame, but not a surprise, really, that these individuals are rarely mentioned in official accounts of the arch's story. As for those 37 blocks, only three buildings were left standing, those three monuments that I mentioned earlier. The old courthouse, the old rock house, and the old cathedral. Everything else got demolished. You know what else got demolished? The freaking Pearl Harbor military base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. How'd you like that insensitive transition? Short story short, the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, you know, RIP, Go America, whatever. That bombing caused the USA to enter World War II. And the preth the pret, there wasn't any money or even men to screw around with building a memorial. So the plans got put on hold, and those newly demolished 37 city blocks basically turned into a glorified parking lot for years. Now that'll be a pattern in the construction of the arch. Lots of activity, lots of waiting, lots of activity, lots of waiting. Rinse and repeat. The next flurry of activity occurs in 1945. In that year, a group of architects come together to plan a design competition for what will become the crowning glory of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, the Monument. Operating under the supervision of the National Parks Service, the committee put out a call for designs. They also announced the cash prize of tens of thousands of dollars to the winning design. In 1945, I mean that that's a lot of money. But that's how you get the legit established architects to participate. You offer the big cheddar. Big big cheddar. The competition required designs to meet a set of criteria, which was fairly extensive, so I'm only going to highlight the big things. One, designs had to include an architectural memorial to Thomas Jefferson. Two, the design had to maintain the old courthouse, the old cathedral, and the rock house, those three buildings that were saved from demolition. Three, there had to be extensive landscaping. A four, the design had to include an open air theater and a museum. And five, and what I think is the most important, there had to be parking. Also known as the reason that I almost had a mental breakdown in 2015. This wasn't just a competition to design a monument. Entrance also had to design the memorial and all it included. And they could only submit one entry, which had to be submitted by September 1st, 1947. The contest received requests for over 5,000 application forms, though it would only receive 1,100 official entries. Now I say only, but that is a boatload of entries, especially considering how much work went into the design process. To illustrate this, let's take a look at one special entry, entry number 144, and the process that it took to create it. Entry 144 belonged to an architect by the name of Eero Saarinen. Now I love his name, Eero, spelled E-E-R-O. Saarinen, who I'm sure that I'll phase into my Wisconsin accent and start saying Saranin, but it's Saarinen. Saarinen was a young Finnish-American architect who was only 37 when he submitted his design for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. At the time, Saarinen was working at his father's architecture firm. Arrow's dad, Eilil, was also an architect, and a fairly famous one at that, especially in Finland. Eilil Saaranin also submitted an entry for the competition, though he and his son worked independently from one another on their own entries. Ero Saarinen was attracted to modern design from the very start, studying sculpture in Paris and architecture at Yale. But even as a high schooler in Michigan, he took courses in art and design. Also, remember, his dad was an architect, so there's also that. Ero's big break didn't even come from designing a building. It came from designing furniture, specifically a chair that he designed with his friend and fellow designer Charles Eames. Sarinen's designs were renowned for being simple, sleek, and striking, or, as he would put it, quote, simple and satisfying. Some might even say that his designs are austere, as they embrace geometric simplicity and organic forms. His buildings also regularly looked like sculpture, a nod to the months that he spent in Paris studying that art form. The design for the gateway arch embraces all of that, especially Saranin's desire to create a monument that had no function other than to look really cool and commemorate whatever it was supposed to commemorate. No fuss, just form. Arrow Saranin knew that he couldn't design the memorial alone, so he got together a group of architects, which included the landscape architect Dan Kylie, architect Jay Henderson Barr, painter Alexander Gerard, and sculptor Lily Swan Saarinen, who also happened to be Arrow's wife at the time. The design took Saarinen and his team months to conceive of and execute. At one point, Dan Kylie, his wife, and his daughter moved into the Saranin's house so that he and Saranin could work on the design, sometimes working around the clock until the early hours of the morning. Saarinen's first instinct was to design a monument in a simple geometric shape, like a dome or a mass of stone of some kind. But he couldn't come up with a design that he liked, so he grabbed some pipe cleaners and he started screwing around on his living room floor, making small arches from fuzzy sticks. Eventually an idea came to him: a giant concrete arch. Over time, of course, Saranin would change his mind about the material, choosing stainless steel over concrete, but the idea of the monument remained an arch. Arches have been utilized as architectural forms for thousands of years, though the Romans are credited with really taking the arch form to the next level. In addition to aqueducts and bridges, the Romans also used arches to celebrate great victories. You can see a whole handful of them all around Rome. Of course, Saranin's arch wasn't like the Romans' arches. It was an inverted catenary arch, which sounds complicated, but it's it's not. A catenary arch is the curve that forms if you were to hold up the ends of a chain. It's essentially like a pointier version of a parabola. An inverted catenary arch just takes that curve and flips it up. Sardin's main point of inspiration for the arch were the dirigible hangers that he saw in France during World War II, which were the places that the French would store the, you know, the blimp, the blimp things, the dirigibles. And all of those hangers have a very similar shape to what would later become the Gateway Arch. This is all to say that what makes Saranin's design so brilliant is that it is so simple. It also may or may not have been impossible to build, but he'll worry about that later. Sarinin and his associates submit their design for a stainless steel catenary arch, and they wait and wait and wait. Then, one day, Saarinen's dad Ilil gets a telegram. It's from the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Design Committee. And it tells Ilel, Congratulations, his design had been chosen from the 1100s submitted as one of the top five designs. Champagne comes out, cheers all around. What amazing news. And then the phone rings. It's a committee member. The man apologizes and explains that Ilil's design did not place in the top five. A committee member had simply been confused because design 144 was attributed just to the last name Saranin, and the guy just assumed it meant Ilel. Arrow Saranin's design was the one that placed in the top five. Now that was probably a really crappy phone call to receive, but at least Ilel already had some champagne. In reality, Ilel reacted to this news in the best way possible. He opened another bottle of champagne to toast Arrow, though I am sure that the medicinal properties of the bubbly were also very welcome. Arrow Sarin and the four other architects then had the chance to submit a second draft of their design. It was at this stage of the competition that Arrow added 50 extra feet to the arch and proclaimed that the monument would symbolize, quote, the gateway to the west. The national the na national, that was my Wisconsin accent. Quote, the gateway to the west, the national expansion, and whatnot. End quote. And whatnot. Great specificity there, Arrow. Awesome. On February 18th, 1948, the competition jury members voted on the top five designs. All seven men voted for Arrow Sarin's design, and they prepared the checks. As with any major public works project, and you know, really anything at all, the design for the arch was met with both support and criticism. Though I'll give you just one guess as to which side was louder. The critics, you say? Why yes, amazing. Critics abounded and challenges mounted. The first major challenge was to reroute the railroad tracks that passed through the area where the arch was to be built, which had to be done before construction could begin. Saranin hoped that he could start building by 1954, a full six years after his design had been chosen. He was actually wrong. It would take much, much longer. Money was the primary issue as it usually is. The project collected funds in fits and starts. A million here, a million there, and that meant that construction followed suit. At one point, the money situation looked so bad that rumors began to circulate that the arch would get scrapped in its entirety. There was also this big kerfluffle about the railway tracks, how they would be relocated, when it would happen, and who would pay for it. But finally, finally, on June 23, 1959, the mayor of St. Louis at the time, Raymond Tucker, rammed a steel shovel into the dirt, officially breaking ground on the construction of the arch. Eleven years had passed since Arrow Saarinen received a phone call telling him that he'd won the competition. Saarinen, of course, kept himself busy with other projects, including terminals at JFK and Dulles Airport. You can blame him for those. But in August of 1961, Saarinen carved out some time in his busy, busy, busy schedule to make a trip to St. Louis to discuss some details of the arch's construction with the contractors. It would be Saarinen's last time in St. Louis. On his flight back to Michigan, which is where he lived, Saarinen experienced disorientation and a severe headache. In the months leading up to this, friends and family had also complained that Saarinen's mood was drastically changing. These symptoms were the result of a stage four tumor on Saarinen's brain, which was uncovered during surgery on August 31st. Aro Saarinen, one of the greatest architects of his time, died the next day. He was just 51 years old. The irony of this, and I mean, I don't even know if it's irony, but it's certainly sad, which is that just four days, four days before Saarinen's death, President John F. Kennedy had signed a law that allocated $9.5 million to the construction of the arch. As Eros Saranin died, the arch was just beginning. Despite his untimely death before the arch really even got started being built, Saarinen is still credited as the sole architect of the arch, a status that he fiercely defended during his life. But the construction, and most importantly, the completion of the Gateway Arch is a testament to what a group of people can accomplish in the face of tragedy. Saarinen's colleagues banded together to finish the project, chief among them being Kevin Roche and John Dinkaloo. There was also the engineer Fred Severand, who was an integral part of the process, as he was the man who ensured that the arch was properly engineered so as not to, I mean, you know, collapse. But wouldn't you know it, money became an issue yet again. With 9.5 million in the bank, the National Park Service had put out a call for contractor bids to see who would get the job of building the arch. The lowest bid was the winning bid, the McDonald's Construction Company of St. Louis. Their bid was $12,139,918. That's, you know, that's just a few million over budget. Oops. And that wasn't even the worst part. As construction geared up, criticism got louder, with notable architectural firms claiming that the arch was not even architecturally possible to build. They literally thought that it would collapse, it wouldn't stand, and all of this money would be for nothing. Now, I don't think that these people were being nasty or anything like that. There was a genuine anxiety that the arch was not properly engineered to stand, that it would fall the second the final piece was put into place. Of course, this wouldn't turn out to be true because the gateway arch is a masterpiece of architectural engineering. So how we're like we're like 20, at least 20 minutes into this, and we're just now talking about the engineering. Now imagine how long it felt to wait for the actual arch to get built. My goodness. The construction started with the foundation. Without a good foundation, what are what are you even doing? Get out of here. The foundation for each leg sits 60 feet underground. Above ground, the arch is comprised of two legs that rise out of the ground at 78 degrees. The arch is comprised of 142 stainless steel cans, as they're called, in the shape of an equilateral triangle. These cans were stacked one on top of another and then welded into place by some very, very brave welders, let me say. Given that the arch tapers from the base to the apex, these cans got smaller and smaller as they went up. So for example, at the base of each leg of the arch, the cans are 54 feet long and 12 feet high. But at the top, the cans are 17 feet long and only 8 feet high, their measurements having gradually decreased as each new section was added. What makes the arch stand is the fact that it's double walled, or double skinned as some people put it. To give you a better idea of what I'm talking about, especially for those of you who might not be near a computer or a phone to get a picture of it, and if you're driving, don't even try it, Buster. Envision that you were gluing together pieces of cardboard. So you've got little squares of cardboard that you are gluing together. You take three equal pieces and glue them together to create a triangle. You then take three smaller pieces and make a smaller triangle. You fit that smaller triangle inside the first, and then you insert pins that hold the inner wall in place so that the two triangles essentially become one object. A larger triangle that has a smaller triangle fixed inside of it. When put together, those two triangles and their pins make a more stable form than either triangle on their own. That's the idea behind the gateway arch, and there are photographs of these cans being put into place where you can clearly see that it's double walled. It's a triangle inside of a triangle. The whole thing is known as a composite structure, in which the hole is far more stable and strong than the sum of its parts, and that is what allows it to stand. The outer skin of the arch is what you see: a sleek, polished, stainless steel exterior. The inner skin is made of pure carbon steel. Much like the size of the triangular cans, the distance between the two walls would get smaller and smaller as the construction process progressed. At the base of each leg, that gap is three feet wide. At the top, it's less than eight inches. That gap was then filled with various materials to reinforce the form and to give it such an incredible structural integrity. From the base to like around 300 feet, the space between the two walls is filled with reinforced concrete, or concrete embedded with steel mesh or bars. From 300 feet to the top, the arch has to become less heavy. So instead of using concrete, the gap between the walls is reinforced with steel stiffeners. Now I know that explaining this verbally might be making sense, and it might not be making sense, so I would encourage you to go look at photographs of the building process, because when you break it down, the construction of the arch, or at least the concept behind it, is quite simple and brilliant. But who was it complicated to build? And construction crews built the legs without any scaffolding. The internal mechanisms of each leg were enough to keep them standing until pretty close to the top, when something was brought in to keep the legs from collapsing inward. But for the most part, there was no scaffold or bracing or anything other than the strength of the materials and the construction methods themselves. Quite amazing. As you can probably already tell, the arch took a lot of steel to build. Like, a lot of steel. Hundreds of thousands of tons of steel. Fun fact, the order for the steel to build the arch remains the biggest steel order in United States history. No one else needed that much steel. We've got the most of it. All of it, the hundreds of thousands of tons of steel, was imported to St. Louis from Pennsylvania via railroad. The steel was then welded on site into those triangular cans, which weighed tens of thousands of pounds, like up to 50 tons for the largest sections. These cans were then lifted by cranes and welded into place, one on top of the other. And they're welded inside, outside, anywhere that they could be welded, they were welded. But conventional cranes are tiny, at least by arch standards, and the standard crane couldn't lift anything above 72 feet. So recall that the arch is 630 feet high. So uh what do you do when you hit the 72 foot mark? Easy. You lift the crane. How frickin' exactly do you do that? Very freaking carefully, that's how. This was an issue that needed an ingenious solution, and that solution was called a creeper derrick, which, let's be honest, sounds like some of the boys I knew in college. In the case of the Gateway Arch, Creeper Derricks were a way of moving cranes up the side of the arch. Now I'm sure that there is a very professional way of explaining creeper derricks, but I'm not an architect, so I'll make do by describing them thusly. The creeper derricks used to build the arch remind me of a roller coaster track, specifically the portion of the track that brings you up a slope. You know, when it's like chik-chik-chik-chik-chick, and the cart is going up, up, up, and then your stomach is like, whoa, the drop is coming. Workers built tracks similar to the ones used for roller coasters or railroads up the outer curve of each leg of the arch, both of which were being built simultaneously. The creeper derrick was then mounted on this track. It kind of looks like a platform with a crane attached to it that would move creep, I suppose you could say, up those tracks. As the arch got taller, workers added onto the track. This continued until the very, very tippy tippy top of the arch. The photographs are incredibile. The cranes look positively tiny compared to the arch. Though I will say that I felt pretty queasy just reading about all of these things, much less looking at pictures, and I'm not even afraid of heights. I'm just, you know, afraid of dying by falling of hundreds of feet to my death. Uh, and you know, being dead. By the time construction neared the top of the arch, additional supports had to be added to hold the legs in place as the final pieces were added. In pictures, you can see a skeletal structure that extends between the two legs, ensuring that they wouldn't collapse inward. And good thing, too, because there are two cranes and a lot of dudes up there. There's also this net that's pictured that I'm sure was meant as a safety measure, and it looks just like it looks so flimsy, and I really hope that no one had to test the strength of that thing. Yikes. The final piece to be dropped into place during the construction of an arch is called the keystone. The keystone is the most important segment of the arch. It's the piece that brings it all together. Pretty important. When the keystone is in place, no other supports should be needed, because the two legs become one entity that naturally distributes weight and force. Being made of steel, the gateway arch doesn't have a keystone so much as a keystone piece. Workers dropped in the final piece of the arch, the keystone piece, on October 28, 1965. The four-foot triangular section weighed 10 tons. That's 20,000 pounds. The piece was slotted safely into place, ending three years of construction and I'm sure heart attack inducing anxiety. I mean, I had that just reading about this stuff. I can't imagine what it was like on the ground. Or worse, on the arch. Who was that dude in the crane? Like putting that stuff into place? That dude is nuts. Throughout the episode, I have made references to the fact that some individuals legitimately thought that the arch was structurally impossible, specifically that it would collapse once the keystone piece was slotted into place. In fact, engineers at the Pittsburgh Des Moines Steel Company, which provided all of the steel for the arch's construction, were so concerned about the structural viability of the arch that they went straight to the top of the project and sat down with George Hartzog, the director of National Park Services, the branch of government that oversaw the arch site. PDM's engineers begged Hartzog to reassess the construction process, and this pissed off Fred Severud, the head engineer of the Gateway Arch. I mean, he was pissed, because he had personally done all of the calculations that proved that the arch was indeed structurally sound. Severud was so sure of his own work that he challenged the engineers at PDM to a test. They would take a scale model of the arch and submit it for a stress test. If the baby arch collapsed, Severud would pay for the costs of the examination. If the baby arch remained standing, PDM would have to pick up the tab. Seems fair. The entire process, though, would cost about $1 million. It was only then that PDM engineers backed down, clearly not willing to put $1 million where their mouths were. That being said, the National Parks Services did subject Severed's work to additional scrutiny, and lo and behold, it was finally decided that Severed was indeed correct. If all went to plan, the arch would stand. Still, doubts about the arch persisted all throughout its construction, right down to the level of St. Louis citizens. One of my favorite tidbits about the arch's construction was that the head of the McDonald's construction company that contracted the site, Gene McDonald, he regularly had to bail construction workers out of jail when they would get in drunken brawls with people who taunted them in bars, saying that the arch couldn't be built. But hate is gonna hate, and arch is gonna arch. The arch was structurally sound. Cool, cool, cool, awesome. But how exactly were people supposed to get to the top? There were, after all, windows at the apex and a room where people could go and stand and look out over the city. So someone needed to come in and build an elevator system that could ferry people from the bottom of the arch to the top. Now, obviously, all of this had been hashed out at least somewhat before the arch had been built, but the elevator system took two additional years to build, as well as some serious ingenuity. The internal mechanism that ferries people to the top was invented by a brilliant man by the name of get this, it's one of the greatest names I've ever encountered, Dick Bowser. The arch people had thought of a bunch of different options, from traditional elevators to even escalators, but none of those were feasible. But then Dick Bowser, he comes in, cracks the case, saves the day, by devising a system with capsules that moved much like the carriages of a Ferris wheel, the ones that won't overturn even as they go up, up, up into the air. In the end, there are two different trams, one in each leg of the arch. Each tram has eight pods or capsules, and each one of those pods can hold five people. The tram moves at a speed of about 340 feet per minute, so it only takes a couple of minutes to get to the top. But let me tell you, those pods are not for anyone who is remotely claustrophobic. They are tiny. At the top, the pods open and you enter a viewing room at the apex of the arch, that on a clear day gives visitors a 30-mile view of St. Louis and its surroundings through a series of 32 windows. Fun fact, the walls are also carpeted, which I thought was a very strange choice when I was up there, but um, whatever. Those windows measure 7 inches by 27 inches, so they're not very big. I remember when I was up there I heard this person complaining um about how small the windows were when I was in the viewing room, but there is a very very good reason for that size. In order to drop the final section of the arch, which measured just four feet, the pieces that had already been put into place were under 500 tons of pressure. If the construction team had made the windows any bigger, the sections with the windows wouldn't have been able to withstand that pressure. So if the windows were any bigger, they would have crumpled. As for those of you who prefer the stairs, there is a stairwell in each of the arch's legs, which amounts to 1,076 steps. However, those stairwells are only used in the case of maintenance work and emergencies. Thank God. My mom would be in the line for those things so fast, and I would be like dying. Do you guys just hear Gus Bark? Puppy. Speaking of safety, the Arch isn't just a miracle of engineering and design. It's also a testament to the excellent safety standards of the McDonald Construction Company, which insisted on hiring skilled workers. No entry-level labor for the Arch, no sir. Before the project began, the insurance company that was working on the Arch project estimated that 13 people would die in the creation of the Arch. Although horrifying, that number seems pretty decent considering three years of work with lots of massive machinery and heights and like welding torches and human error. But not a single person died during the construction process. There has actually only ever been one death associated with the Gateway Arch, that of a man whose parachute didn't open during a free jumping session. We will not dwell on that, um, because it's horrifying, but RIP to Mr. Kenneth Swire's. Ugh boy. Now that we've wandered into the realm of death, it's as good a time as any to give a brief overview of the less triumphant stories behind the building process of the Gateway Arch. As with some of the most upsetting stories to come out of St. Louis, and sadly some of the most frequent, racial and economic biases were heavily at play during the entire planning and building process. In her book, The Gateway Arch, a biography, Tracy Campbell notes that the demolition of those 37 blocks of riverfront property all the way back in the 1930s had as much to do with building a monument as it did with worries over a growing African American population. In the area, which had affected property prices. One city engineer on the project even described it as, quote, an enforced slum clearance program. Additionally, many African Americans had voted for the measure that allowed the arch to be built in the first place because they thought it would be an excellent provider for jobs. However, the workforce of the Arch project was largely supplied with union workers. And back in the day, unions in St. Louis were racist as hell and wouldn't admit African American workers, which meant that virtually all construction workers on the Arch site were white. In 1963, this led to a lawsuit being filed by Korr, the Congress of Racial Equality. Korr said, quite rightly, that the project was embracing racial discrimination in its workforce. This led to a sit-in on the partially constructed legs of the arch itself by two very brave souls, Percy Green and Richard Daly, who had dressed up like construction workers, climbed up ladders, and sat on the arch for something like 12 hours, refusing to leave in the name of racial equality on the construction force. They were eventually apprehended and taken into custody, though no charges were filed. To appease growing protests, the contractors did hire additional black workers, but then white workers got pissed and walked off. This racial tension, also known as racism, would persist throughout the construction of the arch. Campbell writes about this fact of the arch's construction beautifully in her book, again, The Gateway Arch, a biography, and I'm going to read you a brief excerpt here from page 145. Quote In St. Louis's long and troubled history of race relations, the arch represented one more example of unmet promises. While it stood for many things to many people, for the city's African Americans, the Gateway Arch symbolized the divide between those who had made it and those who did not. End quote. Construction on the Gateway Arch was completed in 1965, and it opened to the public in 1967. From start to finish, it cost $13 million to build the arch, the equivalent of about $100 million of today's currency. Nevertheless, it's safe to say that the arch was a huge hit, with over 135 million people having visited what was once the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. But alas, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial is no more, thanks to a recent revitalization project. This project included the addition of an outdoor amphitheater, a new plaza between the arch and the river, and an expanded museum underneath the arch. The project was slated for completion in 2015, just in time for the arch's 50th anniversary. But given that nothing in construction, especially construction related to the Gayway Arch, ever seemed to stay on schedule, it's no surprise that the 2015 deadline was little more than a pipe dream. The revitalization project finished just last year, in 2018, and it cost over $380 million. In early 2018, Congress passed the Gateway Arch National Park Designation Act, which, as it sounds, turned the area into a national park. This act became law on February 22nd, 2018, turning the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial into a celebration of Arosarinen's Gateway Arch, a much deserved honor for what is surely one of the greatest monuments in architectural history. As for me, Lindsay, um, I love the arch, even if I don't love everything that it stands for. The arch has a very special place in my I don't want to say heart because I'm not that kind of person, but as a symbol of a very transformative time in my life. The first time that I saw the Gateway Arch, I was driving from Wisconsin, which is where I'm from, to St. Louis. I had never been to St. Louis, and really all that I knew about this city was that it had the arch, the St. Louis Cardinals, and was home to the university that I was considering for graduate school. That's legit all I knew. I had absolutely no idea that there was a hockey team, much less one that would eventually win the Stanley Cup. Go blues! After seven and a half hours of driving in my car and like something like 300 miles on the same highway, 55 south to be exact, I rounded a bend in the highway, and all of a sudden this glint of light caught my eye, and I looked over to see the St. Louis Arch rising out of the skyline for the first time. Now I'm not that sentimental of a person, but seeing the arch for the first time was a moment for me. By the time I got close to the arch, because when you when you see it from the highway, you've still got like 20 minutes to go, the sun was setting. And as I drove by the arch, the steel was reflecting bright orange and red. And it was one of the most beautiful things that I've seen in my life. And it sounds super cheesy, but it's true. In that moment, I knew without seeing the school or any of the city that this was where I was going to end up for a significant period of my life. And five years later, I am still there, and I still wave to the arch whenever I pass it in my car. I personally prefer to observe the arch this way because when I visited it with my parents in the summer of 2015, it's a day that will go down in my personal history as one of my more shameful days as a human being. I lost my patience and my mind at the Gateway Arch, and bless my parents for putting up with me. And I haven't been back since, though I still enjoy waving to it as I come and go on my journey between the places that I call home. Despite the ups and downs and controversies of its construction, Arosarinen's ingenuity brought into being a timeless monument that does so much more than memorialize Western expansion. The Gateway Arch has become a symbol of St. Louis, a backdrop to Cardinals' games at Bush Stadium, and a glorious setting for Fourth of July fireworks. The arch has served as the backdrop for civil protest, including protests against racial inequality, the women's march, and St. Louis Pride Parades. It's a monument that symbolizes the audacity of engineers, architects, and workers who came together to build something that others said was impossible. It's a testament to Aerosarin's stunning designs and the gumption of his friends and colleagues to see it through to the end. And of course, it's a beacon of homecoming for a young woman who had absolutely no idea what awaited her when she drove around that highway bend in late 2014, much less that she would be talking about the arch on a podcast episode some five years later. In case you missed it, that's a me. That is all I have for you on the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri. I hope that you enjoyed and learned a lot from that very deep dive. As for Gus Corner, this episode, Gus is downstairs from where I'm currently sitting, no doubt sleeping on the cool tile floor of my parents' kitchen, enjoying some Z's and some dreams on this fine 4th of July day. Gus has no idea that it's a holiday, or rather that it's any holiday other than Gus Day, which just happens to be 365 days a year. For this episode, Gus invaded three more famous works of art. You just can't keep them out. Those works include Antonello da Messina's Saint Jerome, Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, and Andrea Montaigne's Oculus from the Camera de Sposi in Mantua. I will post those and all other images, links, and sources that I use for today's episode on the podcast's website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. A special shout out to Tracy Campbell's book, which I keep mentioning, The Gateway Arch, a Biography, which I found very helpful in writing this episode. The usual thanks goes to hooksounds.com and freemusicarchive.org for the royalty free music that you hear at the beginning and the end of the episode. The first turn the first turn, the first tune that you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 by Kevin McLeod, and the second song is called Success Dreams. For first time listeners, I thank you for giving this podcast a try. Thanks for coming. And for longtime listeners, I thank you for coming back. I will have another episode up in about a month. I'm already hard at work researching it, and I'm really excited to record it. Until then, I am sending you very good vibes, and I hope that you take the time to look at something beautiful today. Alaprosima Michi. Haters are gonna hate, and arches are gonna arch.