On the St. Louis riverfront stands a big arch-shaped hollow chunk of stainless steel. It stands some 630 feet tall and is 630 feet wide at the base. It’s the first thing that you see when you cross the river from Illinois into Missouri. As you might think, you also see it duplicated wherever you go in the city. Archway Cookies, Archway Diner, Archway Plumbing, you name it. Well, after all it is the tallest monument in the world. And we’re proud of it. It was finally competed in the late 1960’s after much discussion, even among engineers, that it might fall down as soon as they linked the two sides together. The whole city held its collective breath as the final section was dropped in place. It even had to be timed perfectly with the weather so the heat didn’t affect the expansion and contraction of the metal. Then the discussion turned from whether the thing would fall down or not to whether or not you were brave enough to ride to the top of it?
Now the way to get to the top was to crawl into this tiny little egg-shaped tram. You were crammed in there with four other people for the 4 minutes ride to the top. It was like you were a tiny ant trying to slowly crawl up the inner leg of a giant. It seems like ever since the dawn of man we have had this desire to go higher and higher, whether it’s building a ceremonial mound, commercial air flight, or rocketing off into space. But for me that desire seems to have diminished as I have gotten older. When I was younger, I had no problem jumping from roof to roof in the old neighborhood, or seeing how high you could go up in a tree. Then it was a breeze to get up on the roof and work on the chimney or take a helicopter or plane ride. My friends and I waited eagerly for weeks for the arch to open and then stood in line for almost four hours on opening day for the ride to the top. I remember one of my friends exclaiming how fun it would be to be able to spit out of the thing at somebody on the ground. But alas the windows were sealed.
The designer of the Arch, Eero Saarinen, never got to see the monument completed. He died four years before it was completed. He had tried to have several elevator companies in the area design the tram that would take people to the top of the arch, but none of them could do it. He finally hired a college dropout parking lot elevator designer named Richard Bowser to do the job. The city gave him only two weeks to submit a design and he was able to do it. And it worked. (www.wikipedia.com)
That is there were no major problems until on July 12, 2007 several hundred people were trapped when a cable broke, shutting off electrical power. Another problem the very next day caused the tram on the south leg of the Arch to be closed. It has been closed ever since. Obviously the parts are not something that you can order out of a catalog. Then the south leg was opened to much fanfare last Friday only to shut down gain for four hours because an electrical switch malfunctioned. (www.stltoday.com) Maybe our beloved Arch has gremlins living in it. Would I go up in the Arch today? Probably. But I’m not so sure as I used to be.
