An Academy Award-nominated production (Best Documentary Feature, 1966) by the Jefferson National Expansion Historical Association.

The Gateway Arch was and is commonly seen variously as a symbol of patriotic American ingenuity and engineering honoring pioneering European / Colonial settler ancestors, as an equally potent and graphic symbol of a 'triumphal' conclusion to often brutal acquisitions of Native territory still recalled then by surviving Elders, a highly questionable use of public money (at least for its time), a lucrative project which illegally sidelined colored contractors, or a project which removed, partially, an already notable and historic waterfront. Perhaps it is all of these and perhaps it has yet to define itself in other ways over time.

Certainly, speaking for itself artistically, geometrically and architecturally, the Gateway Arch is an strikingly elegant, sublime and impressionable landmark built at great risk to life and limb which greatly changed the symbolic and cultural destiny of historic St. Louis and marked an era of mid-century and midwestern pragmatic optimism. It was meant to stand and to defy. Polite and informative comments and memories are welcome!

Note the historic passenger river steamer SS "Admiral" in the Mississippi River that was present for the topping off ceremony, built in 1904 as the "Albatross", rebuilt in 1937 into its silver streamlined condition seen here, and scrapped in 2011 after a failed preservation effort.
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