The Gateway Arch and What It Does Not Say

The Gateway Arch stands six hundred thirty feet above the St. Louis riverfront. It is the tallest monument in the United States, completed in nineteen sixty-five after seventeen years of planning, delays, and construction. It memorializes the westward expansion that made the country continental: Lewis and Clark departing in eighteen oh four, the wagon trains that followed, the railroads that ran after them.

The memorial is accurate as far as it goes. The question is how far that is.

The riverfront where the Arch stands was a major embarkation point for enslaved people sold south on the Mississippi River in the decades before the Civil War. The Old Courthouse visible from the Arch's shadow is where Dred Scott filed his freedom suit in eighteen forty-six and where, six years later, the Missouri Supreme Court had ruled against him. The land the Arch stands on was cleared in the nineteen thirty-nine through nineteen forty-two urban renewal program that demolished more than forty blocks of the city's oldest riverfront neighborhood, displacing thousands of residents.

The westward expansion the Arch celebrates was made possible by the forced removal of the Osage, the Quapaw, the Missouria, the Sac, and the Fox from the Missouri and Mississippi river valleys. The removals began before the formal Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty and continued for decades after it.

None of this makes the Arch less beautiful. It is, in formal architectural terms, nearly perfect: a catenary form in stainless steel that catches the light differently at every hour. Standing under it, you can feel the scale of what American ambition built. And ambition, at that scale, is never simple.