Construction of the Gateway Arch, St. Louis program (1965)

1990s production by the Jefferson National Expansion Historical Association. The Gateway Arch was and is commonly seen either as a symbol of patriotic American ingenuity and engineering honoring pioneering white settler ancestors or as an equally potent symbol of a 'triumphal' conclusion to often brutal acquisitions of Native territory still recalled then by surviving Elders.

Certainly, and speaking for itself, the Arch is an strikingly elegant 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.

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.

Видео Construction of the Gateway Arch, St. Louis program (1965) канала Justin J.M. Higner