In 1947 a telegram told the Saarinen family that Eliel Saarinen had won the design competition for a riverfront monument in St. Louis, and they opened champagne. Two hours later the phone rang: the real winner was his son, Eero Saarinen, and Eliel opened a second bottle. The project itself began in 1933, when civic leader Luther Ely Smith pitched Mayor Bernard Dickman on a $30 million Jefferson memorial as a New Deal jobs program promising 5,000 construction jobs. The city condemned a 40 block stretch of working riverfront, sparing only the Old Cathedral and the Old Rock House, while Paul Peters called it a monumental boondoggle and opponents asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt to give the money to the Red Cross instead.

Saarinen faced a plagiarism attack from critic Gilmore D. Clarke, who claimed the arch copied an unbuilt Mussolini design for a canceled 1942 Rome expo, and he threatened to withdraw unless elevated railroad tracks were buried. Construction began in 1963 with engineer Hans Karl Bandel on an inverted weighted catenary, 630 feet tall. On July 14, 1964, Percy Green and Richard Daly of the Congress of Racial Equality climbed 125 feet up the north leg to demand skilled jobs for Black workers, which led to the first pattern or practice lawsuit under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Later came a stalled tram, a fatal 1980 parachute stunt, and a 1992 suction cup climb.

• How a hanging chain flipped upside down keeps the arch entirely in compression, with legs tapering from 54 feet to 17 feet
• The creeper derricks that ratcheted up tracks bolted to the arch itself, and the scissors truss installed at 530 feet
• Insurance actuaries predicted 13 worker deaths, and not a single worker died
• The 1966 walkout by white AFL-CIO plumbers that took a National Labor Relations Board injunction to end
• Kenneth Swyers’ 1980 parachute landing on the top, John C. Vincent’s 1992 climb, and the local legend of the arch deflecting storms