The Gateway Arch: A Biography by Tracy Campbell (review)

Yale University Press’s Icons of America series has each of its authors telling “a new and innovative story about American history and culture through the lens of a single iconic individual, event, object, or cultural phenomenon” (v). In The Gateway Arch, Tracy Campbell uses the most recognizable landmark in St. Louis to revisit the city’s urban decline and the efforts that were made to reverse it using mid-century urban planning ideas like making the city more accessible to automobiles and encouraging tourism. The author explains how this vision of urban revitalization failed during the thirty-year struggle to fund, design, and construct the arch. Campbell has written a concise and insightful history of the origins of this iconic structure, one that fulfills the goals of the series admirably. The book is uneven, however, in its treatment of key elements of the urban history that Campbell proposes to examine, including the production of the built environment and the difficult theme of race.

Campbell begins by placing the Gateway Arch within the context of urban history. “Though its overt function is to commemorate the city’s past,” he contends, “the Arch’s design and underlying purpose look toward the future: it was meant to renew the city that surrounds it. The steady procession of people leaving St. Louis is another marker of urban decay, and the Gateway Arch helped speed the decline” (7). In the process of making his argument, Campbell addresses broad questions about the arch, such as, “Who benefitted from its construction? Who lost?” (3). The author’s answers clearly identify those who profited from the memorial’s construction—local real estate developers and the arch’s architect, Eero Saarinen—and who lost—the people who owned residences and businesses in the area occupied by the arch, people who wanted to preserve the city’s history, African Americans, and the City of St. Louis. Diverging from many traditional urban histories by closely examining the built environment, Campbell challenges readers with landscape-centered questions such as “What was there before?” and “Why do our cities look the way they do?” (3, 6). Through these elements, Campbell’s narrative thread emerges: his focus is on the Gateway Arch and the space on which it sits, and his emphasis is only on the people directly involved in its construction.

In chapter 1 Campbell begins by briefly explaining the history of the area of the riverfront where the Gateway Arch would one day stand. He takes time to describe the founding of the first European settlement by the French and then examines how they and their Anglo-American successors built up the riverfront and the city over the course of the 170 years from the 1760s to the early 1930s. (He ignores any possible influence that Cahokia, a Native American city that had sat across the river from 1100 to 1400, might have had on this area.) This history consists primarily of information about the physical changes to the built environment during this period, the construction of important historic buildings, the ways the people of St. Louis used the neighborhood for business and residence, and, once he reaches the twentieth century, the failed plans to change it. Yet Campbell does not go into the social or cultural significance of this area of the city beyond the fact that people lived and conducted business there.

More generally, the author underplays the issue of race in St. Louis. He does briefly mention near the end of this first chapter that Jim Crow laws segregated the city, and he describes an instance where one plan to “improve” St. Louis involved putting a parkway through the riverfront district, displacing the area’s African American population. White opponents of this proposal stopped it only by using the threat of black “invasions” of white neighborhoods, even getting a city ordinance passed to...