The historic Old Courthouse sits gracefully among the modern buildings of downtown St. Louis, while the Gateway Arch dominates the skyline behind it. (NPS photo)

By day, it's majestic. Sun glints off cold steel, dominating the skyline for miles around.

By night, it's romantic. Moonlight shimmers on satin, reflecting the ripples from the river below.

It's the Gateway Arch, part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (JNEM) in St. Louis. The tallest memorial in the country, the Arch is 630 feet high and tops the Washington Monument by 75 feet and the Statue of Liberty by 325.

Designed by the noted architect Eero Saarinen, it symbolizes the gateway through which the trappers, explorers, adventurers and settlers made their way west—from the time of Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase in 1803 until 1890 when the Census Bureau announced that a frontier line no longer existed in the United States.

Located on a 91-acre park along the Mississippi River near downtown St. Louis, JNEM also contains the Old Courthouse, where Dred Scott sued for freedom from slavery and where many laws affecting western expansion were debated. Acquired by NPS in 1940, the building serves as headquarters for JNEM.

Next to the Arch is the Old Cathedral, the only structure standing on its original foundations in old St. Louis. It is located on the site of the first church built in St. Louis, and still has Mass served in it.

Visitors peer at the spectacular views of St. Louis from the observation room in the top of the Arch. In uniform in the center is Roy Scown, chief of maintenance. (NPS photo)

More Than Buildings

But JNEM is more than just buildings.

"It's an urban park dream," declares Ivan Parker, park superintendent and NPS state director for Missouri.

He says that they are developing park programs "responsive to a city in crisis, for people who have great educational and recreational needs."

To do this, Ivan is active in civic affairs and works closely with the news media, schools, civic groups and professional organizations in the city.

Before coming to JNEM in January Ivan was director of personnel for the Service. Before that, he was personnel officer for the Southwest Region.

Under Ivan's direction, the park has helped sponsor music and dance programs at the Arch, rotating art exhibits and, in December, Christmas trees decorated in the styles of St. Louis's various ethnic groups.

In addition, JNEM has an active 1971, environmental education program. The Gateway Arch doubles as an environmental study area, and last year environmental education specialists Dick Youse and "Perry" Fuller brought 68,000 inner-city children to the park.

Alice Peterson, a VIP at the Old Courthouse, demonstrates hand work on an afghan to Park Technician Will Hlavac and Assistant Superintendent Jack Wheat. (NPS photo)

"We emphasize the environmental as well as the historical aspects of the park," Perry explains. "We start with the past, but explain that things are going on now, too."

He says that they also take students to nearby state parks. Last year they worked closely with the Missouri Botanical Gardens to develop the arboretum as an environmental center.

Under Park Technician Will Hlavak's guidance, some rooms in the Old Courthouse have been turned into typical nineteenth century frontier cabins where quilting and weaving and other crafts are shown.

Just opened in the Old Courthouse is a nineteenth century trading post, staffed by a costumed "trader," which contains not just furs, but also goods that the settlers needed—flour, silverware, soap, etc.

Charles Ross, chief of I&RM, oversees a large staff of VIP's (volunteers in parks) who give the various demonstrations.

"Last year had over 100 people as volunteers," he said. "Some helped with the living history program or assisted the librarian. Many performers were VIP's too, including a full symphony orchestra, some Hopi Indian dancers and a steel drum band."

He says that next year they will try for a strong "Summer in the Parks" type program. Urban Intake Trainee Dick Danielson helped draft a proposal for the program, which will be a cooperative venture between NPS, state and local parks, schools and organizations.

"Beaver was the most important fur," says Park Technician Frank Joachimsthaler, holding a specimen in the trading post room of the Old Courthouse. "St. Louis was the fur trading center of the world for many years, " he explains. "Fur trade is what opened up the west." (NPS photo)

Because of these many activities, Superintendent Parker has been presented with the mayor's award for contributions to civic progress. In addition, he has been asked to be part of the planning team and the steering committee for the new convention center in St. Louis.

When people come to JNEM (some 25,000 daily during the peak summer season), most head for the Gateway Arch. And despite its prominence above, most activities there are below ground.

A slowly sloping walkway leads some 20 feet down to the glass door entrances of the visitor center. Inside is a huge reception hall with fountains, exhibits and two theaters (one not yet opened.)

Two trains, one in each leg of the Arch, make a four-minute curving climb to a glassed-in observation room at the top. Electrically powered, the trains consist of eight linked capsules, each holding up to five passengers.

Keeping both trains going is the number one problem during the heavy visitor season, according to Roy Scown, chief of maintenance.

"Maintenance during the visitor season is a 16-hour a day operation, seven days a week," he says. He has some 25 maintenance employees to assist him.

Harry Breitenstein, Foreman III, says that preventative maintenance is the key to keeping the trains running.

"It's the little things that give us problems," he says. "For instance, we have forty different safety switches, all of them spread out and difficult to reach. Any one of them could cause the train to stop."

Obviously Harry has them under control, for they've never had a major breakdown on the trains.

"Harry can touch the rails and know when something is wrong," boasts Superintendent Parker.

Park Ranger Doug Harding talks to a family during Fair St. Louis. (NPS photo)

Future Plans

Future plans include completion of the south theater underground, the outdoor lighting and the landscaping. A pedestrian bridge is to be built over the busy thoroughfare that separates the Arch from the Old Courthouse.

Also to be built beneath the Arch, in an underground area the size of a football field, is the Museum of Westward Expansion. When completed it will be the largest museum in the Park System.

According to Milton Thompson, park historian, the museum will present a chronicle of the westward movement of Americans beyond the Mississippi from 1803 to 1890. It will combine history, natural history, science, technology, art and music to tell the story from the various points of view of the people involved.

(A feature on the museum appeared in the July 1972 issue of Architectural Record magazine.)

Now being proposed is development of the East St. Louis waterfront, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi. The area is a maze of railroad tracks and box cars, warehouses and barge loading facilities.

As Interior Secretary Rogers C.B. Morton concluded on his visit there last September, "The Arch—which is just as magnificent as I thought it would be—has set a standard for the cultural development of the riverfront...I think it would be a shame if we do a great job on one side of the river and not on the other."

            Text from NPS Newsletter, Vo. 8 No. 1, January 22, 1973.

The highlight of a visit to Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (JNEM) is a ride to the top of the 630' Gateway Arch for a panoramic view of the surrounding area. This ride is in the form of a special transportation system, a unique combination of train, elevator and amusement park ride. From the very inception of the Arch in 1947, architect Eero Saarinen envisioned a "sky ride" to take visitors to the top of the Arch. Saarinen felt that one way to interpret the memorial would be to allow visitors to see the downtown area of St. Louis, the mighty Mississippi River, and the land stretching to the West. In a 1948 description of his plans, Saarinen imagined a family at the top of the Arch, seeing "the great plains beyond the city... [and] the great droves of people who landed here and passed under your very feet on their way to open up the West." But Saarinen had no idea how to get people up the inside of his curving structure. Technology and creativity would have to be used to solve the problem.

As plans for the Arch were revised in 1957 and money became available for its construction, the Saarinen firm began to search for an elevator company to create a "sky ride." None of the major firms would touch the project, however, fearful that in any system so unique a breakdown or accident would generate lawsuits and unfavorable publicity. Then, in early 1960, a man named Dick Bowser stopped to visit a friend at the Montgomery Elevator Company offices in Moline, Illinois.

Bowser had worked at many jobs over the years, including an apprenticeship to his father, who was an elevator man. Bowser left the University of Maryland without obtaining a degree in 1942 and enlisted in the Navy, serving on a destroyer in the Pacific. After the war, Bowser invented, manufactured and installed parking garage elevators which could travel horizontally and diagonally through a structure, eliminating ramps and driveways. Bowser's friend at Montgomery Elevator told him about Saarinen's "transporter" project for the Gateway Arch, and had his secretary call Saarinen's office. "By the time he handed the telephone to me, recalled Bowser, "there were two of Saarinen's partners on the line. Their first question was, 'did an elevator have to travel vertically?' I said I didn't think so. I could remember that my father built and installed a dumbwaiter that transferred from one hatchway to another about half way up its vertical travel ... Their next question was, 'when can you meet with Eero Saarinen?'"

A month after their initial meeting, Saarinen called and requested a presentation from Bowser, as an independent contractor, for a workable Arch transportation system. The catch was what Bowser had to come up with a concept within two weeks. Bowser recalled that "The first drawing that I got had an outline of the Arch, and down at the bottom was a square that said 'elevator'—that's all there was." Bowser sketched, computed and dreamed day and night for the next two weeks to complete his plans, at home in his basement. Bowser recalled that his criteria included a National Park Service estimated passenger volume of 3,500 people in an 8-hour day, or up to 11,000 people in a 14-hour day. Although Saarinen forbade any distortion of the exterior of the Arch, Bowser had a free hand on the inside.

Bowser first looked at elevators. But getting people to the top of a 63-story catenary curve would require more than an ordinary elevator. The Arch is a triangle in cross section, and the different slopes of its curve limited a standard elevator to only the first 300 feet. Above that level, a smaller elevator which could travel at a steeper angle would be required. Between the larger and smaller elevators would have to be machine rooms, pits, and waiting spaces which would have consumed about six stories of the interior of the Arch. Bowser rejected standard elevators early in his two-week search for a solution.

Next he turned to escalators but, once again, many units would have been needed, and the cost would have been very high. Additionally, in the upper sections of the Arch the slope of an escalator would not have followed the required curvature. Bowser next considered a Ferris wheel principle. He recalled that "this involved utilizing small containers of people, with their seats pivoted to swing at any angle. This approach involved a continuous chain pulling seats which would go up one leg of the Arch and come down the other; but the distance... would have been almost half a mile, too long for any chains or cables to negotiate successfully. The Ferris wheel system would also have had to move on the center line of the Arch, and no provision could be made for passengers to get off at the top observation area. Finally, a combination of the elevator principle and the Ferris wheel principle was developed into a train of capsules." Designing capsules small enough to fit in the cramped upper levels of the Arch was the key to solving the problem of space.

After two weeks, Dick Bowser traveled to the offices of Eero Saarinen Associates in Michigan for a 45-minute presentation. Bowser expected a preliminary meeting with the architect and his staff, but instead walked into a room filled with St. Louis area congressmen, the mayor of St. Louis, construction engineers, and Director of the National Park Service George B. Hartzog, Jr. Bowser made a 40-minute pitch of his ideas for the trams, then endured several hours of relentless questioning. He refused to be intimidated by the group, even though he was an independent contractor with a college degree. His straightforward and simple style won over the group, who realized that his unique solution to the problem was the only practical plan they had seen.

Tram repair, March 1978 (NPS photo)

Within a few weeks Bowser had a contract, for a fee of $40,000, for a two-year job; as it turned out, the job lasted six years, until 1967, and Bowser stayed on with the Park Service maintenance staff at the Arch until 1972. Bowser's original scheme was altered very little from the idea he conceived during a two-week period in 1960. The eight small capsules, used in each of the two Arch trains, "are similar to the barrels used in cement mixers," according to Bowser.

"Each train capsule has a 5' diameter barrel.... The back has a center pivot shaft, and surrounding the open front there is a frame with rollers. The barrel can rotate within the frame, which is supported by wheels running in channel-shaped tracks.

"There are 5 seats in each capsule, so the weight of the passengers helps keep it in an upright position. Each capsule rotates approximately 155 degrees during the trip to the top of the Arch. When the capsule starts out in the load zone, the tracks are overhead, but as it goes up the Arch they come to be beneath the capsule. All the way along, the framework rotates around the capsule. A separate train runs in each leg of the Arch because there is great deal of difference in the amount of time that loading takes at the top, where it is cramped, and at the bottom, where there is a great deal of room. Each train of eight capsules is powered by a typical heavy-duty elevator machine with cables, counterweights and all of the safety features of a modern high-speed passenger elevator. Each of the Arch trains carries 40 passengers and is capable of making a round trip in 9 minutes—including loading and unloading passengers in both directions. When running near capacity each train typically carries 200 to 225 passengers per hour."

The trams have been operating for 30 years, traveling a total of approximately 300,000 miles and carrying over 27 million passengers. The final car design was by Planet Corporation of Lansing, Michigan, and they were built by General Steel Industries Inc. St. Louis Car Division, from Reynolds aluminum supplied by Joseph T. Ryerson & Son. The five fiberglass seats in each capsule are the only components of the cars and carrier frames not made of aluminum; they were designed by Eero Saarinen.

The trams were considered to be a transportation system, and found financing for construction and day-to-day operations from the Bi-State Development Agency, a local corporation licensed to run mass transportation in the St. Louis area. The unique partnership between Bi-State and the NPS at the Arch has allowed the dreams of Eero Saarinen and Dick Bowser to become a reality. A maintenance crew, dedicated to the Arch tram system, comprise some of the most specialized people in the NPS, with a history of innovative solutions to their credit. Their mission is to keep the trams running, and the service record of the system is a testament to their effectiveness. The Arch trams are a premier example of the uses of technology in interpretation. The Arch tram system created by Dick Bowser is as unique and special as the Arch itself, and is one of the many amazing aspects of Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.

Bob Moore is a historian at Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, St. Louis, Missouri.

            Text from CRM, Vol. 21 No. 2, 1998.

National Park Service Employee Chuck Kalert with the Old Light Bulb From the Top of the Arch. (NPS photo)

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