Gateway Arch: a walk from the Old Courthouse to the river

Welcome to Gateway Arch National Park, in the heart of downtown St. Louis, on the Mississippi River. The whole park is about ninety-one acres: the Arch, the free museum underneath it, the landscaped grounds around it, and the Old Courthouse, which was already a hundred years old when the Arch was built.

Long before any of it, this riverbank was a trading place. French merchants founded St. Louis here in 1764, on a river that was then an international border, and the village grew into a hub for trade with the American Indian nations of the region.

Today's walk goes from the Old Courthouse, across the park that bridges the highway, to both legs of the Arch, the top of the Grand Staircase above the river, and the South Pond. It's about two-thirds of a mile on paved paths. I'll tell a story at each stop and stay quiet in between. Leashed pets are welcome on the grounds, and yes, you're allowed to touch the Arch.

This is the Old Courthouse. Its cornerstone was laid in 1839, and the building took twenty-three years to finish. The dome rises a hundred and ninety-two feet, and for thirty years it made this the tallest habitable building in Missouri.

These steps hold some of the hardest history in the park. Enslaved people were sometimes sold from the steps of the east wing, to settle estates. And inside, more than three hundred enslaved people sued for their freedom between 1812 and 1865. Fewer than half won.

In 1846, Dred and Harriet Scott filed their suits for freedom here, and their first two trials were held in this building. Their case reached the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in 1857 that no African American could be a citizen. The park calls that decision one that hastened the Civil War. A bronze statue of the couple stands close by. In the 1870s, Virginia Minor's case for a woman's right to vote was tried here too.

The courthouse reopened in May 2025 after a long renovation, with new galleries and two restored courtrooms. It's free, and rangers lead tours most days. When you're ready, walk toward the Arch through the square across Fourth Street.

From this square, the Arch and the courthouse line up on a single axis. That wasn't the first plan. In the design that won the competition, the Arch wasn't in line with the courthouse at all. When the architect reworked the design in 1957, he said the relationship between the Arch and the historic courthouse it frames was now much stronger and clearer.

The interstate runs below, sunk on purpose to cut its noise, but for decades it still cut the Arch off from downtown. This green strip, the Park Over the Highway, opened in 2015 along with the renewed square, the first land bridge of its kind in Missouri. It was part of a three-hundred-and-eighty-million-dollar project, finished in 2018, the same year Congress renamed the memorial Gateway Arch National Park.

The land itself came at a price. Starting in 1939, the Park Service razed every building in the memorial area except two: the Old Cathedral and an old fur trader's warehouse. The park's own history calls it a major loss of St. Louis heritage.

Visitors heading inside the Arch go in through its west entrance, which faces this way, toward the courthouse.

This is the base of the north leg. Go ahead and touch it. The park says you're welcome to, as long as you don't mark or scratch it. Local legend says the Arch is shaped like a boomerang, because once you touch it, it keeps pulling you back to St. Louis.

What you're touching is the skin: quarter-inch plates of polished stainless steel. And here's the surprise. The Arch has no internal skeleton. Each leg is a triangle with two steel walls, stainless on the outside and carbon steel inside. Up to three hundred feet, the space between those walls is filled with concrete. Above that, the two steel skins carry all the weight themselves.

Down here, each side of the triangle is fifty-four feet across. At the top, it's seventeen. The Arch is six hundred and thirty feet tall, and exactly as wide from leg to leg. Its foundations go sixty feet down, thirty of those feet into bedrock. In a hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour wind, the top would move only about eighteen inches. And lightning rods on top carry the hundreds of strikes it takes each year straight down into the rock.

This is the top of the Grand Staircase, and below it is the Mississippi. Across the river is Illinois. For years this river was an international border. The town on this bank was French in culture and Spanish in government, home to Creole families, enslaved Africans and traders who did business with the region's Indian nations. It became part of the United States in 1804, the same year Lewis and Clark set out from the St. Louis area. They came back in 1806.

In 1817, the first steamboat arrived, and the levee below grew into a bustling port. By the 1840s and 1850s, hundreds of boats moored here every year, and the city made a fortune on its port fees. In 1849, a steamboat blew up on the crowded levee, and the fire spread into town, destroying fifteen blocks. The stone courthouse and the Old Cathedral survived, and the city rebuilt in brick and iron.

Notice the curves around you. The designers repeated the Arch's curve all over the grounds: in the sides of this staircase, and even in the overlook walls, which form an upside-down version of it.

This is the south leg. Picture the work going on high above you. Above about seventy feet, two creeper derricks, cranes of a hundred tons each, climbed the curving legs on their own tracks, lifting sections twelve feet high and fifty tons apiece. Setting a section took about half an hour, and the finished Arch has a hundred and forty-two of them.

At five hundred and thirty feet, the builders braced the two legs against each other with a steel truss two hundred and fifty-five feet long, while more sections went on. For the very last piece at the top, a jacking frame pressed against the two legs so it could be set into position. The Arch was completed on October 28, 1965. On their way back down, the derricks took up their tracks and plugged and smoothed the bolt holes they left in the steel.

The trams inside came later. The first ride to the top was on July 24, 1967, in little capsules designed by Dick Bowser, a man who never received a college degree. Each car seats five, and the ride up takes about four minutes.

This is the South Pond, and from its shore you get one of the views the designers planned: the Arch rising over the water and the trees. The ponds aren't only for looks. Water drained from around the underground visitor center is pumped into them.

The rolling hills here do quiet work too. They hide a railroad cut, several roads, a shipping point and a major highway, so well that most visitors never notice any of them.

The long walks were meant to be lined with a single kind of tree. Ash trees were planted, but with the emerald ash borer on its way, they were taken out in 2014, and the London plane trees along the walks today have been here since 2016.

Just beyond the grounds stands the Old Cathedral, built between 1831 and 1834 on ground that Laclede set aside, and one of only two buildings spared when the riverfront was cleared.

That's the end of the tour, and thank you for walking it with me. If you have more time, the museum under the Arch and the Old Courthouse are both free to visit.