A renovated downtown gathering green that frames the single most photographed sightline in St. Louis: the domed Old Courthouse, set perfectly inside the sweep of the stainless steel above it. At its heart sits a circular fountain and the leaping bronze figure popularly called The Runner, the work of immigrant sculptor William Zorach. The lawn fills on summer evenings with concerts, food trucks, and families cooling off in the splash jets. From here the whole national park reads in one glance, courthouse and monument lined along the same axis, and a wide paved path runs east toward the grounds. Benches, shade, and restrooms make it the natural place to begin, open daily and free to enter.
Welcome to the Gateway Arch National Park tour. I'm Ranger Quinn, your guide for the next mile or so, and walking along with us is Ranger Boone Merrick — when a stretch of this ground holds a tale worth stopping for, he's the one who'll tell it.
Now look east. There's that bronze figure caught mid-stride beside you — "The Runner," by an immigrant sculptor named William Zorach — and past him, the domed Old Courthouse. Rising right behind it, framing the whole building inside its curve, six hundred and thirty feet of stainless steel. The Courthouse, cradled inside the Arch. It's the most famous view in St. Louis, and you're standing in the best place on earth to see it.
Hold onto that frame, because it's the whole tour. The Arch is the myth — the Gateway to the West, the silver curve the whole country knows on sight. The ground it rises from is the ledger: a courtroom where an enslaved family sued for their freedom, a riverbank that once burned down to the water, a thousand-year-old city erased before any of this was built. One monument to the westward dream — and right beneath it, the price of it.
These grounds are free, flat, and paved the whole way, open from five in the morning to eleven at night. The tour follows you on your phone the whole way — stop whenever you like, and it waits right there; just tap play to pick up where you left off.
When you're ready, walk east toward that dome — the Old Courthouse is where we begin.
Photo: Kevin McCoy / Darxus · CC BY-SA 3.0
