Look straight up the inside of that curve, where the two legs lean in toward each other. For two and a half years there were men up there — ironworkers walking bare steel with nothing under their boots but the wind off the river. This is the tale that belongs to them.
Here's the first thing you ought to know. Before a single beam ever went up, the insurance men ran their figures — the way insurance men do — and they decided a job this tall and this strange was going to cost lives. Thirteen of them. They put it in writing: as many as thirteen workers could be expected to die building this arch.
Now the fellow who drew it, Eero Saarinen, never laid eyes on so much as one raised beam. He died in nineteen sixty-one, better than a year before anybody broke ground. He left behind a curve on a drawing and a promise that it would stand — and after that it was up to the ironworkers to make the paper come true.
They started in February of nineteen sixty-three. Two legs, climbing up separate, leaning a hair closer to each other every week, held apart near the top by a great steel strut so they couldn't sag in before their time. The men rode creeper derricks up the outside and walked those bare triangular sections in the open air, sixty-some stories of nothing below their heels. And here's the part that still gets me, every time — through all of it, every name on every paycheck, not one of those men fell. Thirteen predicted. None. They buried nobody.
Then it all came down to one last piece. October twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-five. The two legs had each climbed six hundred and thirty feet and stopped just short of meeting, waiting on one final triangular section — the keystone, near ten tons of it, eight feet of stainless steel swinging on a cable. Slide it home, and the arch is finished. But the morning sun rose over the Mississippi and fell square on the south leg, and steel does what steel does in the heat — it grew. Grew just enough that the gap up top started closing on the wrong terms, pinching itself tight before that keystone could ever drop in.
So they got clever, the way working men get clever when the clock's against them. The Saint Louis fire department ran their hoses up the south leg and poured cold river water down that hot steel to shrink it back into line, while jacks down below muscled the two legs apart. They'd started early on purpose, to beat the sun, and now they were racing it straight up into the sky. Down on the ground a crowd ten thousand strong stood holding its breath. The vice president of the United States watched the whole business from a helicopter circling overhead. And welded up inside that last piece, where no living hand will ever reach it again, they sealed a time capsule — the signatures of seven hundred and sixty-two thousand schoolchildren, riding inside the keystone for as long as this arch stands.
And then the steel cooled, and the gap gave, and the keystone slid home. Two legs became one arch. The story goes the men up top didn't even whoop right away — they just stood there a long second, feeling it take the weight and hold.