Your first sight is the Gateway Arch, the tallest national monument in the country at 630 feet, taller than the Washington Monument. Designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, who won the design competition in 1947, the Arch wasn't completed until 1965. The keystone piece was fitted on October 28th of that year, with crews working from both legs simultaneously.
The geometry is a weighted catenary curve — the same shape a chain makes when you hang it between two points — which gives it both its beauty and its structural strength. It memorializes the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, when President Thomas Jefferson doubled the size of the United States for just three cents an acre, and the subsequent Lewis and Clark Expedition that departed from near this very spot in May 1804. Inside the Arch, tiny tram cars carry visitors to the top in four minutes.
On a clear day you can see 30 miles. Look east across the Mississippi into Illinois — that's where westward expansion truly began. This silver parabola is America's grandest punctuation mark, the exclamation point on a continent.