The new park grounds do that beautifully. City officials worried that the arch experience was essentially a drive-by affair they wanted to draw people above ground, outside, and into the rest of the city. The old arch was sandwiched between the interstate and a railway, mainly accessed through a parking garage into which one could drive, walk along an underground passage, hop into the bitty elevator cars that transport visitors to the arch’s top, walk back to the garage, and go without ever having to step outside. The renovation really was beautifully done and, according to old reports, pretty badly needed. Still, we were excited to see its new museum and updated grounds. So we came to Gateway Arch with a smidgen of side-eye. Shiny and new for the unveiling of the big renovation, but still appropriate to what the site actually protects, which is history and a huge man-made structure NOT natural resources. A more appropriate name change (for us and for the National Park Service and for every single ranger we spoke to at the site) would have been Gateway Arch National Memorial, or Monument. The arch hardly ever got called by its first name anyway, and it’s pretty obscure and distinctly un-catchy. They’re the ones trying to keep this whole public lands thing alive in the first place.Īlas, Congress did not listen to the National Park Service, deciding instead to sign the legislation that would change “Jefferson Expansion National Memorial” to “Gateway Arch National Park.” For the record, we love the “Gateway Arch” part. So if, as was the case with Gateway Arch, they come out against legislation to change a park site’s name, saying that they think the proposed name is inappropriate and they’d like to go a different direction, we side with the national park service. Because the national park service has to regularly fight for its life, balancing the corporate-henchmen-slash-Congresspeople that decide its future with the complex and fraught imperative of “conserving unimpaired”, dealing with the hordes that come to experience America’s national wonders and leave behind mountains of trash, graffiti, and literal poop while also seeking to educate, inspire and uplift, and do it all in ill-fitting polyester uniforms. But only a real national park geek is going to read through the legislation establishing every other park and notice the glaring difference.Īnd, obviously, it matters to us. With Gateway Arch’s renaming, the name doesn’t match the designation-the arch was never legally designated as a true national park. named “national park” had to go through an extensive process of proving its resources were worthy of protection, Gateway Arch’s legislation just basically says, “we wanna change the name so let us do it, the end.”Ī bad precedent for the national parks system, yes? Because while the arch has been managed by the national park service for as long as it has existed, the NPS has always distinguished between different kind of parks by giving them different names that signify different designations-until now. Louis, Missouri was reopened on Junder its new name “Gateway Arch National Park”.įrom the time we heard about this name change we were not very stoked on it, mainly because while each of the other 59 places in the U.S. After five years of renovation, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St.
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