Tag Archives: The Arch

A Night at the Museum

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The Eads Bridge on a Dark and Foggy Night

The Eads Bridge on a Dark and Foggy Night

It was a dark and stormy night, well it was. Thursday night we went down by the river, not in a van, but to the Arch. We attended the grand opening of the Maplewood-Richmond Heights Elementary School’s exhibit at the Arch’s museum. Last night, was more party than education. I guess Anne, her colleagues and their students, had already done all of that heavy lifting. In addition to the great social vibe of the evening, there were also cookies and free Arch tram rides.

The photo with this post is of the Eads Bridge, the oldest bridge across the Mississippi in Saint Louis. It demarcates the northern boundary of the Arch grounds. For once, I can claim fog as an excuse, instead of focus, for the fuzziness of this photograph. Still, I think that it makes for a great effect.

After the show, Anne and I retreated to the Tap Room, for a light supper and a brew. The Post-Dispatch had a great article about the school’s exhibit, that I’ll link to here. Individual students are interviewed and their commentary on the exhibit is priceless. We managed to dodge the occasional rain storm, on the Arch grounds and at the Tap Room, but our luck ran out, when we finally returned home.

Wreck of the USS Inaugural

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Flood Wall Art

This year’s drought is driving the Mississippi River’s water level to a record low in Saint Louis. Forecasts have the river hitting that record low in just a few weeks. These low river levels are playing havoc with river barge traffic. Hundreds of barges line the river’s edges, with no way to move. The low water is also uncovering ghosts from the past.

Low levels have revealed the wreck of the USS Inaugural. It sits on a sandbar just south of the MacArthur Bridge. The USS Inaugural (AM-242) was an Admirable-class fleet minesweeper during World War II. This sweeper was launched in October 1944, and was commissioned in December. The ship was decommissioned in 1946 and turned into a museum ship on the Arch riverfront in 1968. During the Great Flood of 1993, the boat was ripped from her mooring and grounded about a mile downstream, where she remains today.

Since breaching, it has been noticed that the 3″ gun (the one forward near the bow) was stolen from its mount sometime after mid-August. It weighs approximately 1,700 pounds, so it was not exactly a two-person job to walk away with it. Smaller 40mm anti-aircraft guns had previously disappeared. One is rumored to be found in Cementland, the Bob Cassilly art project, in north Saint Louis.

I bicycled downtown to see the Inaugural. I ended up wandering around for a while in the industrial expanse that is the Saint Louis riverfront south of the Arch. Eventually, I found the wreck. There was a crowd there, but on the way back I was passing alone through a rather sketchy area of abandoned warehouses, which is crisscrossed with both highway overpasses and railroad trestles. Even on large group rides, I’ve felt nervous riding through this area. Today, a car with two men in it pulled along side me and matched pace with me, even as I slowed to just a few miles an hour. More than a few long seconds later, another cyclist rounded the corner ahead and the car took off.

Last summer, I was invited to accompany several of my co-workers on a photographic expedition to this dilapidated warehouse district. Only, this time it would have been at two in the morning, instead of two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. My colleagues felt safe though, because they were carrying handguns. I didn’t go and nothing happened to them, but if you ask me that was like looking for trouble with a flash attachment.

Anne’s Explorers

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Today, Anne led Rey, Dave and I down to the Arch to view the Maplewood Richmond Heights Elementary School’s exhibit that is now on display there, School as Museum. For those not familiar with the place, underneath the Arch is the Museum of Westward Expansion. In cooperation with the National Park Service, MRH Elementary has taken over one of the galleries there.

The Arch Grounds Under a Dusting of Snow

The Arch Grounds Under a Dusting of Snow

The overall purpose of this project is to give the students an opportunity to explore museum functions and practices. Students in grades 2nd through 6th worked with National Park Service staff to learn more about museum functions and practices. The following three questions were posed as guidelines for this exploration:

  • How does a museum collect and protect artifacts?
  • How are museum exhibits designed?
  • What does a museum curator do?

Through a series of visits to both the Arch and the Old Courthouse, students learned about the roles and functions of museum personnel and how they preserve, exhibit, collect, interpret and document museum artifacts. These experiences tied into the actual design and development of an exhibit by each grade on a topic of their choice.

This fall Anne worked with the fourth graders. They chose to study European exploration. In this unit the students learned about European exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries. They examined artifacts, read secondary sources about different explorers and analyzed the dominate motives for European exploration.

The display they choose to share is of the inside of an explorer’s ship. This portion of the overall exhibit is intended to be walked through, as though you are actually on a ship. Once aboard this vessel, you are introduced to five explorers; you can stop and admire their portraits or stop and listen as their bust comes alive to tell you their tale. Anne is seen below, posing before the 4th grade exhibit.

Anne In Front of the 4th Grade Exhibit

Anne In Front of the 4th Grade Exhibit

After the Arch, we walked over to Laclede’s Landing. Once, a warehouse district, it is situated along the Mississippi, just north of the Arch grounds. It is now a restaurant and entertainment district and we headed to one of the older establishments there, Hannegan’s. Named for Robert Hannegan, a Saint Louis politician, Hannegan’s interior decor is modeled after the US Senate’s dining room.

I don’t know what the connection between Hannegan’s the restaurant and Hannegan the politician is, except that there are some of Bob Hannegan’s artifacts on display in the restaurant. The most interesting one that I saw was a letter to Hannegan from FDR saying that he would be happy to run with Hannegan’s suggested running mate, Harry S Truman. Hannegan was the Democratic chairman in 1944. Then we sent Rey on his way back to Tennessee.

Field Trip to the Arch

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Field Trip to the Arch

Anne took her fourth grade class to the Arch on Tuesday. They rode downtown by school bus to the old courthouse. There they got a dose of history, thanks to the National Park Service. They walked from the courthouse down to the Arch. You have to walk over I-70 to do this. The kids took the opportunity to with raised arms imitate the pulling of a cord to get the desired response from the passing semis. They were quite successful at this. At the Arch, the class went downstairs to the museum. After a seemingly endless bathroom break, involving Dyson hand-dryers, Anne got her students on to their main lesson. 

This field trip was part of the social studies subject. The class is studying Native Americans, mapping and explorers, cue Lewis and Clark. Where better to study these subjects than at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, the gateway to the west. Afterwards, the kids got to run around the base of the Arch a bit, before the buses picked them up on old Wharf Street, down by the river. Unlike in her dream, Anne did not lose a single child. She came home throughly exhausted though. As a school district taxpayer, I feel that I have totally gotten my money’s worth out of this field trip.