When you hear the phrase “national park,” I generally imagine towering mountains, pristine lakes, and stunning landscapes, all with miles of hiking trails. A downtown block with paved walking paths and views of skyscrapers doesn’t come to mind.
And yet, that’s precisely what comprises America’s smallest (and, in my opinion, most absurd) national park: Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis, Mo.
I’ve lived in St. Louis for nearly a decade, and the fact that the Arch is a national park has always struck me as strange and somewhat ridiculous. The area is small and unimpressive, and isn’t naturally beautiful — yet it belongs to this elite cadre of federal lands.
Here’s the story of how this towering steel structure became a national park, and why that designation still causes debate today.
History of Gateway Arch National Park
The plan to build St. Louis’s most famous landmark, the Gateway Arch, began in the 1930s. Civic leader Luther Ely Smith had a vision of creating a national monument to honor Thomas Jefferson and the western expansion of the United States. He partnered with Bernard Dickmann, the city’s mayor, to form the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Association (JNEMA).
The group lobbied Congress to appropriate money, and also got a bill approved by local voters for funding. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order to create the memorial, to be managed by the National Park Service (NPS). Next came major demolition along several city blocks on the waterfront of the Mississippi River.
In 1947, the JNEMA announced an architectural competition to design the memorial. The winning entry — the iconic arch — came from young architect Eero Saarinen. Construction began in 1959, and the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial was opened to the public in 1967.
The memorial had two other components: a museum dedicated to the United States’ westward expansion, and the Old Courthouse. The city handed over the courthouse, which had been abandoned, to the federal government. It was the site of the well-known Dred Scott cases from 1847 and 1850.
Scott and his wife, Harriet, two enslaved persons, sued for their freedom in the Circuit Court of St. Louis County. This began an 11-year legal battle that culminated in 1857, when the Supreme Court ruled that slaves were property, not citizens, and thus could not sue. Historians widely agree that this decision ratcheted up tensions that helped incite the Civil War.
The area remained a national memorial until 2018, when Congress passed a law, which President Trump signed, to make it a national park, bestowing upon it the current name. The 91-acre park is the smallest national park.
The bill received bipartisan support. Its two main sponsors were Missouri’s senators, Republican Roy Blunt and Democrat Claire McCaskill.
Ongoing Debate
The history of the park itself is fraught, adding further reason to question its change in status.
According to historian Andrew Wanko, the public vote in 1935 to use public money to fund the memorial showed widespread fraud. The local newspaper found that more than 46,000 false registrations in the vote, but it was to no avail: The Missouri Supreme Court ordered the ballots destroyed.
In order to build the Jefferson Expansion Memorial and create a new historic area, construction crews destroyed many existing significant historic structures that some locals fought to preserve. In the 1960s, the construction company refused to hire African American workers, and local activists protested against racial discrimination.
As Wanko explains, “While Arch workers were out to lunch, activists Percy Green and Richard Daly climbed 100 feet up a ladder on the Arch’s north leg, refusing to come down for nearly four hours … It was one of multiple incidents that led the US Department of Justice to file its first ever ‘pattern or practice’ lawsuit against the St. Louis Building and Construction Trades Council — the first time in US history that the federal government had enforced equal employment opportunity.”
Lack of Nature
Making the memorial a national park is questionable for a variety of other reasons. There’s the obvious reality that, compared to other parks like Zion, Glacier, Joshua Tree, or Yellowstone, the Gateway Arch lacks any connection to nature.
While the Arch is certainly impressive and a feat of engineering, it is not a natural wonder. Riding the tram to the top of the arch gives you views of two things: a bunch of mediocre buildings in a dead downtown, and a commuter bridge over the Mississippi River. Even the park’s own website admits that “it is unusual for a national park to have no natural plant life.”
Back in 2018, the change sparked fierce criticism. On the park’s Facebook page, people weighed in with comments like, “John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt would be depressed by this,” and, “What a stupid thing to do.” A study of the controversy found that there was an inherent disconnect between what people associated with national parks (the environment) and what this park offered (values about America).
An online petition to revoke the status claimed that the area offered “no natural features, species, landscapes, or items meriting interest or conservation that can’t be found in a typical city park.”
NPS Opposition
Even by the NPS’s own standards, the Arch doesn’t belong with other national parks. According to the agency’s website: “A national park contains a variety of resources and encompasses large land or water areas to help provide adequate protection of the resources.” Moreover, there are no rare species or pristine landscapes that the Gateway Arch National Park is protecting.
The area aligns much better with its prior designation as a national memorial, which NPS says “is most often used for areas that are primarily commemorative.” As the park’s entire purpose was to commemorate President Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase, this classification makes sense.
In fact, in a Senate hearing in 2017, Acting Deputy Director of the NPS Robert Vogel recommended that the area be named a national monument, not a national park. “At only 91 federal acres, we believe that the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial is too small and limited in the range of resources the site protects and interprets to be called a national park,” he stated. Vogel compared it to the Statue of Liberty, which is a national monument: Both are something iconic in an urban landscape.
Vogel pointed out that the existing national parks at the time were all a minimum of 1,000 acres, which vastly dwarfed the tiny size of the Jefferson Memorial.
Economic Boost?
As the nonprofit media organization National Parks Traveler explains, “There long have been efforts by local groups, usually concerned about tourism dollars, to convert national monuments, national historic sites, national recreation areas, etc., into ‘national parks.’ Hands down, the reason is economic.”
The idea that the change was to bring in money to downtown St. Louis, which had been struggling financially for years, was a common refrain among critics.
If that was the intent, it was at least partially successful. In 2024, the park and nearby areas “generated more than $572 million in economic impact for the St. Louis region,” according to a study from the nonprofit Gateway Arch Park Foundation.
And yet, to someone who has lived here since 2016, downtown feels as dead as ever. Many restaurants open and shutter in less than a year. No local is going to voluntarily spend time there. As St. Louis Public Radio has documented, the revitalization of downtown still has decades to go, even after years of effort to turn things around.
And even as the park has brought in visitors, they don’t stay for long. The small size means that a tourist can easily see it in a few hours. It’s not like Zion or Glacier national parks, where people might spend a week or more. It’s also worth noting that the bill making it a national park did not include any additional funding.
The Optics
The Gateway Arch’s Museum of Westward Expansion does address some of the complicated history of the United States’ territorial expansion to the western coast of North America.
However, elevating a memorial that was built to glorify Manifest Destiny seems out of touch — even by 2018 standards. There’s also the disconnect that the park commemorates the legal fight of an enslaved Black man at the same time that it celebrates a founding father who owned slaves.
The NPS addresses this complex history throughout the park, and on the park’s website. “For some, it [the Arch] is a symbol of bravery, exploration, and perseverance. For others, it represents a legacy of conquest and displacement. For St. Louisans, it represents home. Perhaps what the arch represents most of all is America and how complex our history is,” the NPS states.
Other Parks
Some people believed that marking the Arch a national park diluted the brand of “national park.”
After all, if anything can be a national park, what makes them special? Gaining national park status is a rare privilege. Offering that designation to the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial means that other, more naturally beautiful places may have missed the opportunity.
National Parks Travelers remarked that other national monuments would also deserve the title (and the funding that comes with it).
“We do believe there are places in the National Park System where the ‘national park’ brand is deserved, but not bestowed. Foremost is Dinosaur National Monument,” the publication wrote.
Besides the Gateway Arch, only eight other national parks have been added since 2000: Cuyahoga Valley (2000); Congaree (2003); Great Sand Dunes (2004); Pinnacles (2013); Indiana Dunes (2019); White Sands (2019); and New River Gorge (2020).
So, Who Is This Park For?
I can think of three kinds of people who would visit Gateway Arch National Park.
There are tourists in town for a Cardinals or Blues game, and they find time for a quick visit. There are also locals who decide to cross off the “bucket list” item of taking the tram to the top of the Arch. And finally, there are the national park completists (people like my cousin) who are aiming to visit every single national park, no matter how silly or far away.
Since an act of Congress created the park, only an act of Congress can turn it back into a memorial, which is unlikely to happen. But in reality, it’s the right solution. The Gateway Arch National Park tells an important history about American slavery — a story inevitably overshadowed by the giant, steel monument to colonialism and American exceptionalism.
Barring an act of Congress, let’s use the Gateway Arch as a cautionary tale. We must exercise greater discretion and caution when designating a national park. The designation of “national park” attracts visitors, dollars, and prestige. There are many threatened natural areas, with endangered species, that would benefit more from that status than a few square blocks of pavement in Missouri.
