The Gateway Arch Was Completed in St. Louis
On this day · 28 October 1965
On a chilly October morning in 1965, crews wedged a single keystone into place and finished America's tallest monument.
On October 28, 1965, workers in St. Louis lifted the final stainless steel section into place, completing the 630-foot Gateway Arch after roughly 33 months of construction. The slim, gleaming curve was designed by architect Eero Saarinen, who won a 1947 competition but died in 1961, before any steel rose from the riverbank.
Fitting that last piece was the hard part. The two legs had been built separately, and as they neared the top they were only feet apart. Crews used heavy hydraulic jacks to spread the legs wide enough to slip the triangular keystone between them, then released the pressure so the structure settled into a single weight-bearing arch.
The Arch stands taller than the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty.
Clad in stainless steel and engineered to sway gently in high winds, the monument became the centerpiece of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, now Gateway Arch National Park. It remains the tallest arch and the tallest accessible monument in the United States, a symbolic gateway to the American West.
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