A family trip to St. Louis in the mid-1960s was the first thing that came to mind when I saw Meredith Talusan’s post about the December 8 cover of The New Yorker.
The Gateway Arch was not quite finished. Two graceful arcs of gleaming stainless steel reached into the muggy summer air toward a single point in the sky.
We may still be back there in 1965 in some sense, hoping for an end to division.
While the magazine cover works on one superficial level, though, the artist could have done better. As we all know, the two sides of the arch did meet 630 feet above the riverside.
The gap that has yet to close is far from unique to St. Louis and has nothing to do with the iconic arch.
The Smith Compound 