美国最具标志性的地标之一是在其所代表的城市基础设施中最不协调的环境之一中。现在，工作人员正在重建该基础设施，以便到2017年将重新连接到市区。
ENR visited the project as part of its Low & Slow Across America's Infrastructure tour in May to investigate how agencies are getting important projects done in an era of constant funding battles. Those agencies included numerous public-works departments situated deep in the trenches.
在预算紧张和紧迫的基础设施需求的时候，一系列私人和公共利益相关者聚集在一起为这项耗资3.8亿美元的项目提供资金。公众私人伙伴关系瑞安·麦克卢尔（Ryan McClure）表示，主要机构是密苏里州运输部，国家公园管理局，大河格林威，圣路易斯市和双州发展局。该项目。
"Ever since 1965, [officials] have been talking about how to connect the arch to the city," says McClure. "There have been many plans but no traction." That changed, he added, when in 2007 St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay (D) convened a meeting of local leaders to push the issue. "A lot of the collaboration wasn't so much the buy-in from the community as in from the leadership-the folks going around the table saying 'I need buy-in from you and you and you,'" says Drew Gates, a MoDOT spokesman.
MoDOT led the way by applying, in 2011, for a $20-million TIGER grant and contributing $25 million. Deanna Venker, former MoDOT area engineer and now St. Louis traffic commissioner, says a new NPS plan galvanized MoDOT to take action. "We saw the writing on the wall: Everything was coming together on this project that had been around for 20-plus years," she recalls. "There was always a money issue, it never was the right time, and we never had the right people coming together-then we had the right leadership."
McClure calls the grant "a huge step forward." He adds: "At that point, it was just an idea. It had a lot of political and community support, but that was the first real large chunk of funding that came through." CityArchRiver raised another $10 million in private donations.
The landscape design firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates won a design competition held in 2009. "It was probably the hardest competition I'd ever been a part of," says Gullivar Shephard, a principal with MVVA. "There are so many complexities in working with the National Park Service; you can't just solve the problem with architecture and retail. It was a fascinating combination of how to craft places not only [with] problem-solving and engineering solutions but also by understanding how people behave."
麦克卢尔说，选民批准了2013年的销售税加息，该税为该项目提供了9000万美元。他补充说：“我们还没有在当地管辖范围内的其他地方找到一个榜样，以征税以改善国家公园。”
Historic Gap
The national park and the arch began construction in the early 1960s, while Interstate 70 also was being built, notes Patrick Boyle, construction manager for Alpha Corp., which represents the National Park Service in managing construction of the NPS-owned sections of the project. Eero Saarinen, architect of the arch monument, designed pedestrian bridges to span depressed lanes between the park and the city, but they were never built.
