All you gotta do is listen!
St. Louis is rich in history, and that can make the city marketable!
This month, our plug is Heat Up St. Louis! If you would like to donate, please visit their site at https://heatupstlouis.org/
SOURCES
https://www.enjoymtvernon.com/see-do/art-history/art-in-the-city/#
https://www.history.com/articles/stl-gateway-arch-design
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
I drive around a lot and I’m constantly seeing advertisements for cities both big and small that are trying to attract visitors to not just stop at their interstate exits, but come in and explore them.
For example, just outside St. Louis, there’s a billboard for Mt. Vernon, Illinois right now that has a big picture of what I can only describe as a metal gorilla on it. My son and I have been trying to figure out for weeks what this is even supposed to be, because we’ve been to Mt. Vernon and we’ve never seen this thing.
So finally, I decided to visit the tourism website for Mt. Vernon, and after seeing it in a sizzle reel and doing some further digging, I discovered that this is a public art piece installed in 1990 called “Gorilla” by Chicago artist John Kearney that was built out of car bumpers.
The website further explains:
“In addition to “Gorilla”, Cedarhurst Center for the Arts is home to the nearly 80 acre Goldman-Kuenz Sculpture Park, featuring over 70 large scale sculptures.”
That’s honestly really cool. Mt. Vernon’s just an hour from St. Louis and I’ve been there many times, but I never even knew this place existed. Future weekend road trip, planned!
But here’s the thing about cities marketing themselves – they very rarely have anything as interesting as a car bumper gorilla sculpture to entice you, and most of the time, their marketing centers around things that aren’t available year-round, like festivals or fairs or crop harvests or big events. And even when they do have some sort of distinctive feature, like the Cloud Gate metal Bean in Chicago or the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles or Bourbon Street in New Orleans or the infamous World’s Largest Ball of Twine in Darwin, Minnesota, they’re often not super visible from the road and you have to actually drive into the city just to see them.
But here in St. Louis, we have a monument that’s so famous that it defines what our city is known for. You can see it from miles away while you’re driving on the highway and it’s honestly such an impressive and interesting sight even when you drive by it every day, like I do as I head across the Mississippi river, that your eyes are still drawn to it.
I’m of course talking about the Gateway Arch, the most famous feature of the St. Louis skyline and one of the greatest national monuments in the world. And it’s not just a kitschy tourist trap you walk around and look at for a few minutes while you snap some photos – it’s a true destination, with an underground museum, an interior tram ride to the top, and an observation area where you can take a look at both sides of the river and see what St. Louis truly is.
It’s great marketing, too, because it not only helps St. Louis to stand out visually and artistically, but it also helps to inspire a sense that St. Louis really stands for something important as a city smack dab in the middle of flyover country.
This is a city with some wonderful architecture, some incredible artwork and some of the best free attractions in the entire country, including an amazing Zoo and a top-notch Science Center and Art Museum all within a few blocks of one another.
This is a city that still celebrates its hosting of the World’s Fair in 1904 by preserving many of those grounds and buildings in Forest Park and which has been the starting point or long-term home for many major organizations and businesses, including Anheuser-Busch, Ralston Purina, the payment processor Square, Panera Bread, Express Scripts, Build-A-Bear Workshop and Famous Footwear.
This is a city of history, where Lewis and Clark started their famous journey, where West-bound settlers would stock up for supplies before departing for their claims, where the first ever heart transplant was completed at Washington University School of Medicine and where local aviator Charles Lindbergh built his famous plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, before flying it across the Atlantic in a first-ever feat.
This is also a city that has had to grow and evolve and reckon with a dark past rooted in slavery and segregation and find a way to evolve along with the transformation of the country on both sides of it, both socially and commercially.
St. Louis is often called the Gateway to the West… and the Arch is a signifier of everything our city’s been through! And we marketers can learn a lot of lessons from it.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
St. Louis hasn’t always had a Gateway Arch – turning the soil to allow for construction on this national monument didn’t even begin until 1959, and the monument was built between 1963 and 1965.
In fact, the plot of land that the Arch is situated on, which is historically known as the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, was set aside for decades for the purposes of building a monument before the Arch was even planned.
St. Louis itself is a pretty old city by North American terms – it was first founded in 1764 by the French as a hub along the Mississippi river and eventually came under control by the Spanish. When President Thomas Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, St. Louis and the basin along the Mississippi River became part of the United States, and St. Louis became an important trading port city for getting goods from the East to the ready-to-settle West.
Now, I want to take a moment to acknowledge – this all was completely ignoring the presence of indigenous tribes across the lands that the United States now claimed as its own land, and what the US actually purchased was the right to conquer and occupy these lands without interference from other European powers. Just across the river from St. Louis in Illinois, there was a major indigenous city called Cahokia that existed into the mid-18th century, and it wasn’t until 1818 that the Treaty of Edwardsville was signed where various tribal leaders ceded lands in Illinois to the United States.
Let’s also go ahead and mention that when Missouri was admitted as a state in 1821, it was as a slave state and St. Louis was a pro-slavery town that was quite hostile to abolitionists across the river in Illinois. St. Louis is the city that kicked off the Dred Scott v. Emerson case that led to Dred Scott v. Sandford, unquestionably the worst decision the US Supreme Court ever issued and which effectively nationalized slavery and stripped black people of their citizenship and Constitutional rights and legal standing.
Historians say this was one of the biggest reasons the country wound up in a Civil War, and St. Louis has continued to have a rather unfortunate legacy of oppression against the black community in the decades that followed, including hyper-segregation leading to some truly terrible incidents that include forcing black communities out of different parts of town, the incredible failure of the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects and, more recently, police brutality against the black community that’s led to protest uprisings in Ferguson and St. Louis City.
It’s really, really important that we accept that for all the good St. Louis has to offer, the city and the broader metro area have also had to reckon with these issues repeatedly over the last 262 years.
It’s also important that we recognize that Dred Scott did win his and his family’s freedom in 1857 due to a fortunate turn of events and even became a minor celebrity around town until he died of tuberculosis in 1858. Today, there’s a state of him and his wife, Harriett, standing right below the Arch on the grounds of the Old Courthouse.
That’s part of our St. Louis story, too. We can be better people if we try, and we can work hard to learn lessons from the injustice of our past.
But let’s get back to the Gateway Arch, because it, too, has a rather interesting story of twists and turns behind its construction!
The St. Louis riverfront was historically a bustling commercial site where riverboats would stop and unload cargo that could be taken into the city’s warehouses and exchanges for sale. But as the railroads became a more important part of the commercial infrastructure, shipping goods by riverboat was less important and the riverfront area around St. Louis needed some revitalization. A civic leader named Luther Ely Smith felt the land could be used for a national monument and convinced the mayor, Bernard Dickmann, to help him establish a committee to build a public memorial honoring President Thomas Jefferson and others responsible for the Louisiana Purchase.
The project was estimated to cost around $30 million – or over half a billion in today’s dollars! – and the locals weren’t exactly onboard with this idea considering that St. Louis was struggling from its underinvestment in railways and the Federal Government had to become involved to underwrite most the expense.
Eventually, President Roosevelt approved the memorial in 1935 with an executive order and named it the first National Historic Site. Part of Roosevelt’s interest in the project was to create jobs in the St. Louis area in line with his New Deal policies. But very little happened over the next 20 years, in part because Congress didn’t deliver all the funding it’d allocated and in part because there was a second World War that occupied a lot of the government’s attention.
There was also a lot of disagreement over what the monument should look like, and the desire for something spiritually inspiring dictated a monument that would be tall and visible, but also not something that would become outdated or fall out of favor as cultural or aesthetic tastes changed. So, something more like the Washington Monument with its high visibility, clean lines and abstract meaning and less like an ornate, gaudy sculpture depicting Thomas Jefferson directing Lewis and Clark to explore while Columbia and angels looked on.
The Gateway Arch, which was designed by Eero Saarinen and was one of hundreds of designs submitted and one of 172 ultimately put in front of a jury in 1947. Some of the competing designs included a college campus, reshaping the riverfront to look like a giant plow, various statues, gates or even parks that included pylons or columns.
I don’t want to trivialize these designs – many would have had large observation areas and public spaces and would have certainly been nice features. And in fact, one of them was submitted by Eliel Saarinen, the famous father of the ultimate winner of the competition.
But the reason Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch design was selected was because it was the sort of impossible dream that the jurists realize would make St. Louis stand out. The idea of it fusing the historical term “gateway to the west” with a modern design was incredibly appealing, and the whole design was sufficiently larger than life to really make an impression. The original design was supposed to rise 590 feet up in the air, but the final design was even taller – 630 feet, and still, by requirement, the tallest structure in the City of St. Louis and the tallest arch in the world.
Even after winning the contest and getting the chance to bring his idea to life, Eero Saarinen didn’t actually get to see it constructed – he died in 1961, which was when the foundation was still being laid. The construction of the Arch had numerous setbacks due to funding and politics as well as the need to relocate railway lines, and many locals felt it was a bad idea that was doomed for failure.
When construction finally did begin in 1963, it attracted millions of curious people over the course of the year, but also a lot of negative attention.
Beyond continued funding issues, there were concerns about worker safety, there were problems with union infighting, there were legal disputes, and there was a major controversy about the disproportionate number of black workers who were working on the project, leading to civil rights activists protesting racial discrimination.
The structure was also difficult and time-consuming to build due to its curved shape and exacting specifications.
The project was supposed to be finished in 1964 in time for the city’s bicentennial but dragged on until 1965, when President Lydon Johnson presided over the topping off ceremony. Even so, the interior was not finished and it took another two years for the Arch to be available to the public so that people could begin entering the visitor’s center, explore the exhibits and ride the tram to the top. All of that was finally available in the summer of 1967.
But as troublesome as it was to build the Arch, the entire 30-year endeavor brought with it a transformation of downtown St. Louis, including the construction of the similarly modern-looking Busch Memorial Stadium and many of the hotels and buildings in the surrounding skyline. When the Arch was being built, St. Louis was far from an impressive city, and its courthouse was its most defining feature. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the city looked brand new, gleaming, exciting and inspiring.
The riverfront area became a hotbed for tourism and riverboats offering restaurants and gift shops lined the waterway. Downtown St. Louis boomed with tourists coming into town to visit the Gateway Arch and to see the St. Louis Cardinals play practically next door. Though the city itself and the metro area beyond it spread for miles past the Mississippi, St. Louis’s most famous feature was now its Gateway Arch, and even today, any depiction you’ll see of the city of St. Louis will include the Arch.
We even use it in the logo for this podcast!
But why, you may be wondering, am I bringing this up as an important topic for marketing?
Well, the undercurrent to all of this is that St. Louis is itself barely considered a major US city by modern standards. We rank #80 in terms of city size and #23 in Metropolitan Statistical area.
In fact, in the early 20th century, St. Louis was rivaling the size of Chicago, but as St. Louis bet on riverboats and Chicago bet on railroads, the forward-thinking approach turned out to be the better one. Today, Chicago’s metro area is over three times the size of St. Louis’s, and it’s still growing while St. Louis’s population and industry is pretty stagnant.
But that Arch! That magnificent monument that stands on the Eastern edge of the city, still means something, because it tells a story about the history and the dedication of the people who still live here and who are still instrumental in bridging the Eastern and Western halves of the country.
It speaks to our values and our purpose not just as people who’ve settled in the Midwest, but who are a part of a history and a legacy that has seen many bad things happen, but also many positive instances where people have come together, worked out their problems and been able to accomplish something inspiring and enduring.
And in a time of division, that symbol is something that unifies us, which gives us a common story to tell and a common purpose to drive us. It helps the world to not write St. Louis off as yet another city full of people whose best days are behind us, but instead as a place full of people who are constantly focused on bridging the past and the present to achieve greater things.
There’s no clearer symbol for St. Louis than the Gateway Arch. And there’s no dissociating the two in our collective consciousness now that it exists.
I can’t think of a better way for a city to tell its story than that. And I challenge us all, as marketers, to think about the many lessons we can learn from what taking the time to build something inspiring and enduring can do to ensure that your efforts aren’t erased by history, but instead become a valuable part of it.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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