“Oh Punching Kitty! You guys are always so down on St. Louis, but this headline is the worst yet. You know full well that you can stop in St. Louis and you won’t get robbed! This is a huge important city with lots of food trucks, and yes there is crime, but it’s not nearly as bad as you make it out to be! Why don’t you do positive stories about St. Louis, like how we have food trucks, or how awesome it is to sit at a coffee shop you’ve never heard of in South St. Louis that I think is cool because old black people walk by and it makes me feel less like the rich white kid who pays extra for this vintage plaid shirt that I always roll up the sleeves on even though its cold.”

Fellow St. Louisans, let us drop a senario on you and you tell us when you start to get worried: A Marine and wife were visiting family near St. Louis after recently coming back from a tour in Afghanistan (Eh, ok. Not too worried yet.) and while on their way to the airport to fly back to where he is stationed in Hawaii (Sounds nice!) they decided to stop in and visit the Arch (Hmm..it’s not as cool as it seems.)

I think we all can agree the St. Louis’ monument the Gateway Arch certainly has some special powers. For example it’s pretty clear that thing is some how a super magnet for attracting street crime, crappy hockey goalies and cheesy tourist calendar photographers, but maybe there’s something else going on there…

The St. Louis Arch, a 636 ft. monument on the west bank of the Mississippi River, has stood for nearly forty years. It is a shining monument built to convey St. Louis’s role as the Gateway to the West. Only now has the reason for its construction as well as its true purpose been revealed.  It seems that some of the same scientists responsible for the doomsday weapon research in the deserts of the Southwest U.S. during the forties, were also interested in controlling the weather. They hoped to use weather control as a means to aid in troop movement and logistics for the Allies, as well as use it as a tactical weapon against the enemy. This, they hoped, would bring about a quick end to the war in Europe.

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An employee of the St. Louis Arch was pinned for 30 seconds between the south leg tram and the top of the shaft while working on electrical upgrades yesterday. I bet that hurt. One time we stubbed our town on the south leg of our coffee table and it hurt like hell. Like really hurt and still hurt the next day, probably just like this guy’s injury. The good news for him is that after two days we were fine and we got to limp around at work and make people ask us what happened. Yea! People talked to us!

One of the most frequent questions we are asked is: “Why doesn’t your site name have anything to do with St. Louis?” to which we always reply “It doesn’t need to. If the site does well, the name won’t matter and it will just seem St. Louis-y regardless. Having to put “STL” or “river” in every damn thing created around here is lame and lazy.

That question is actually #2 to one other question though: “Why don’t you have the Arch on your site anywhere?” which is interesting really since that’s the exact opposite question we have for nearly every business or organization in St. Louis: Why the hell do you think you need to put the Arch in all your logos?! Yes, we get it that the Arch is St. Louis’ nationally recognized symbol, and because of that, it makes sense for tourism logo’s to include the arch visual…it still makes no sense as to why anything else has the arch in it. Quite simply, the Arch doesn’t really mean a lot to actual St. Louisans. How many of you have actually been up in the Arch? We bet fewer than you might think. Flat out, the Arch is not something the average St. Louisan thinks about at all. Hell, only a small fraction of the St. Louis area can even see the arch and a regular basis and even city dwellers don’t give a crap.

The forums at SkyscraperPage.com have some great old photos of downtown pre-Arch.  You wouldn’t think it would look that foreign, but it does.

This is like looking at a clean-shaven KFC’s Colonel Sanders or watching a Brendan Ryan that can play baseball.