They lit the Arch the other night! The once gently reflective Arch is now a glaring spectacle of rust-resistant metal, a modernist artwork turned into a postmodern icon. In the process, its value as art in the nighttime, when it had been most poignant, slips from a way of looking at the city reflected and distorted by a simple arch to that of a silly hulk that wants to be reflected. Already it had long been an icon to stand for all of St. Louis to natives and visitors, and that was fine. It embodied a city. Now it is an icon apropos of itself, first lit up like this by a television network for use in a football game telecast. The Arch is now “made for TV” by people who did not make it. This could be called sacrilege of the people’s monument. Now it is just a “beautification project” for private interests, an alternative “reading” to the one that has been commonly made.

This is unacceptable. The people who lit the Arch defied its creator, its most responsible and interested beholders, and the city’s buildings with which it had a relationship. They think that they stand responsible to no one but themselves. In that assumption they are wrong.

Last night, I went down to the river, Wharf Street, no, to Leonor K. Sullivan Drive -- renamed and seized for a fucking Republican Congresswoman of all people! -- and looked at the glaring hulk that once was so beautiful. Eero Saarinen wrote several times that he never wanted it to look like this, that it was to reflect only natural and electric light from other sources. His “lighting scheme” was ingenious because there was nothing formal about it. The thousand relations the Arch made with other structures could be captured at night, when the Arch reciprocated the light it received in those relationships. This was a system where local relations could be centrally envisioned -- focused -- without being disturbed. And now it is forever obliterated by a central flash so bright that nothing is reflected save the intentionally directed spotlights. Saarinen would be outraged. On his behalf, so am I.

I stood looking at the Arch, when all of a sudden the illuminating lights flickered and the wind off of the Mississippi rushed so fast that I thought the Great Fire of ‘49 might be kicking up again. No, I saw instead cobblestones jump up by forces beyond anyone’s control but definitely real so that they flew -- they forced themselves through the cars that sit on them (riverfront turned to parking lot, stones intact, long ago) and there were numerous crashes of flung cars sinking and tourists scattering for protection along the floodwalls tornado style, duck and cover, some ran -- stones flung themselves in air not quite far enough -- flung in midair and flung again higher—they flung themselves to smash the floodlights recessed in the earth at the Arch base -- smashed glass scattered and crashed the bulbs destroyed the lights died I pulled off my shoes and the air was oddly warm even without the lights, I pulled up my pants legs and ran out into the water a little -- not too far -- I saw the city once again in good relation to the Arch -- I screamed piercing so that the last spotlight was smashed with one high note and I was alive and wet and not cold. I then went home to bed content.