For my third independent city, I made it to St. Louis. I originally wasn’t entirely enthused about it. It’s not one of those cities that you find yourself dreaming about going to. I was pleasantly surprised, dare I say impressed, by it though. It felt like being in an East Coast city in the middle of the Midwest (as if I hadn’t already seen an East Coast city on the Mississippi before). Being an independent city, it only made sense that things would be run out of City Hall. And boy was I impressed by City Hall. It felt like some kind of eighteenth-century mansion or something similar. I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen a courthouse better than it and maybe City Hall in Philadelphia beats it, but I’ll have to think on that a minute. As a bonus, down the street was …
… the Old Courthouse. That would be a small capital building anywhere else. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to tour it because there were a number of things on my daughter and my agendas. We had actually arrived the evening before, and while we found a cache, we didn’t photograph City Hall until we got back from across the river in Illinois.
That cache, since Missouri is cache agnostic, was a Virtual at the World Chess Hall of Fame, more specifically outside at the world’s largest chess piece. Yes, it is a story and a half tall. And yes, they have been challenged before. When someone in Sweden topped their previous biggest chess piece, the Hall made this bigger one and set forth a challenge that if anyone built an even bigger one, they would still top it. However, we still had another cache to get. And was there any doubt that we were going to do the most touristy thing in the city? Of course not!
It was its own mini-Odyssey frying to find a parking spot near the country’s smallest national park. We found the worst parking concession ever and forked over the cash to park. What was so bad about it? It wasn’t a parking lot or structure; we literally parked on the banks of the Mississippi River. We were on century-plus old cobblestones. I almost drove over driftwood at one point. But it did put us at the foot of the arch so it was worth it. I was a bit surprised to learn that it was originally an attempt to revive the waterfront area after much of it had been destroyed during the Depression because of a fire (several blocks were torn down to keep the riverfront fire from reaching into the city proper). After decades of demolition, design, and planning, work began in 1961 and was completed in 1965, opening to the public in 1967 to be a gateway to the West. Of course we took the tram up to the top.
What a view… Of course, there were other touristy things to do there but we were short on time. The morning had been spent going to Slices of Quince and Cahokia so it was getting late in the day when we made it to the Arch. But there was more than enough time to get the Virtual there (because of course there was a virtual there). Info from the plaque and a photograph from inside was more than enough to prove we had been there. Invenimus, inscripsimus. But before we could go back to our hotel, we had to run an errand while it was still light out to…
