ST. LOUIS • The National Park Service is hosting an open house today to explain the impact of proposed renovations to the Gateway Arch grounds.
The park service released its environmental assessment earlier this month. The 256-page report analyzes three possible scenarios for Arch grounds renovations, and assesses each for a variety of impacts — on historic buildings, archaeology and museum collections, vegetation, flood plains and local businesses.
The park service found no severe impacts in any of the scenarios. It selected the third, requiring the most extensive renovations, as its “preferred alternative.” That is also the alternative favored by the nonprofit organization spearheading the project.
The first option, deemed the “no-action alternative,” considered only the impact of landscaping the “Park Over the Highway” — a lid, already funded and planned, that bridges the depressed lanes of Interstate 70 and links downtown with the Arch.
The second alternative calls for building a large plaza at Luther Ely Smith Square, just west of I-70, regrading the Arch grounds, replanting vegetation, renovating the existing exhibit spaces inside the Arch museum and Old Courthouse, replacing the ash trees on the Arch grounds, and raising the riverfront’s Leonor K. Sullivan Boulevard.
The final, “maximum change” option adds to the second. It would build out Luther Ely Smith Square with benches and gathering space, dig a new western plaza and entrance to the Arch museum, expand the museum, demolish the north parking garage, close the adjoining stretch of Washington Avenue, and replace the garage and street with trees, gardens, an elevated walk and pathways into Laclede’s Landing.
The renovations, the report says, would connect “the park with the city and the river,” and have “long-term beneficial economic impacts.”
Ann Honious, chief of Arch museum services for the National Park Service, noted that the park service has not issued its final decision. Public review of the process ends March 1.
“We don’t plan in a bubble,” Honious said. “We want public input into the process.” Honious also said, however, that the park service process has so far supported the project championed by CityArchRiver, the nonprofit group that is fundraising and spearheading the renovation’s design.
The CityArchRiver design calls for $380 million to complete the third alternative. Of that, about $90 million could come from a sales tax measure up for a vote April 2 in St. Louis and St. Louis County. St. Charles leaders have declined to put the tax on the ballot.
Federal, state and local governments will pay an additional $69 million. CityArchRiver aims on raising $221 million in private funding.
Maggie Hales, executive director of CityArchRiver, said she expects the park service to give her organization the green light.
“This is an important process,” Hales said. “We don’t expect any big surprises.”
The open house is from 4-7 p.m. today at the Old Courthouse, next to the Arch, at 11 North Fourth Street.
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