ST. LOUIS -- Moving quickly after years of talk, leaders of the effort to make the Gateway Arch grounds busier and more accessible opened a design competition Monday with plans to announce a winner in October.

Their goal is to complete construction on a new vision for the sweeping riverfront park by Oct. 28, 2015, the 50th anniversary of the day when the last piece of the Arch was fitted into place. The process for picking a design mimics the competition opened in 1947 that chose Eero Saarinen’s 630-foot Arch.

The effort is twofold — to create more attractions that will bring people to the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, and to solve the nagging problem of getting pedestrians across busy Memorial Drive between downtown and the Arch grounds. But it also asks designers to be boldly creative.

“This is unfinished business for St. Louis,” said Walter Metcalfe Jr., a lawyer downtown and member of the governing body that will oversee the design competition. “The (riverfront) park is the one great unifying point that is central to this region. Let’s get going and see what happens.”

The group, working with the National Park Service, formally invited design groups to begin making pitches Monday and said a new private foundation will raise money to pay for that effort, estimated to cost $1.6 million.

The new group, CityArchRiver2015 Foundation, has hired architect Donald Stastny of Portland, Ore., to run the day-to-day work of studying competing ideas.
Stastny has managed competitions for such projects as the Flight 93 National Memorial at Stonycreek Township, Pa., where one of the airliners hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, crashed during an uprising by passengers; and the Oklahoma City National Memorial at the former site of the Murrah Federal Building, which was blown up by domestic terrorists on April 19, 1995.

Stastny is to work with a jury of eight international experts in architecture, landscaping and related fields that he and the governing body plan to choose by early January.

In addition to Metcalfe, the governing body consists of Mayor Francis Slay; Tom Bradley, superintendent of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial; Bruce Lindsey, dean of Washington University’s architecture programs; Deborah Patterson, president of the Monsanto Fund; Vaughn Vandegrift, chancellor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville; and Lynn McClure, regional director of the National Parks Conservation Association.

Metcalfe was a major player in the effort to build the Edward Jones Dome 15 years ago. He also is a fellow partner in the law firm of Bryan Cave with former U.S. Sen. John C. Danforth, whose call more than two years ago to do something big with the 91-acre riverfront park helped spark the effort now under way.

Danforth bowed out of the project in frustration in 2008, but his Danforth Foundation will assist in paying for the design competition. Danforth said Monday he will not rejoin the project but wants to help.

“I want to encourage the people who want to make our town better,” he said. “Clearly, the Arch grounds are not what they could be.”

Danforth originally suggested that the Park Service give up some of land for uses that would attract more people. The Park Service resisted at first but undertook a series of public hearings that led to a new “general management plan” for the Arch grounds. The plan, made formal Nov. 23, suggests a design competition and outlines ideas that the Park Service might welcome or resist.

The Park Service considers the wide lawn beneath the Arch untouchable. Welcome ideas include improving access across Memorial Drive, updating or replacing the Arch parking garage, using the north and south ends of the park for more activities, and developing part of the East St. Louis riverfront across from the Arch. But the park won’t give up land.

Stastny said designers or groups that want to participate should submit résumés and general ideas by Jan. 22.

In February, he and the jurors will invite eight of them to offer more. By late April, he said, the process would pick four or five finalists, who then get to the serious business of proposing detailed plans. The foundation will give $100,000 each to the finalists to help cover their costs.

The jury will choose a winner by October. The Park Service has final say, and Congress still would have to appropriate money to do any work. The general plan estimates cost at $305 million, but it warns that it could end up being significantly more.

Stastny said his goal will be to make the Arch grounds “more of a part of the city rather than an island sitting between different modes of transportation,” referring to the busy interstates, railroad lines and Mississippi River barge traffic that nearly surround the park.

“I’m optimistic,” he said. “There always are times when the stars are aligned, and I would say this is it.”