ST. LOUIS — The gleaming Gateway Arch that presides over the downtown riverfront may be the architectural symbol for this Midwestern metropolis, but its true gateway was built a decade earlier just outside city limits — the Lambert-St. Louis International Airport.
And despite its utilitarian function,
Custom Soccer Jerseysthe airport’s main terminal is a celebrated structure in its own right, welcoming arrivals for more than a half-century and winning praise as an inspiration for modern airport design.
So local residents reacted with alarm to the news that a tornado Friday night had cut a path of destruction directly into the airport, causing enough damage to force the city to temporarily close the transportation hub.
“To know what it was and to see what it is now, I’m just devastated,” Vicki Ware, an administrative assistant at the airport, said after arriving on her day off to assist.
Bruised but operational and smelling strongly of plywood, the airport reopened for much of its inbound and outbound traffic on Sunday. As construction workers continued to board up blown-out windows in the main terminal, as well as turning to the more serious repair work in a damaged concourse that had part of its roof torn off, the business of ferrying passengers resumed with surprising normalcy.
Meg Stowe, ac milan jerseya 37-year-old teacher traveling with her two daughters, said she was shocked not only by the damage but also by the fact that their flight home to Rhode Island had not been canceled.
“The speed with which they got this airport up and running is impressive,” she said.
Falling on the eve of the Easter holiday weekend, the daylong shutdown had limited economic impact on the city, though officials said it would cost millions of dollars to repair the airport damage. “We’re all committed to rebuilding this and making it look as it did beforehand as an iconic destination airport in the heartland,” Gov. Jay Nixon said after touring the scene.
No one was seriously injured in the tornadoes, which also destroyed or damaged hundreds of homes in the surrounding neighborhoods.
For all the complaints they may inspire, arsenal jerseyairports have become the welcome mats of major American cities, usually shuffled through without observation but often offering telling details about the personality of a place. And this one — with a storied past and uncertain future — seems to embody the changing fortunes of the city it serves.
When the new terminal opened in 1956 at the city-owned airport on the site of an old balloon launching field — nearly 10 years before the Gateway Arch would be completed on the bank of the Mississippi River — it was a testament to the ambitions and influence of a city that was still the country’s eighth largest.
The domed concrete terminal, capped in copper and featuring enormous arched windows, was the work of the architect Minoru Yamasaki, best known for designing the World Trade Center in New York. Similar design elements soon appeared at airports in New York and Paris.
“We were really out to create the imagery of St. Louis,” said Gyo Obata, who directed the project.
Yet, as so many other airports of the era have outgrown those early terminals because of increased passenger volume, this one is instead cursed with “excess capacity,” its unused concourses testifying to a shrinking city that openly worries about whether its best days may be behind it.
After another decade of decline, the population of St. Louis stands at 319,000, according to the latest census figures, less than half the peak of 857,000 in the decade when the airport was built.
Meanwhile, partly as a result of the merger that ended Trans World Airlines, the airport is no longer one of the busiest in the country; the number of annual passengers dropped to 12.3 million last year, from 30.6 million a decade earlier. Part of the main terminal was closed, the rest was regarded as aging poorly. (A second terminal operated by Southwest Airlines opened in 1998 and was largely unaffected by the storm.)
St. Louis,england soccer jersey responding to the grumbling of residents and business leaders, was in the midst of a $70 million renovation when the tornado — the most powerful to hit the city in over four decades — undid some of the recent progress, toppling newly erected signs, exposing freshly painted walls to the elements and leaving the whole place littered with glass.
City leaders like Richard C. D. Fleming, the chief executive of the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association, said they were adjusting to changes in the aviation industry by promoting the airport as a potential cargo hub for Chinese products.
And the building remains a source of community pride. The St. Louis Art Museum opened an exhibition this month featuring work inspired by the airport that, according to the accompanying literature, “transformed the landscape of postwar airport design, successfully formalizing the concept of flight through its architecture.”
Mr. Obata, a founding partner at the firm HOK, has now worked on a number of airports around the world — including those in Dallas, Indianapolis and Saudi Arabia — but admits partiality to the airport he helped build in his hometown.
After the tornado struck, cup-soccer-jerseys/spain-soccer-jersey.html">spain soccer jerseyMr. Obata traveled to the airport to see the damage but was not surprised that the main terminal, broken glass aside, had largely withstood the assault.
“Nothing will hurt that structure,” he said.
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