National Parks Service Encourages Exploration of Downtown St. Louis

Sure, the Gateway Arch is
spectacular, but there’s more to St. Louis. (Photo: hz536n via
Core of Discovery Flickr pool)

Today we’ve got news from member blog Dotage
St. Louis about a sweet new initiative from the National Parks
Service (NPS) called “Core of
Discovery.” Aimed at tourists visiting the city’s Gateway Arch (an
NPS property), it highlights various attractions of St. Louis’s downtown
— historic
architecture, bike
rentals to enjoy the path along the Mississippi, the new Citygarden
sculpture park and many others.

The Core of Discovery website is beautifully designed, and the NPS
is also using social media — including a Flickr group
that already has some quite stunning content — to draw visitors into an
exploration of what urban St. Louis has to offer. The effort dovetails
with a major design
competition focused on better integrating the Gateway Arch grounds
into the city’s urban fabric. Here’s what Dotage St. Louis has to say:

With the ongoing City Arch River 2015
design competition, it’s great to see the NPS express its dedication
towards connecting the Arch to downtown in the meantime.… It might seem
like a small step on the part of the NPS, but clearly much thought has
gone into the design of this site and the marketing of our downtown. I
applaud this effort and am excited that I’ll be here in person to
witness the more radical interventions that will be proposed this fall
as a part of the Archgrounds International Design Competition.

More from around the network: Half
Mile Circles writes about a new report about the effect of compact
development on greenhouse gas emissions. Transit
Miami writes about the threat to some Miami Beach bike lanes. And One
Speed: Go! has a philosophical meditation on the benefits of riding
a tandem.