Old Courthouse Revamp Featured in New York Times
Date Posted: April 24, 2025
Posted In: Discussion, News,
From New York Times: The Gateway Arch dominates the skyline of downtown St. Louis, its gleaming legs standing as a monument to the nation’s history of exploration and westward expansion.
Centered firmly under those legs is another symbol: the domed Old Courthouse.
After a $27.5 million renovation, the site and its museum are set to reopen May 3.
“It’s a symbol of a lot of different things to different people,” said Jeremy Sweat, the superintendent of Gateway Arch National Park, which includes the courthouse. “We think about it as a symbol of justice and freedom, but for a lot of people in St. Louis, it was also a symbol of that fight that was lost repeatedly.”
Enslaved people were auctioned from its steps, and more than 300 sued for their freedom there including Dred and Harriet Scott, an enslaved couple, in 1846. The Scotts eventually lost their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, starting a national conversation that helped lead to the Civil War.
Virginia Minor and her husband filed suit here in 1873 for her right to vote. They, too, lost at the Supreme Court, but the decision forced suffragists to change their tactics and focus on the state level.
“I think a lot of the story is the more challenging parts of our history,” said Sweat, “those times when we’ve fallen short of our own vision of what this nation should be as a nation, where we provide freedoms for all Americans.”
and her husband filed suit here in 1873 for her right to vote. They, too, lost at the Supreme Court, but the decision forced suffragists to change their tactics and focus on the state level.
“I think a lot of the story is the more challenging parts of our history,” said Sweat, “those times when we’ve fallen short of our own vision of what this nation should be as a nation, where we provide freedoms for all Americans.”