...with an iPhone in St. Louis

Last week, I traveled to St. Louis for a conference. With storms in the mid-west, there were cancelled flights, so the itinerary turned into an all-day-long affair: Tucson to Dallas, then Dallas to Chicago, and finally Chicago to St. Louis, arriving late at night.

Since this was a work-trip with not much free time, I didn't bring my camera...I immediately regretted that decision the following morning when I looked out my hotel window, waking up to this view:

(...stitched together on my iPhone with the Autostitch App...)

RIGHT downtown!--with the celebrated 630-ft. high  Gateway Arch on the left, and the mid-19th century Old Courthouse on the right (site of the original Dred Scott court case)...

So, I did the best I could with my cellphone camera...

The scale of the monument, and the audacity of its slender construction--just awesome!

Paris has its Eiffel Tower, Seattle its Space Needle...

and in the middle of the Continent,

St. Louis is justifiably proud of its stainless steel gesture of pure mathetmatics...

looking up the south leg:

...and then after a four-minute claustrophobic ride in a retro-futuristic round bubble of the elevator-tram--think of peas traveling up a giant leaning pod--this is the view of the Arch's shadow, eastward over the Mississippi River:

...looking westward over the downtown core, flanked on its south by the baseball stadium, and on the north by its hockey area:

 (this is stitched together from five cell-phone photos)

...and, fun with vertigo: splicing together two shots for a 'straight-down' view

between the legs of the Arch:

(Math trivia: the Arch, instead of being a true parabola, is a catenary curve.)

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I went up to my hotel's roof-deck--had to shoot through glass--but still, a fun phone-panorama, with the Mississippi River at muddy flood-stage:

...and a view from one of downtown's many plazas:

 ...and then inside the domed atrium in the center of the Courthouse--the color scheme seemed pretty 1980's to me, for a 1850's-era building:

 (again, stitched from 5 cellphone photos,
distorted, but I still like it...)

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Pure form.