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.