Beautiful park to visit! You can buy your tickets ...

Beautiful park to visit! You can buy your tickets online which I suggest if you have limited time in the area. I went on a Sun afternoon in Oct and security took 5 min, then you can access the impressive museum, gift shop, and cafe for free. Skip the boat tour.

The museum has amazing displays, artifacts and videos taking you through the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark expedition, the growth of St. Louis and finally some background about the Arch itself. Allow 1-2 hours.

The 30 min video goes in depth about the engineering feat the Arch is, showing real video footage from construction in the 1960's. I highly suggest watching the video before going up the tram so you'll appreciate it more.

The 4 minute tram ride was interesting because the glass doors of your car let you see behind the scenes into the Arcs construction. Once at the top, you'll have a few small windows to look down over the city and river but there is no need to spend more than a few minutes up there before heading back down. The line to go up seemed to vary. We had Sun 2:10pm tickets and it took 45 min to get on the tram, by 4:30pm it looked like there was barely a line but that could have been due to the rainy weather.