Cross the Mississippi in Style in a Gondola!

No, not this kind.

​Tonight, the architect Michael Van Valkenburgh and CityArchRiver2015 will presenting his firm's winning plan from this summer's contest to redesign the grounds around the Arch. Indulge your inner architect and check it out, 6 p.m. at the Ferrara Theater downtown. (They would dig it if you pre-registered, but you won't be turned away if you don't.)

The word over at the Post-Dispatch is that Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates is poaching a cool element from a proposal that didn't win: aerial gondolas. How cool is that? It was originally proposed by one of the four finalists, a German firm called Behnisch Architekten. The final design, which they'll be elaborating on tonight, includes gondolas to whisk folks across the river.

We hope it looks something like this awesome "futuristic" image from the Missouri History Museum's Flickr stream. It's called "A Forecast Looking Up Olive Street in the Year 2010,"  from the Greater St. Louis Christmas Magazine, December 1910.

(The Daily RFT admits to having shamelessly stolen this super-cool link from The Royale's Steven Smith's Facebook page. Not that we look at Facebook during the workday. Ever.)