More than 10 years after last powering the revolving restaurant atop the Millennium Hotel, the north tower’s 1,500-pound axle came down this week. But the hulking piece of machinery isn’t headed for the scrapyard: City Museum has agreed to give it a second life.
Ainsley Worthley, communications & marketing coordinator for the Gateway Arch Park Foundation, says the organization was determined to get a piece of the two-tower, long vacant hotel donated to City Museum. As the nonprofit has been supervising hotel demolition on the road to its redevelopment as a $670 million mixed use project by Cordish Companies, it kept an eye out for “something that’s meaningful, something that has memories attached to it,” in Worthley’s words.
At first they wondered if the hotel’s chandeliers might be just the thing, but they proved too delicate. When the company handling the demolition, Spirtas Wrecking Co., then encountered the rotational system that had powered the Top of the Riverfront restaurant on its slow-moving rotations, the hulking axle—three feet by three feet, mounted on a steel plate—seemed not just interesting, but more in keeping with the industrial detritus that City Museum specializes in preserving.
Maria Cassilly, City Museum’s chief archivist and special exhibits and programming manager, acknowledges that the quirky downtown museum is frequently solicited by people with random items, many of which it simply doesn’t have space for. A collection of grandfather clocks from Texas, for one, was politely declined. This was different…