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I've posted a number of pictures lately on St. Louis Daily Photo of the sculpture Kindly Geppetto by Tom Otterness in downtown's Citygarden. The last couple of them (here and here) have been titled Geppetto's Hammer because this old woodcarver in in the process of whacking little Pinocchio to bits with a gigantic mallet. Not kindly at all. I find the work dark and fascinating.But here's another hammer: a view of the north leg from inside the curve. It looks to me like a titanic blow from Thor or John Henry or maybe Maxwell blasting our city center.
An exercise: this photo has a close relative appearing today on ST. LOUIS DAILY PHOTO. They are parts of a seven image sequence of the same subject, shot at 2/3 stop intervals from -2 stops to +2 stops. The aperture remained the same and the shutter speed varied. They were intended to become part of a seven layer HDR of the Arch. However, when I blended them in Photomatix, the sky came out with a marked box-shaped weave pattern in. It looked like fabric. Actually, it looked terrible. If any HDR experts can explain that to me I'd appreciate it.
So, I started playing with the individual pictures in the sequence. This one was +1 stop (ISO 100, f 6.3, 1/100 sec., spot metering). I always shoot in RAW so I could mess around with the image a lot. This is what came out. 
Click to see the companion photo on ST. LOUIS DAILY PHOTO. Which do you prefer, assuming that either one does something for you?
You could read all sorts of things into this. I'll leave the interpretation to the viewer.
The writer Jonathan Franzen was born in Chicago but grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, the town where I have lived for 22 years. He wrote a novel, set mostly in St. Louis, called The Twenty-Seventh City. That was the city's U.S. population rank at the time. It's fallen considerably since, what with devastating suburban sprawl, although we remain the 16th largest metropolitan area if you believe Wikipedia. It doesn't look like much in this view from across the Mississippi but the Arch is ever glorious and we are covered by the boundless Midwestern sky.
