On the news (I think CNN) today I heard that the go-ahead had been given to paint the Gateway Arch in St. Louis pink in honor of breast cancer awareness. :eek: Discuss amongst yourselves.
I could see doing it for maybe the month of October or something, but are we talking for forever here?
Eeek, why not just light it with pink light during the nights of October.
I think that is the plan. Park service is against it because they think every special interest group will want to do it if they let one group do it.
They’re not planning to paint it pink. They’re planning to change the lights that shine on it at night to pink**.
Even so, the Park Service is annoyed. They point out that doing this even once opens the door for other groups to request special uses of national monuments.
There’s a building here in town with special lights on its roof that can change colours. It was pink this month.
I should have said (lest that sound UNBELIEVABLY trivial) that it’s a really big prominent downtown office tower, and it lights up part of its facade in the appropriate colour.
It would be cool to paint it pink.
And then red and white for christmas.
Pale blue for Easter.
Red White and Blue for July 4th…
Or better yet, paint it with multi colored polka dots!
Dag Otto is correct, the OP is mistaken. The proposal is to use pink lights during October. Many purists are opposed to that for aesthetic reasons – as originally intended, the Arch wasn’t even supposed to be lit at night. It was supposed to reflect the light from the surrounding Downtown.
The Arch is only lit at all during special ceremonies and occasions.
Anybody else think “Big Gay Arch” when they saw the headline?
As for the Arch being lit up as pink to support Breast Cancer Awareness… blah. Next thing ya know, they’re gonna give a mammogram to the Statue of Liberty.
(Ba dum bump).
They do something similar with the lights on the Empire State Building, BTW. I used to have a list of all the different holiday color-schemes they used…there are quite a few, actually.
I believe that they said on the local news that the Arch would be lighted pink just for one night. Here’s an article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: A pink arch view is not shared by all.
I believe the National Park Service is up in arms because 1) this will be the first time in history someone has done this to a national monument, 2) everyone else will want to do it, and 3) it was actually made law that this is going to be done. In other words, it went through our (Missouri) congress as a bill and was signed into law this week or last.
It’s not a national symbol (at least on the level of, say, Mount Rushmore).
It’s not a religious symbol.
I got over homophobia when I was about 10.
If your job is to deal with the public, you deal with the public. This includes requests.
It’s only for the month.
Breast cancer awareness is definitely a good cause.
Please pardon me if I’m having a really hard time getting all worked up over this.
They should paint a nipple on it while they’re at it. It would play into the whole “breast awareness” thing. I’m already pretty aware of breasts myself but I think raising awareness even more is a good thing. Yay, breasts! 
And Big Gay Mecca, though we already have a few of those.
As in, a big gay wedding ring rising out of darkness into the glory of day?
Nope. Not at all. 
Auckland’s Skytower is currently a garish glowing pink at night. At Christmas it will be green and red. It changes colours fairly often. Sometimes I really have to think hard to figure out what the new colour is supposed to represent.
It’s fun really. Besides during the day it looks like a ugly great syringe, so the colours do it a favour.