Lumiere Link is Nice, Route to Tunnel Needs Attention

Earlier in the week a new tunnel under I-70 connecting Baer Plaza (East of the Edward Jones Dome) and Lumiere Place casino in Laclede’s Landing opened to the public. St Louis Development Co. head Rodney Crim suggested the city wants convention goers, “when not in session and looking for things to do” to take the tunnel to the casino and Laclede’s Landing. Never mind conventioneers taking a stroll down Washington Ave or other streets downtown where retailers are struggling to have enough customers. See Crim on KSDK here.

So much was made about this great new privately funded $8 million dollar connection I just had to see for myself.

I started by heading East on Washington Ave, passing by the main entrance to the convention center, aka America’s Center. Of course the taxi stand on the sidewalk gets more space than us pedestrians. I can tell you that being in a wheelchair heading straight on toward a taxi that is moving toward me is not a comforting feeling. Oh the driver saw me as he repeatedly tapped his horn as he drove off. Behind the cabs was a St Louis police car that was so far to the right I had to go to the left to get around it. Welcome to St Louis.

When I got to 7th I turned left as I figured conventioneers might use the courtyard/plaza doors as their starting point for their walk to the casino. Above is looking back South from the plaza entry at 7th & Convention Plaza. As a side note Convention Plaza used to be Delmar but it was renamed when it ran in front of the original convention center. Later in the early 1990s when the center was expanded to the current configuration the street go cut off by the building. So now we have this short section of Convention Plaza on both the East & West sides of the center. It should have reverted back to the name Delmar.

Leaving the circle drive area at 7th & Convention Plaza we see surface parking lot and the back of the Drury Inn.

Heading East toward Baer Plaza & Lumiere Link we are along the side of the Edward Jones Dome. I’m not sure why street trees were not part of the plan when this was built but thet are sorely needed. The Jersey barriers were likely added after the Oklahoma City bombing or after 9/11.

Almost to Broadway now and we see a nice collection of Jersey barriers, seemingly blocking our path across the street.

Above, I want to cross Broadway which is to my left but I can’t get my wheelchair close enough to the pedestrian signal button (it is the one on the right on the light pole).

Above is the same pole and signal button from another angle. The ramp to cross Broadway is to the left of all the Jersey barriers you see. Current ADA guidelines require signal buttons to be closer to where they are needed.

Finally we make it. I can’t believe that Rodney Crim wants visitors to make that walk — it has to be among the worst in the city. I’d hope conventioneers would never see this side of the dome — instead making their way down Washington Ave to see sidewalk dining and increasingly active sidewalks.

So we are now at the entry to Lumiere Link. We are at Baer Plaza. Who?

Robert J. Baer was the first chairman of the St Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority. Baer was also the former head of Bi-State Development and he took over the position again at Metro after Larry Salci had a very public crash & burn. From the plaque:

“Preservation of land for this park reflects Mr Baer’s recognition for ‘green space’ as an attractive front yard for the Stadium/Convention Center.”

With the trees now mature this has the potential for a decent public space. Sadly it has no natural users as the area is pretty desolate. Although now we have people coming and going to the casino and maybe a few to Laclede’s Landing beyond the casino. So how attractive is this front yard? Above you can see the weeds popping up between the seams in the concrete, not a good start.

All around the edges is debris from the trees.

There is even part of a dumpster lid. The whole plaza looks and feels rather abandoned. This is not St Louis putting it’s best foot forward. You’d think someone from the Visitor Commission or whomever has responsibility for this space might had tidied up a bit before the opening of the new tunnel.

Visitors to the tunnel have three choices for the decent — stairs, an escalator or an elevator. At the other end of the tunnel you end up right smack in the middle of the complex. You are not on the casino floor of course because you must show ID and such to enter the gaming area. Still you can see the games and certainly the restaurants.

The interior was more posh than I expected. Pity they had to go and ruin it with all the gaming machines. I also have to wonder how of the $8 million for the tunnel was in video screens. Despite the richness of the whole place I couldn’t wait to get out. I may use the link again so that I can check out the exterior of the casino & hotel as it looms over what little remains of Laclede’s Landing.

Overall I think the link is a good thing — the more connections across I-70 the better. If only the route to get to the tunnel wasn’t so pathetic.

Tower Grove South Concerned Citizens Special Business District

What a name!  Ald Jennifer Florida is introducing legislation (BB89) at the Board Of Aldermen this morning to put the establishment of a special taxing district on the ballot for residents within the district to vote on.  The district, if approved, would be from the alley South of Utah Place, to the centerline of Grand, to the centerline of Gravois to Roger Place (one block West of Gustine). The official name would be the “Tower Grove South Concerned Citizens Special Business District.”
First, what is with the “concerned citizens” bit in the name?  They’ll never get the full name on banners or on trash cans.  Doesn’t every area have concerned citizens?
Secondly, I never like it when major streets are used as edges for neighborhood or business district lines — Grand was once the center point for residential areas on both sides.  When using major streets as dividing lines we end up with different groups having a say on the same street — but only for their half.  When business districts are done this way you end up with money for improvements for half the street.  Using alley lines is the better way to go.

And lastly I always wonder who manages the money — in this case it would be a 7-member Board of Commissioners appointed by the mayor.  Five would be property owners and two would be renters.

Soulard Market to Become a Park

Don’t worry, the city has no plans to do away with the market.

However a bill (BB41) before the Board Of Aldermen would make the market part of the “Soulard Playground” park which shifts control from the Director of Public Utilities to the Parks Director.  Maybe this is a good thing?  Maybe it is a power play to increase the Parks Dept budget?

Given the issue of citizens getting to vote on any leasing or selling of park land I wonder how the long-term leasing of vendor stalls would be impacted?

Downtown Business Not So Good for Good Works

The giant ribbon-cutting scissors are barely back in their box and Good Works is pulling the rug on their second location, located on Washington at 9th (Banker’s Lofts). I attended the ribbon cutting on December 13th and I must say it was an exciting time, the ribbon cutting for Flamingo Bowl was later that same day.

Above: Deputy Mayor Barb Geisman, Ald Phyllis Young, the store manager and Jim Cloar from the Downtown Partnership cut the ribbon on December 13th, 2007.

In the Post-Dispatch on the 24th of this month the news of their closing:

In the latest blow to downtown St. Louis, Good Works Inc. will close its home-furnishings store next month due to a lack of new customers.Many of the shoppers who visited the store at 901 Washington Avenue were the same ones who frequented the Good Works store at 6323 Delmar Boulevard in University City, said Chris Dougher, one of the owners. Co-owners Dougher and Rita Navarro plan to expand the store in the Delmar Loop.

“We just aren’t generating new business,” Dougher said of the store on Washington Avenue. “It’s a huge disappointment, but we can’t foresee it changing in the near future.”

The 8,000-square-foot store, which opened in November, was one of the larger retailers to locate downtown in recent years.

The store on Delmar, which sells contemporary furniture and accessories, has been successful since opening at that location about 11 years ago.

The owners decided to open a second store on Washington Avenue because they wanted to be part of the downtown renaissance and thought it would become the next Loop.

However, a soft economy has slowed downtown loft purchases, store openings and retail spending.

On opening day I wrote:

“I wish Good Works the best of luck and hope they do get all the support they need from the city — and some on-street parking out front.”

Just imagine the loop as four traffic lanes and no on-street parking, it would totally kill the vibe that it has. That is what exists in front of the Good Works store on Washington — it is a poor pedestrian & retail environment. To do well they needed lots of customers and the area to the immediate East is a dead zone — so dead the taxi cabs get to use the sidewalk as a taxi stand. The loft crowd just doesn’t walk by this location on the way to get groceries, dinner or drinks. Too few people do walk by. OK, back to parking.

As I’ve written before I think so much of St. Louis is auto centric with too many drive-thrus and surface parking lots measured by the acre. Even downtown it is hard to take pictures without getting a damn parking garage in the image. So how can I be arguing for on-street parking? On-street parking does a number of very beneficial things for an area. First it reduces four traffic lanes down to two — much friendlier. This also helps to slow down the traffic on the street. People parking and getting in/out of their cars & feeding the meter creates activity on the street. And finally having parking in front of the store decreases the perception that downtown has a parking shortage. When someone arrives they may have to park in the next block or two but the fact that someone got to park out front helps give the impression that parking is fairly easy. This is not to say that a few on-street spaces out front would have provided a steady stream of customers but it would have changed the feel of the area for the better. Certainly more Loop-like.
Of course they recognize they were basically stealing customers from their Loop location. Not much you can say about that except it takes a lot of marketing to increase a customer base. The Loop didn’t happen overnight and neither will retail downtown. For many places the rents far exceed the number of customers.

This is why we need to take immediate steps to make downtown more pedestrian/retail friendly. On-street parking needs to be added where it doesn’t exist, add street vendors selling hot dogs, toasted ravioli, t-shirts, whatever. Street performers would also be a nice touch. The sidewalks need life to have a good stream of retail customers. If we are not quick to act I can see much of downtown being just a restaurant zone with very little retail.

Old Urbanism, Suburbia & New Urbanism

Here in the St. Louis region we have a little bit of everything — we have old urbanism in the inner core (the city of St Louis) as well as in the many older suburbs that ring the city on both sides of the river. Like every region in America, we have too much suburbia — that auto centric muck that has been growing since WWII.Your know what suburbia is — residential streets with big lawn, no street trees and an increasing number of garage doors. The big box centers with enough parking for the day after Thanksgiving. The indoor mall surrounded by acres of parking. The office park with similar looking buildings casually placed on lush green lawns all set between yet more parking. Being a suburb of the core city is fine — Webster Groves is an old suburb that is walkable in ways St Peters will never be. So my issue is not with suburbs but with suburbia — that very soulless form of building that has predominated America fot the last five or six decades.

So much of our good old urbanism has been destroyed remaking core cities with touches of suburbia.

Old urbanism was built for people on foot. Streets were narrow by today’s standards. Each neighborhood had a commercial area within a short walk. The streetcar was not far away which could get you to the bigger stores downtown. No zoning regulated this. It just was. And it worked well until we reached a tipping point with the car — fewer pedestrians and more cars through it all out of balance. While old urbanism was great for people it did a poor job accommodating the car.

The solution of the day was not to tweak our existing environments but to rip them out entirely. The new suburbia was proudly proclaimed as “progress.” Once narrow streets were widened and those neighborhood shops moved to the new strip centers or the open air mall.

In the early 1980s a few people began questioning the status quo and looks to the past for ways to make walkable communities while still making room for the car. The first result was Seaside, Florida — as seen in the movie The Truman Show. Widely dismissed due to its resort nature, many said the principals couldn’t be applied elsewhere — that we were basically stuck with suburbia as the model for future development both in core areas and on the edges.

But a diverse group of Architects and Planners refused to accept suburbia as the only way, founding the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) in 1993. Today people are still foolishly dismissive of New Urbanism — saying it is just nostalgia in the corn field. This view is so narrow it looks at a few projects but doesn’t take into account the depth of the guiding principals found in the Charter of the CNU.

About a decade ago there started being talk of a big New Urbanist project in our region. The resulting project was Paul McKee’s Winghaven (yes, that Paul McKee). In August 2001 Peter Downs authored a story on Winghaven for the RFT; The Gospel According to Paul.

Though the experiment is barely half-done, some people are already proclaiming it a stunning success. “WingHaven will be cited for the next 25 years as a great example of a new form of urban development,” says Richard Fleming, president and chief executive officer of the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association.

By this point we had seen enough to know that Winghaven was not New Urbanism, despite what Fleming had to say. At the time I was part of a casual group of architects and planners known as New Urban St Louis. After this article appeared architect John Hoag, planner Todd Antoine and I drafted a letter to the editor on behalf of our group. We wrote, in part:

While we applaud Paul McKee’s efforts to break the current mold of suburban development in the St. Louis region, several points are worth mentioning.

New Urbanists identify with one of two camps: developments in suburban “greenfields” or revitalizing existing neighborhoods in the urban core and inner suburbs. New Urbanists believe strengthening the urban core is vital to sustaining long- term regional growth while acknowledging that greenfield development will continue. New development, whether in the urban core or in greenfields, benefits by incorporating New Urbanist principles. New Urbanism does not imply a strict return to nostalgic remembrances of the past. Instead, it is based on design and planning principles nurtured and refined over centuries of town- building that have been largely forgotten over the last 50 years. Problems such as affordable housing, lack of connectiveness and inadequate public transportation plague many suburban areas. Solutions include pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use and transit-oriented development which offers real alternatives to auto-oriented sprawl.

The St. Louis region is blessed with fine older examples of traditional neighborhoods exhibiting many aspects of New Urbanist designs. However, the region is lacking the breakthrough projects seen in Memphis, Dallas and Minneapolis. We encourage developers, bankers and local government officials to explore the rich variety of New Urbanist developments in the U.S. already completed or in the planning process.

Since this time we’ve seen real New Urbanism come to our region via New Town at St Charles. New Town is a project of Whittaker Builders. I’ve had the good fortune to have spent some good one on one time with Greg Whittaker talking about the project and what led him in this direction. Whittaker, like most large home builders in our region, was responsible for a number of the typical subdivisions that define suburbia. Greg Whittaker spent vacation time at Seaside Florida and he began to wonder if they could do something different than they had. The answer was yes.

Building new (or old) urbanism is not a simple task. First of all, based on current zoning, it is illegal —- even in the City of St Louis. Zoning in much of the country mandates suburbia — be it in the old urban core or on corn fields at the edge of each region. The site where New Town is located was zoned for industrial park development. If someone wanted to recreate the intersection of Euclid & Maryland (old urbanism) on the long vacant Pruitt-Igoe site they could not do so based on our current zoning code which dates to 1947.

Our zoning code is like most in the U.S. — it is what is known as use based zoning. That is the code tells you where certain uses are allowed (so much for mixed use areas) and finally how much parking each use much have. Always back to parking — this is why instead of contiguous commercial districts as in the old urbanism newer areas have each building surrounded by parking. With all this parking between buildings you lose that connected feel of a truly walkable environment.

New Urbanist developments like New Town use their own codes — with the city or county adopting that code as an overlay for that site. These codes are not use based — they don’t care if you want to put a hardware store or an insurance company in a storefront space — they are more concerned with the design of the storefront. This is not to say that you can open a slaughterhouse on a street of single family homes. But having commercial spaces with residential units above just around the corner from single family homes is to be expected — something you don’t see in residential subdivisions today.

Codes in new urbanist projects are “form-based” codes — these control how the buildings relate to each other and to the public street. Cities such as Denver are also using form-based codes to regulate how urban infill will be built in various parts of town.

While New Urbanism is not perfect it is a starting point for building communities that respect people while also accommodating the car. New Urbanists such as Peter Calthorpe tend to have a much more modern aesthetic as opposed to DPZ (planners behind New Town) that rely on a more familiar vernacular aesthetic. Aesthetics aside they all seek to mix uses, provide a walkable environment and reduce dependence on the car. Rather than dismiss New Urbanism we should embrace it as a means for ending the mandated suburbia we have now.

Keep in mind I personally would not want to live in a New Urbanist place on the outer edges of a region. However as a model for sites such as the former Pruitt_Igoe it is ideal. I could live there as I’d be close to the old urbanism that remains in the city. Nobody should have to live in zoning mandated suburbia.