City Needs to Ban Future Skywalks, Ameren’s is Latest to be added

What better way to destroy a city than to take pedestrians off the public street? Back a few decades ago skywalks were all the rage — every city just had to have at least one.

St Louis has it’s fair share and the most noteworthy is the one above as part of the failed St Louis Centre indoor mall. Making Washington Ave feel like a tunnel and blocking urban views up and down the street this is most certainly the largest. This bridge over the street is pretty universally accepted as major urban blunder even though it was hailed as wonderful just 20 years ago.

Many of the skywalks we have connect multiple buildings while others connect building to parking garage.

Above is a new skybridge at Lumiere Place on the formerly historic Laclede’s Landing area. This one connects a renovated hotel structure to the casino, saving guests from having to go outside on the sidewalk.

The latest skywalk being constructed is at the HQ of electric utility Ameren located just South of Union Station. This bridge doesn’t connect buildings or even a building to a parking garage. No, this skywalk goes to a surface parking lot.

In a prior post I was critical of the lack of street trees on 18th/Truman Parkway and as I was taking these images I felt like I was in the roadway given how close traffic was. We really should not be building pedestrian-unfriendly roads like this.

It should be telling that Ameren is going to such expense to keep employees from crossing five lanes of traffic. Their own HQ building and numerous surface parking lots has contributed to the destruction of an active and thus safe public sidewalk.

We need to stop removing people from the sidewalks in this manner — it only makes bad situations worse.

 

Book Review; Historic Photos of St. Louis by Adele Heagney and Jean Gosebrink

June 3, 2008 Books 4 Comments

The old saying is ‘a picture is worth a thousands words.’ So a book with nearly 200 vintage images says a lot. A new hardcover book called, appropriately enough, Historic Photos of St. Louis, attempts to tell a lot using vintage images. Combined with a very diverse collection of these images are fairly detailed captions on the place or event shown you learn a great deal about the evolution of St. Louis.

Many books using historical photos tend to focus on a single event or subject– the 1904 World’s Fair, Streetcar transit, The Arch, etc. Here Adele Heagney and Jean Gosebrink have divided the book into four sections covering a 100+ year period from the 1860s through the 1960s. I’ve seen many old photos of St Louis but Heagney & Gosebrink have put together an interesting collection of previously unpublished images (to my knowledge).

At first the lack of a theme other than St Louis is a bit disturbing — I kept wanting to find a connection from one image to the next. The connection is naturally St Louis and in each section that the images are from roughly the same period.

The cover image is from a 1927 parade honoring Charles Lindbergh. The interesting thing is the route — along Locust behind the main library. Of course in 1927 this was a much more vibrant section of town than it is today. However all the images show a booming St Louis with lots of people out on the sidewalks, newsboys selling papers on street corners and so on.

Ultimately such a book is depressing — showing all that we have lost — specific buildings, the streetcar system, sidewalks filled with pedestrians and the optimism of a growing city. I’ve spent hours now pouring over the images in this fine coffee table book.  The book is hardbound and is listed at $39.95.

 

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