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Two Buildings Being Razed in Clayton for St. Louis County Court Project

April 8, 2014 Featured, St. Louis County 2 Comments

Work has started on an addition to the existing St. Louis County Courthouse:

On October 15, 2013, the St. Louis County Council awarded a $122 million Design-Build contract to St. Louis-based KCI Construction Company, Inc. (KCI) to design and construct improvements related to the County Courts Project. KCI’s work will include construction of a new addition and substantial renovations to the existing Courts Building and the parking garage beneath it. Once work is complete, all family/juvenile court and detention operations currently conducted at the Family Courts Center (501 S. Brentwood) will be permanently relocated to the new, unified Courts Complex. (St. Louis County)

The new addition will be built on top of the existing parking garage. Two buildings to the west, across South Meramec Ave, will be razed to make room for staging the constriction project.

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The two buildings circled in red, located on South Meramec Ave, will be razed, click image to view in Google Maps.

The two are connected via a walkway over the alley.  The building at 111 S. Meramec Ave has nearly 72,000 square feet and was built in 1957. The taller of the two, 121 S. Meramec Ave, was built in 1964 and contains nearly 210,000 square feet of space. Both buildings have a negative impact on the Meramec sidewalk, neither will be missed from an urbanist viewpoint. I don’t know the architect of either, a preservationist might object to their planned demolition.

I need to find out if St. Louis County has a long-term plan for the land. Selling to a developer or keeping for surface/structured parking are the two obvious future uses.

— Steve Patterson

 

Currently there are "2 comments" on this Article:

  1. JZ71 says:

    111 houses / used to house the County Health Department. I was inside several years ago and it definitely needed work, even back then. And while I agree that neither one is particularly significant, architecturally, I’m not quite sure that “Both buildings have a negative impact on the Meramec sidewalk, neither will be missed from an urbanist viewpoint.” The most likely scenario, at least short term (the next 10-15 years), once the site is no longer needed for construction staging, WILL be surface parking, much like the parking at Carondelet and Central, and that will certainly have a greater negative impact on the urbanity of the area than the current structures have. And given the glacial pace that most government projects take to complete, unless the County plans on selling the land to a private developer (doubtful), I’d expect the land to remain as surface parking, unless, of course, they decide to “make it a park”!

    I find it interesting that you would state that “a preservationist might object to their planned demolition” – I always thought that you were a big supporter of both preservation and reuse. Both appear to be typical structural frame (non-bearing wall) structures, so saving the frame and recladding them would not be that difficult, nor would expanding the bases to bring them out to the sidewalk line. I’m guessing that the “need” to demolish both structures has more to do with floor-to-floor heights (too “low” for current tastes and the county’s “needs”) than it does with actual floorplate sizes. Courts have specialized spatial and circulation needs, which explains why a new structure is being constructed, for that use. What remains unanswered are the more-typical office uses that the county has – 121, the larger structure, is pretty similar to the structure that was renovated to house the SLU Law School, and you seemed pretty supportive of that effort. If the County needs to house County functions, I’d much rather see them housed in urban structures, here, even dated ones, like these, than to see them housed in a dated strip shopping center, like they are in north county: https://www.google.com/maps?ll=38.782161,-90.361524&spn=0.003566,0.005284&t=h&z=18

     
    • 121 has a raised base and the tower is set back from the sidewalk, the upper floors have a solid brick wall facing the street with the first floor deeply recessed. I’ll advocate saving good urban buildings, or reusing those buildings that can be retrofitted to be.

      These two might be able to be made into good urban buildings but I haven’t figured out how yet.

       

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