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Room with A View

Well, I’m no longer in St. Louis. One of my brothers picked me up Friday morning to drive me to Missouri Rehabilitation Center located in Mt. Vernon Missouri. It took us forever to get out of St Louis due to flooding related delays along I-44.

Mt. Vernon is a small town in SW Missouri — between Springfield & Joplin — pop. 4,000 in 2000. I wasn’t sure what to expect. The highway exit is like most — truck stops and fast food. I’ve stopped at the exit before on road trips back to Oklahoma.

We headed right through the small but cute downtown which is anchored by the Lawrence county courthouse — an impressive stone structure. Mo Rehab – is located at 600 N Main — from the 5th floor we’ve got great views of the courthouse. My room has two large widow — looking NE — toward St. louis — I’ve got a nice view of a park and can enjoy the sunrise each morning.

In my time here I will get out to see the town. They are getting new sidewalks at this time —- all with ramps. This facility is very important to the town and getting patients out in the real world is very important to the rehab process. Thus, ADA sidewalks are a must.

 

Boston’s North End, Once Slated for the Wrecking Ball, Perhaps the Best Urban Neighborhood in America

IMG_9360.JPGLast week I visited Boston and I specifically made a trip to the North End neighborhood. Before heading on the trip I re-read a portion of Jane Jacob’s classic 1961 book, Death and Life of Great American Cities. Starting on page 8 Jacobs talks about planners and architects and how they’ve learned how cities “ought” to work:

Consider, for example, the orthodox planning reaction to a district called the North End in Boston. This is an old, low-rent area merging into the heavy industry of the waterfront, and it is officially considered Boston’s worst slum and civic shame. It embodies attributes which all enlightened people know are evil because so many wise men have said they are evil. Not only is the North End bumped right up against industry, but worse still it has all kinds of working places and commerce mingled in the greatest complexity with its residences. It has the highest concentration of dwelling units, on the land that is used for dwelling units, of any part of Boston, and indeed one of the highest concentrations to be found in any American city. It has little parkland. Children play in the streets. Instead of super-blocks, or even decently large blocks, it has very small blocks; in planning parlance it is “badly cut up with wasteful streets.” Its buildings are old. Everything conceivable is presumably wrong with the North End. In orthodox planning terms, it is a three-dimensional textbook of “megalopolis” in the last stages of depravity. The North End is thus a recurring assignment for M.I.T. and Harvard planning and architecture students, who now and again pursue, under the guidance of their teachers, the paper exercise of converting it into super-blocks and park promenades, wiping away its nonconforming uses, transforming it to an ideal of order and gentility so simple it could be engraved on the head of a pin.

This neighborhood, first settled in the 1630’s, didn’t fit with the mid-20th century notion of a city. Architects, planners and politicians had written off the entire area, and equally urban areas in cities all over the country, so they could be rebuilt in the new order. Jacobs continues:

Twenty years ago, when I first happened to see the North End, its buildings — town houses of different kinds and sizes converted to flats, and four- or five story tenements built to house the flood of immigrants first from Ireland, then from Eastern Europe and finally from Sicily — were badly overcrowded, and the general effect was of a district taking a terrible physical beating and certainly desperately poor.

Gee, that doesn’t sound so good. Perhaps the planners were correct, wipe it back down to bare earth and start over? Of course, at this point in the early 1940s, the country had been in a long depression with little money for the maintenance of housing stock.

When I saw the North End again in 1959, I was amazed at the change. Dozens and dozens of buildings had been rehabilitated. Instead of mattresses against the windows there were Venetian blinds and glimpses of fresh paint. Many of the small, converted houses now had only one or two families in them instead of the old crowded three or four. Some of the families in the tenements (as I learned later, visiting inside) had uncrowded themselves by throwing two older apartments together, and had equipped these with bathrooms, new kitchens and the like. I looked down a narrow alley, thinking to find at least here the old, squalid North End, but no: more neatly repointed brickwork, new blinds, and a burst of music as a door opened. Indeed, this was the only city district I had ever seen — or have seen to this day — in which the sides of buildings around parking lots had not been left raw and amputated, but repaired and painted as neatly as if they were intended to be seen. Mingled all among the buildings for living were an incredible number of splendid food stores, as well as such enterprises as upholstery making, metal working, carpentry, food processing. The streets were alive with children playing, people shopping, people strolling, people talking. Had it not been a cold January day, there would surely have been people sitting.

The general street atmosphere of buoyancy, friendliness and good health was so infectious that I began asking directions of people just for the fun of getting in on some talk. I had seen a lot of Boston in the past couple of days, most of it sorely distressing, and this struck me, with relief, as the healthiest place in the city. But I could not imagine where the money had come from for the rehabilitation, because it is almost impossible today to get any appreciable mortgage money in districts of American cities that are not either high-rent, or else imitations of suburbs. To find out, I went into a bar and restaurant (where an animated conversation about fishing was in progress) and called a Boston planner I know.

“Why in the world are you down in the North End?” he said. “Money? Why, no money or work has gone into the North End. Nothing’s going on down there. Eventually, yes, but not yet. That’s a slum!”
“It doesn’t seem like a slum to me,” I said.
“Why, that’s the worst slum in the city. It has two hundred and seventy-five dwelling units to the net acre! I hate to admit we have anything like that in Boston, but it’s a fact.”
“Do you have any other figures on it?” I asked.
“Yes, funny thing. It has among the lowest delinquency, disease and infant mortality rates in the city. It also has the lowest ratio of rent to income in the city. Boy, are those people getting bargains. Let’s see… the child population is just about average for the city, on the nose. The death rate is low, 8.8 per thousand, against the average city rate of 11.2. The TB death rate is very low, less than 1 per ten thousand, can’t understand it, it’s lower even than Brookline’s. In the old days the North End used to be the city’s worst spot for tuberrculosis, but all that has changed. Well, they must be strong people. Of course, it’s a terrible slum.”
“You should have more slums like this,” I said. “Don’t tell me there are plans to wipe this out. You ought to be down here learning as much as you can from it.”
“I know how you feel,” he said. “I often go down there myself just to walk around the streets and to feel that wonderful, cheerful street life. Say, what you ought to do, you ought to come back and go down in the summer if you think it’s fun now. You’d be crazy about it in the summer. But of course we have to rebuild it eventually. We’ve got to get those people off the streets.”

Here was a curious thing. My friend’s instincts told him the North End was a good place, and his social statistics confirmed it. But everything he had learned as a physical planner about what is good for people and good for city neighborhoods, everything that made him an expert, told him the North End had to be a bad place.

Boston’s North End, like St. Louis’ Soulard or Old North neighborhoods, were very overcrowded during the years of the depression when many people migrated from rural settings to urban centers seeking employment. Overcrowding, not to be confused with high density, can and did lead to many diseases. The older buildings often lacked modern plumbing which would have helped offset disease.  At the time the experts claimed the only thing to do was to clear cut the entire area — including all the streets and alleys — and start over from scratch.

In the 1950s Boston cut out a strip of the North End to create their overly popular Central Artery highway.  This highway project cut off the North End from downtown and the rest of the city.  The highway also became congested quickly which eventually led to the “big dig” project.   Despite being cut off from downtown, or perhaps because of it, the North End avoided the wrecking ball.
Boston, St. Louis and all older cities do well with their older street pattern and mix of uses.  As you will see, this is very compact, and not for everyone.  Of course, not everyone aspires to a 2-story Colonial ranch in the suburbs with a 3-car garage.  The inner core of our region, basically the entire City of St. Louis, should grow increasingly urban as it once was.

Here are a few of the pictures I took in Boston’s North End:

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I’m looking forward to a return visit when the trees green up and more people are out and about.

 

Airport Terminals Are Designed by Luddites

January 17, 2008 Travel 30 Comments

In the last 13 months I have been through airport terminals at St. Louis, Oklahoma City, San Jose, Kansas City, San Diego, Phoenix, Charlotte, Miami, Atlanta, Boston and at the moment, Philly. And I had my laptop with me in all these airports.

Our gate in Philly, waiting for a flight to St. Louis, has exactly one power jack with the usual two outlets. Two! Everyone has phones and laptops these days. Several of us have been trading off who gets to use the power. OK, so the Philly airport is pretty old — at least the ‘C’ concourse is. But some of the above list are pretty new and they still lack outlets. I’m always amazed at the number of wi-fi enabled coffeehouses with the same issue.

Most airports want to charge $8 for using the internet yet they fail to give us a place to plug-in. Atlanta was nice and actually had free wi-fi. Here in Philly they have free wi-fi for students during the week and free for all on weekends. I did not hesitate in using my SLU grad student card to get free wi-fi — better than a discount at the movies.

If I were designing the ideal airport gate I’d have a long table where those of us with laptops can sit and have the computer in a comfortable position — and plugged into power if necessary. This need not take up too much room, just not everyone needs the same type of seating.

Anyone reading this that has anything to do with airport design or even coffeehouses, anything with lots of laptops and wi-fi, give us power to plug in!

 

Gateway Mall Wishes It Was Boston’s Commonwealth Mall

St. Louis’ Gateway Mall was an afterthought — a way to clear away buildings and people thought to be too seedy for downtown. However, in clearing the blocks for the Gateway Mall and numerous other later projects in the urban renewal era all the people were removed as building after building were razed. Businesses and residences were lost by the hundreds if not thousands.

Boston’s Commonwealth Mall, however, was planned from the start. Dating to the 19th Century, not the 20th Century, it has a quite different feel. I visited the Commonwealth Mall this morning.
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The mall is technically a wide median but it is sufficiently wide enough that you don’t feel endangered by a passing motorist nor do you feel so isolated that you fee unsafe. Surrounded on both sides by stately masonry buildings which, combined with the trees, creates a wonderful scale. There are no parking garages or blank walls, just varied architecture with entry/exit points (aka doors) highly frequently. There are no follies or other tricks to get you to be in this space, it was designed to be an integral part of the city.

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Frequent sculptures break up the linear pathway while retaining a formal feeling. Despite the cold and snow, many in Boston walk to their destinations and the Commonwealth Mall provides a beautiful way to do so.

What planners in the 20th Century failed to understand is that you cannot simply cut a slice through a city at any point and expect it to succeed. Furthermore, destroying activities and interest along the edges is critical to the overall feel and ultimately will help determine if the public will use the space or not. St. Louis’ Gateway Mall has no reason for the general public to walk along it. Regardless of the attractions contained inside the space it will remain lifeless and disconnected from the city, the opposite of Boston’s Commonwealth Mall.

 

Should Missouri Eliminate Self-Service Gas?

January 16, 2008 Economy, Travel 45 Comments

In at least a couple of states, motorists don’t pump their own gas — I know from personal experience that Oregon and New Jersey both require, by state law, that an attendant pump the gas.

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Yesterday when I was getting gas in NJ we had to wait in line at a fueling station just off the turnpike, before entering Manhattan on the Cross Bronx Expressway (I-95). For those wondering what I am doing driving through the Northeast — I was driving a friend of a friend, her two cats and her car to her new job in the Providence Rhode Island area. I’m flying back late Thursday evening from Boston.

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OK, back to the gas issue. So while the wait issue was a pain it was interesting how a state law could create jobs. We paid $2.97/gallon for regular — far less than the $3.17/gallon we paid in Pennsylvania that I had to pump myself. The lines would have been shorter but everyone, including us, seemed to have the tank filler located on the driver’s side of the vehicle. And no, this was not full service — they did not check tire pressure, clean the windows or check under the hood. It was simply gas.

Still, think of the number of entry-level jobs that could be created statewide by eliminating self serve. You guys discuss that while I catch a train to Boston.

 

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