I found the following text as commentary on a biodiesel blog:
If anyone who is responsible for planning in downtown St. Louis is reading this: The one thing that really makes downtown look empty is that you’ve allowed the parking garages to take up the ground floor of buildings – which makes every second building, or so, look abandoned because there are no ground-floor storefronts. There aren’t enough ground-floor shops for the foot traffic, especially during the big conventions.
And, you need a more pedestrian friendly “causeway” across the interstate to connect downtown hotels to the archway area. Use air-rights, like Chicago has done with Grant and Millenium Parks.
BTW – the light rail rocks!
The discussion was simply about a biodiesel club in St. Louis and they guy found it necessary to comment. How insightful of this person that visited St. Louis and came to these conclusions. Let’s look at his points one by one.
Parking Garages & Street Level Retail:
Yep, downtown does indeed look too empty because the ground floor of most of our parking garages are blank. These need to be retrofitted soon. In fact, some of our oldest garages such as those on the North side of Kiener Plaza need to be razed and replaced with actual buildings. Note that I said buildings — plural. These banal garages occupy a block each which is just overwhelming. Each of those blocks needs to get broken up again with an alley and have multiple buildings per block. They don’t need massive towers — four to ten floors is good enough. The main floor is most critical.
Foot traffic is so important and many of our blocks offer nothing for the pedestrian so they keep going, and often don’t come back that direction. If a block isn’t “permeable” then it is a dead block. That is, if you as the general public cannot enter a store, coffee house or some other portion of the building(s) on a block then it is not contributing to the life of the sidewalk. In general, building lobby entrances don’t count either. The exception is when building windows are interesting enough to draw you into the main entrance. Such is the case on Washington Avenue with the AIA office.
Connection to the Arch
Plans have been discussed for years to put a lid over I-70 to reconnect our city with our riverfront. The highway, like all our highways, are more of a barrier than a connector. I have somewhat a different perspective on the riverfront. Follow me here.
I love the Arch — it is a stunning sculpture. The problem is the riverfront offers nothing other than the Arch. Who goes there besides tourists? Laclede’s Landing has more things to do but it is still mostly a tourist area. Basically, the civic leaders really messed up a hundred years ago when they got the bright idea to clear the area and build some grand project. They had no appreciation for the buildings and street grid that was there — the massing, the cast iron fronts, the small block grid weaving its way up from the river. This was a spectacular area that, had it not been razed, could today rival areas such as New Orleans’ French Quarter or even NYC’s SoHo and Chelsea neighborhoods. We’ve got a long history in St. Louis of “leaders” wanting to make their mark on the city by razing something great for something less pedestrian friendly. Will it ever stop?
But, those forty city blocks are long gone. We’ve got an exciting loft district happening that has nothing to do with the river. Washington Avenue is our most interesting street at this point (despite the lack of on-street parking East of Tucker). Two obstacles create a disconnect to the river from the loft area. The first is St. Louis Centre over Washington Avenue — that needs to go away before the current Busch stadium does. Second is the highway over Washington is very unfriendly. This is where St. Louisan’s walk — to get to their cars parked in the Arch garage. Burying the highway all the way North of the Landing is what is needed to reconnect these areas to the city. A green lid directly between the arch and the old courthouse are a good idea but we need so much more to reestablish our river connection.
As always I have more thoughts than time. More on this later…
MetroLink
I agree that our MetroLink light rail rocks. I’ve also been impressed with our bus service. I can’t help but think that street cars could reach more of the city and for less money than light rail. Where I live I will never have light rail. That is kind of a bummer. We’ve got the #40 Broadway bus line but I somehow think a #40 Broadway streetcar (like the one we used to have up to the 60s) would draw more riders and make the adjacent neighborhoods more appealing.
– Steve
