Remaking Urban Streetscapes – A Look At St. Louis’ Euclid Ave
Planning work is well underway to remake three blocks of Euclid Ave, from Lindell Blvd on the north to Forest Park Parkway on the South. Monday evening the design team made another of several public presentations on the issues and proposed options. Interestingly, one of the stated goals was to make the street accessible to all yet the meeting was held in a meeting room at the hotel on Lindell that is reached by stairs, no elevator. Luckily, an advocate for the disabled was present to give feedback on behalf of those that couldn’t reach the meeting.
The group behind this makeover is the Central West End-Midtown Development Corporation. Sorry, no link as they don’t yet have a website. I know, almost 2007 and no website to communicate their plans for redeveloping an area…
They are spending a whopping $400,000 on the planning and engineering for three city blocks of a single street. These funds, as I understand it, came from an increase in the taxes on the property where we have the new Park East Tower high-rise. A diverse group of stakeholders were involved at the start of the project on November 9th.
The development team, headed by Denver-based Civitas, is huge. The list of consultants is close to 10, I think. Too many cooks in the kitchen, in my view. I guess the local development group wants to make sure all $400K gets spent.
This stretch of Euclid was redone probably 30 years ago or so. That is when Euclid, and cross streets Laclede & West Pine, gained the now-dated “lollipop” light fixtures (their description, not mine). The sidewalks and such were redone in the latest style for the time, it was up to date and hip. And that my friends, was the problem. The focus was on the horizontal surfaces of the sidewalk or things like street lamps.
Sure, it probably worked for a while. Anytime you infuse some new cash into an area it will attract some attention which brings new business and customers. Sustaining this influx of investment and users, however, is the trick. Height of fashion streetscapes become dated at some point and keeping up the interest level becomes harder and harder when that happens. I know of no such street that has a long-term sustainable record.
“Washington Avenue,” you proclaim. Well, we are only into the streetscape a few years. It is showing some signs of wear and it will be interesting to see if the city is going to keep up with maintenance or simply move on to areas like Ballpark Village. The outrageously expensive light fixtures do a poor job of lighting the street — you get blinding hot spots and and dark areas otherwise. However, as more businesses open and have lit signage this has become less of an issue. Still, the two blocks from Tucker to 14th are all tricked out like a cheap whore screaming for attention. This is what happens when you let good designers go crazy.
The design team will be back next week presenting to the stakeholders and then to the public on the 16th of January.
You see the design community has the nagging problem, the portfolio. The portfolio or gallery is where they show off their projects to their peers and prospective clients. It takes the really flashy stuff to show up well in photographs. A well-designed streetscape (or building) that is reasonable conventional but part of a dynamic urban context will look far too boring in a designer’s portfolio. Often they want projects that look exciting when empty, hard to accomplish unless you go all out.
You can put the most interesting of brick paving in front of a Wal-Mart and it is still a Wal-Mart. You will not want to spend anymore time out front simply because of the pattern created or some token sculpture. Sure, it might make your passing through a bit more interesting but you will not return because of it. And eventually the novelty of that paving pattern will wear off. The world’s great streets are not about the paving. Nor are they entirely about the architecture. Before going any further with this rant I want to break for some reality of the actual proposals for Euclid. The rant will continue post-proposals.
Civitas was kind enough to share with me the two proposals presented at the meeting. Basically, the two plans involve some of the same items: removal of all existing sidewalks, curbs, trees, and paving. Both involve starting over from scratch.
The first concept, shown below, is what is being described as a “polish” project — clean up what they have. Major changes from today involve the bump-outs at the intersections — those extended curbs that make it shorter to cross a street. They are also suggesting using pervious paving under the on-street parking so that some rain water can be absorbed into the soil rather than adding to the load on the sewer system. The other major difference is raised intersections at Laclede & West Pine. These are used as traffic-calming devices — basically the crosswalks and the center of the intersection are at the same level as the sidewalks. As you drive you’ll go up a slope at you get to the crosswalk and back down the other side as you cross.
Option A — click image above to view in Flickr and to see larger size in detail.
This first option calls for two 7ft parking lanes as well as 22ft in the center for two travel lanes. In the 60ft right-of-way this leaves 12ft for sidewalk on each side of the street. I think they could narrow the curb-to-curb width a bit to 34ft for the two travel and parking lanes, giving more room to pedestrians.
On-street parking would remain at the same number of spaces, roughly 48 per their estimates. These spaces would be redistributed a bit as current all are in the two blocks between Laclade and Lindell. In both revised plans some on-street parking is included in the block between Forest Park Parkway and Laclede. Some at the meeting argued in favor of eliminating on-street parking completely, suggesting the cars are eyesores. Eliminating on-street parking on these three blocks would pretty much kill this street. Yes, quite a bit of parking is available on side streets and in parking structures nearby but that is not the point. On-street parking does a number of things beneficial to the pedestrian — namely helping to slow traffic in the travel lanes as well as providing a big buffer between sidewalk and moving vehicles. Using the curb bump outs and other techniques it is possible to acheive a good balance in this mix.
“But how would eliminating parking kill the street,” you ask? Simple, we do not have the density required to keep the sidewalks busy at all times. Sure, we have a number of pedestrians now that make the street look lively but take away the cars and those same number of pedestrians now looks pathetic. We’d need considerably more pedestrians on the sidewalks to make up for the loss of perceived activity contributed by the parked cars. You might argue that removing parked cars from the street would increase pedestrian traffic but such a cause-effect is only wishful thinking. Density is what increases pedestrian traffic, not the absense of parked cars. Without parked cars the street would look vacant and as it looked vacant you’d have less and less pedestrians because they would not feel as safe on the street. Eventually we’d see less stores as a result. The street would die a slow death. On-street parking can only be eliminated in very special circumstances and none of those exist, or are likely to ever exist, in the St. Louis region. We all need to accept on-street parking as part of the activity of the street.
Moving on to Option B, seen here:
What to say about Option B? WTF!?! Let me explain. Someone on the design team, or from the client, got this bright idea to make a “statement” with the street, specifically water runoff. Never ever advocate making a statement with paving and especially not how that paving is designed to channel storm water. I’m as “green” as the next guy but a 3ft wide covered drainage channel down the middle of the street ending a “planters” at the intersections. Again, WTF? Streets for centuries have been crowned — raised in the center causing water to run to either side, along the gutter/curb and into a drain (ok, the drains have not been around for centuries but you get the idea). We don’t need to re-invent the wheel here. We are talking about three blocks of a narrow right of way. Giving more space to the roadway takes away space from the sidewalks, counter intuitive if you are seeking a pedestrian-friendly environment.
Ald. Joe Roddy spoke last night and was there for all but the last bit of the meeting. He spoke very upbeat about this being the most vibrant street in St. Louis in the future. Again, pretty pavement patterns does not equal vibrant. Issues that can have a sustainable impact on the vibrancy of this street now and in the future are land use, zoning and new construction. The Park East Tower is going to add many new residents but its oppressive street-level design doesn’t help matters. They parking structure that creates the bad situation will have 160 public spaces. I personally would have preferred they do without the public spaces and given us a better street treatment. I hear a bank may be going in the retail space, that will really pack the sidewalks on a Saturday evening.
Roddy and the development group should have taken a big chuck of this $400K they are spending and invested that in some good design guidlines for the area. Along the way look at taxing the hell out of surface parking lots like the one at the corner of Euclid and Lindell to the point where the owner is forced to sell or develop it.
Here are some miscellanous issues that came up at the meeting and my thoughts on them:
- Old trolley tracks may still exist under the street. Here is a crazy idea, do a trolley up and down Euclid to connect the MetroLink stop in the medical complex with the urbanized neighborhoods to the north? Run up to Delmar or Fountain Park?
- A “pedestrian refuge” is planned at Forest Park Parkway. This is very much needed. They team also plans to bump out curbs at the ends of the parking lanes to reduce the width of the crossings. They had some nice before and “after” images.
- It was suggested new structures be required to have public parking. I say that is unnecssary, more than enough parking exists now. Eliminate parking requirements completely and let the developer determine how much parking they need to provide to meet the market demand.
- The team showed a kitchen garden in the presentation. I love kitchen gardens with herbs and such — but not in my public streets. I do not want to eat at a local restaurant and worry that my basil was fertilized by the neighbor’s poodle.
- Some feel some monuments need to be placed at each end to mark the entrance to the area. Again, it is only three blocks long. The area needs to become an extension of Euclid to the North of Lindell. They would do well to copy the same feel so that people naturally flow back and forth across Lindell.
- The development group will be applying for a federal grant from East-West Gateway. Their early estimates are somewhere between $1.8 and $3.0 million dollars. For three blocks!
City streetscapes do not need to be fancy. They need good paving, concrete is a perfectly fine material. They need to be lined with good-sized street trees (spend a bit more on bigger trees). Streets need attractive and quality lighting, nothing too fancy or garish. In short, streets need to just be streets. Zoning, signing and things like opening windows to restaurants are the factors that make for an exciting street. People need places to sit or lock up their bikes. Public clocks are a nice touch. Markers in the pavement to indicate the cross street name helps with way-finding as does the address in the paving. Subtle details are far more important than the hit you over the head so cool and trendy things designers want to experiment with. They need to work on the basics first and branch out from there, not the other way around.
Update 12/12/06 at 8:30pm — I forgot to pass along a link to a December 6 article on this subject from the West End Word.
