St. Louis – who is at fault?

“This is St. Louis, bro. Nobody walks anywhere. How this is AGE’s fault, I’m not sure (but we’re sorry)” was written by A.G. Edwards’ employee “Pat” in the comments of a November 22nd critique entitled, “A.G. Edwards headquarters is a liability, not an asset.” Another comment by Pat stated, “Except for the club life on or near the weekends our dear city can’t quite keep people downtown. That’s not AGE’s fault — nor is it their concern when building its facilities.”

Pat argues it wasn’t A.G. Edwards fault that people don’t walk in St. Louis or stay downtown. Pat also suggests that keeping people downtown or encouraging walking shouldn’t be a concern for A.G. Edwards when designing their buildings/campus. Deflecting fault is the common theme to Pat’s comments. Sadly, Pat represents the majority perspective on urban life.

So basically, the argument goes, the only responsibility AGE or any other company has is to pay property taxes and bring in employees. If people don’t walk from place to place because a company’s buildings make the public sidewalk unbearable don’t blame the company. If people don’t want to stick around a place because commercial buildings are boring & sterile don’t blame those companies or their architects. OK, Pat – who is at fault?

This is a very basic question with both a simple & complex answer. The simple answer is everyone is to blame. Yes, everyone that has ever lived & worked in the St. Louis area – including me – is to blame for the current state of the St. Louis Region. Just as everyone that has ever lived & worked in Chicago, Dallas, Indianapolis, or my original hometown of Oklahoma City is to blame for the current state of their cities. Those of us in Missouri are to blame for the condition of our state. We Americans are to blame for the state of our country (and tragically the state of many other countries). And of course, we as humans are to blame for state of planet earth.

This brings us to the long answer. As a democracy we are collectively responsible for the fate of our society. We, as individuals, all make choices. As voters we make choices.. As home buyers we make choices. As consumers we make choices. As business owners we make choices. As architects we make choices. Our choices can and do have an impact on others in our free society.

I’m not talking about personal, private choices but public choices – how we as a society interact. This takes place in the public realm – namely the street. How we travel on the street, that is, how do we go from one private property to another, is the public concern. Perhaps this is why Pat and most of America doesn’t think a company has any responsibility beyond its property lines because the street (which includes public sidewalks herein) is the responsibility of the public. Never mind that we are the public.

Modern zoning was a late 19th/early 20th century attempt at creating some order as cities became more crowded and polluted as part of the industrial revolution. Before modern zoning cities developed naturally as dense pedestrian-friendly environments. Well, I guess all the horses didn’t always make life friendly if you were walking but you get the point. I’m not going to go into all the events of the 20th century that wreaked havoc on St. Louis and most American cities. For that, I suggest James Howard Kunster’s “Geography of Nowhere” as he does an excellent job getting a grasp on the subject. Instead, I want to highlight some choices of prior generations of St. Louisan’s are effecting our city today.

• Organizers of the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis outdid the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. The idea of grand boulevards of culture segregated from basic functions like food service was planted in the minds of fairgoers.
• St. Louis, no exception to the national trend, took to automobile use. This led to a decline in the development of pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods as well as a decrease in areas serviced by streetcars.
• City leaders in St. Louis widened major streets by removing fronts of buildings. Streets like Olive, Jefferson, Gravois were not originally as wide as they are today.
• St. Louis population peaked at less than a million people in just 61 square miles of area. Overcrowding was rampant.
• Civic boosters decided the riverfront – the start of St. Louis – would be better used as a grand scheme – and began clearing 40 city blocks of buildings (save for the Old Cathedral) in the 1940s.
• Federal policy in a post WWII society pushed for highways to evacuate cities in the event of nuclear war, guaranteed home loans for new suburban ranches but not for rehab of older structures. St. Louisians, like most Americans, had little choice but to purchase a new ranch house in the suburbs.
• With the auto & construction industry pushing for increased use of the car developers saw little incentive to continue building dense pedestrian friendly neighborhoods.
• Zoning laws were changed to make sure new development favored auto transportation over walking or streetcar. For example, the store owner that wanted to build a new shop like his old one – up to the sidewalk with his apartment above – found that he could no longer do so. He had to set the building far away from the street (which wouldn’t have a sidewalk anyway), provide parking for cars and he would end up living in a subdivision which was intentionally kept separate from stores.
• As more cars clogged the widened streets St. Louis began the worst phase – the massive destruction of homes, businesses, schools and yes – churches – to build highways that would make it easier for people to drive in and out of St. Louis.
• At the same time entire neighborhoods were razed for highways, other neighborhoods – the slums – were razed so public housing projects could be built. Peoples lives, in the case of highways & slum clearance, were unimportant. They were pawns.
• Activist judges decided we whites could no longer legislatively tell blacks where they could and couldn’t live, that we couldn’t keep them in unequal schools. We were one society and we had to learn to live together. The real estate industry and perhaps civic leaders determined what areas would become black as laws limiting black property ownership to areas like The Ville were determined to be unconstitutional. White people living in an area now labeled as black panicked and fled.
• Demolition for highways, housing projects and – horrors – a black person living next door meant St. Louis was changing faster than it ever had.
• Too much change too quickly made much of St. Louis unstable. Businesses in the path of highways or housing projects followed their customers to the suburbs.
• City buildings were razed for parking, parking and more parking. The city was quickly becoming as boring as the suburbs without the newness. Streets that were once vibrant with pedestrians was nothing but parking lots. Why stay around?
• Despite an ever thinning city, some suggested more open space. The Gateway Mall was conceived, built and then destroyed by allowing an office building in the middle of the green.

Of course, I have over simplified the events of the last hundred years or so. My point is many people have made many decisions that have affected the shape of our city and region. Small decisions like one person moving to the suburbs had little consequence. However, when you add up thousands of similar decisions the affect is major. Couple that with massive public works projects like highways & slum clearance and you’ve just de-stabilized a city.

How we construct our public right of ways – the streets and sidewalks – has a huge impact on the shape our cities take. But, the other factor is how private property owners construct their buildings in relationship to this public right of way. Cities could build the perfect street – correct width, allow on-street parking, street trees, generous sidewalks, etc.. but that along does not make the street pedestrian-friendly. Let’s say you have two identical streets where one has mixed use buildings with ground floor retail, underground parking , interesting window displays and the other street has blank brick walls adjacent to the sidewalk, large massive parking lots/garages in front of buildings so that you couldn’t see any window displays, and parking entrances/exits every few hundred feet or so. Which would you walk down? Keep in mind – the portion that is the public responsibility – the sidewalk, street trees and curb to curb paving is identical. No one would choose to walk down the latter street because it is not conducive to walking. Nor would such a street be pleasant to bike down. One encourages public interaction and one discourages it. This cannot be any more basic of concept.

Each property owner either contributes to or detracts from the public realm by how they choose to build in relationship to the street. Sometimes they have no choice – if zoning says you have to put a parking lot in front of the building and you can’t mix housing, retail, office and other uses then you don’t have a lot of choice. So, the responsibility of building urban & pedestrian-friendly streets falls in two main places – the government that determines the zoning and the building owner. In the case of the owner, I don’t think most know better. In the case of A.G. Edwards headquarters I don’t know who is more at fault for how the campus developed in such an anti-urban fashion – the executives or the architect. Had the zoning been different it wouldn’t have mattered – they would have been forced to build a more urban campus. So, it was the fault of St. Louis’ aldermen & planners for not forcing A.G Edwards, via zoning, to build a pro-urban campus?

Oddly enough, I actually agree with that last question. Yes, A.G. Edwards executives & architects could have taken a much different approach but for whatever reason they didn’t and the city failed to use the power of zoning to create an urban city. Indeed, our current zoning encourages anti-urban development. We can create an exhaustive list of people & decisions to fault from the past but it will be of little use. The important task at hand is to change our outdated zoning – all over the region – to encourage and force property owners to build more urban, pedestrian-friendly buildings.

Before the “it’s my property, I’ll do what I want” folks chime in let me say this – if we can take people’s homes, businesses, schools & churches for the greater public good of a Wal-Mart then we can certainly justify pro-urban buildings in the name of public good.

We, as citizens, must demand of our elected officials to bring about change. We must push civic employes to rewrite the code and get it to the alderman for approval. If not, we are at fault for not participating in the public realm.

Links to public officials in the City of St. Louis:
Contact the mayor
• Contact your alderman
• Contact the Planning & Urban Design Agency