St. Louis’ Gateway Mall leaves much to be desired
The view below is from my friend’s private office in downtown St. Louis:
Not a bad view?
What do you see?
I see a useless strip of green where historic buildings used to be, sterile buildings on the North and equally sterile buildings on the South. From the Old Courthouse to the Municipal Courts this is a dead zone.
Oh sure, at lunch people are relieved to escape their cubicles for the outdoors and you’ll see people out and about. However, the rest of the time this area has no real meaning to the people of St. Louis.
People moving into the lofts only a few blocks to the North are not doing so because of this space. In a future post I’ll take a more detailed look at the Gateway Mall – why it was ill conceived, why it is an urban failure and what can be done to correct the situation.
– Steve
Places like this stretch of Gateway Mall–at least, as pictured here–invite no one and inspire nothing. They’re designed by people who seem hostile to the implied density, even the intimacy of urban scale.
No surprise, then, that these are public places we pass in private automobiles–rather than places we want to inhabit or use–on the way to somewhere real. How can this banality be an improvement upon a derelict but architecturally distinguished building or even strip of buildings, waiting to be reclaimed by people who can understand, respect and celebrate the uban context?
This is not 1955. We know that preservation- oriented downtown revitalization works. Yet here’s another deadly, anonymous space imported from the suburban planbook.
This scene could be anywhere not just in America, but in the world. In 2004, in a city with a built environment as distinctive and important as St. Louis’s, this kind of development isn’t just banal; it’s inexcusable.
it is a failure. For spaces like this to work one thing I think you need is a large number of people living adjacent to it. Not a few blocks away where the park is only a destination you walk to a couple of times a week, but a place for your activities of daily living- work, recreation, school, food etc. You need the overlap of different people doing different things. Right now its only use is an alternative to eating lunch in their office cubicle, but only on nice days in the summer. I did like how they had a volleyball league this summer- it’s a start.
Also, there is a seven lane speedway bordering to the south, and other ‘dead zones’ surrounding it as well.
Food is integral to the success of public spaces (read William Whyte) and we are very lacking. I can only think of 4 or 5 portable food carts in the whole city. I think things like that really enhance a public space.
While I’m suggesting reading options one of my favorites is “Cities Back from the Edge” by Roberta Gratz and Norman Mintz
I don’t see any reason for the blocks of the Gateway Mall between the Civil Courts Building and Gateway One to continue to be a “public space”. At this point, it would be better to develop those three blocks for housing, office space, etc. It would also be nice to see a return of the skating rink, this time as a permanent installation.
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