Grand Center: The Intersection of Art and Life
The Intersection of Art and Life is the latest in a serious of marketing attempts to brand Grand Center as an arts district.
We are the cultural soul of the city.
We are its right brain.
Its once and future kingdom of arts and entertainment.
We open minds and nourish spirits.
We broaden horizons and indulge fantasies.
We are a melting pot of creative juices.
We are the center of all that feeds the mind, body and soul.We are Grand Center.
At the intersection of Art and Life.
Yeah, yeah, we get it. Artsy. Creating an arts district is not an idea new to St. Louis. In fact, such was the trend in cities all over the US in the 60s. It was 1966 when the Symphony bought Powell hall to serve as their new home. The roots of such thinking comes from a lack of understanding on how cities work.
As people left cities in the 1950s for the new clean suburbs city planners began devising ideas on how to revitalize cities. Unfortunately they nearly destroyed our cities. Streets were widened and highways cut through to make it easier to leave at 5pm for the home in the suburbs. Streets were made one-way for the same reason. Some streets were ripped up to become pedestrian malls. Buildings were razed left and right for parking lots and garages. Entire neighborhoods were leveled for great new housing like Pruitt-Igo.
St. Louis and other cities became neither cities or the new suburbs. They were stuck in this middle ground of being neither. As such, they offered little appeal to city dwellers or suburbanites. In retrospect we now know we should have not tried to mimic the suburbs but instead reinforced what city life was all about. But that didn’t happen.
One of the main aspects of the suburbs is to separate uses. Single family houses are separate from apartments which are separate from shopping areas. Offices too are separated. Given how ugly the new suburbs were it was almost never thought the Symphony should be next to a strip mall. But the logic that created the office park thought a arts district was a good idea. Hence the idea to compartmentalize cultural institutions into one place.
Special districts, by definition, are not diverse neighborhoods. They will not be vibrant from a mix of users and uses. They have a singular purpose.
A neighborhood or district perfectly calculated, it seems, to fill one function, whether work or any other, and with everything ostensibly necessary to that function, cannot actually provide what is necessary if it is confined to that one function.
Unless a plan for a district which lacks spread of people through time of day gets at the cause of the trouble, the best that can be done is to replace old stagnation with new. It may look cleaner for a while, but that is not much to buy with a lot of money.
Jane Jacob’s wisdom from The Death and Life of Great American Cities still rings true over 40 years later. I’m not suggesting we make any arts group or museum move. I am suggesting we drop the urban renewal era district idea in favor of building a great neighborhood. The renovated Coronado and Moolah are two steps in the right direction – they add life to the city morning, noon and night.
The best urban areas in St. Louis; The Loop, Euclid in the West End, South Grand and Washington Avenue, are all based on diverse uses. They are not false singular districts. It is time for city & civic leaders to realize the fallacy of special districts.
We need to be focusing on building diverse neighborhoods.
– Steve
Jane Jacobs is great, especially for having seen long ago and with streets-smarts experience the fallacies of urban planning practices.
Even from more conservative paradigms, such as location theory in economics, every neighborhood needs local services. Places to buy jewelry, antiques and cars would cluster for cost-comparison shopping in a regionally accessible locale, simply because you’re willing to travel further for rare purchases.
But with the age of the mega-stores for even essential shopping, our sense of neighborhoods has been nearly wiped out, especially outside of these rare diverse centers of activity.
Ultimately, every neighborhood, whether Southtown (automotive district), Midtown (arts district) or Downtown (financial district) still needs to function at the most micro level as a neighborhood. This is why Downtown is only now seeing 24/7 activity with more residents, and how Midtown has hung on with SLU but hopefully may soon dramatically increase its own residents beyond The Continental and Gills’ developments.
And this concern for every neighborhood to function like a neighborhood is ultimately why the opening of City Grocers was seen as downtown’s turning point.
It’s not that discussions of this sort don’t happen in New York. Sure they do. But if they’re not dismissed as dealing in lofty abstractions and thus marginalized in that way, then they get buried under the sheer number of issues clamoring for recognition and influence–often aided by large communications budgets that ensure they get heard (and taken seriously) .
Am I wrong to think that in St. Louis, these discussions take place more publicly–more audibly–and thus are likely to have at least some measure of influence, particularly if they represent an identifiable political constituency that actually votes?
This is off topic, kind of, but this blog is the only thing that had weilded any kind of result in my googling. I’m going be visiting St. Louis next week and I’m hoping to find whatever may be the artsy area- a place where I can get some coffee, there are unique shops, etc. Any other points of interest for a girl who’s urban at heart, please let me know.
krisholechek@gmail.com
Concerning the Jane Jacobs idea of an over-abundance of uses in a particular district, you should do a post on the office uses in downtown. As part of the whole “back to the city” movement, many people want to see more companies located downtown. I think this is pure nostalgia and it would be more helpful to see office towers located throughout the city. For instance, Benton Park/Lafayette Square/Soulard could have a neotraditional office tower or two to help bring new uses into that neighborhood. Same thing with areas like the Loop, South Grand, CWE and Dogtown. In fact, they could become landmarks for each respective neighborhood, and be a point of pride among residents. Part of this spreading out of office uses is an influx of other uses, such as residential, into downtown – which we are now seeing and why I believe the reverse could work.