A Nearly Typical Walgreen’s in Springfield, MO
I’ve been on vacation of sorts since last Friday (June 10th). Over the weekend I was in Springfield MO for a bicycle class that I’ll share more about in a day or two. Biking to the class from my motel I spotted the Walgreen’s pictured at right. Please excuse the photo quality, it was 7am, cloudy and I’m using an $89 digital camera since my Canon died a week ago.
This Walgreen’s looked like one of their older designs but the corner thing at the street as well as the sidewalk appeared to be newer. Curious I decided to stop and get a few photos to review.
I like how the Walgreen’s has a clear sidewalk from the corner of the intersection to the front door. This is about the only way to make these small boxes tolerable. Of course, if you are coming from up the street from the Walgreen’s you’d never use this sidewalk.
The structure at least “held” the corner since the building certainly doesn’t. I’m not normally a fan of such corner monuments and especially those with advertising as this one. Yet, with this monument sign it would have been worse.
They did an OK job along the public sidewalk. Lamp posts and a few street trees offer protection from passing cars and a short brick wall (where a building should be) gives something of a building line to help enclose the walls of the public street. For a typical suburban-esce Walgreen’s these things certainly helped.
– Steve
A number of the newer Walgreens in St. Louis City are located right on the sidewalk of one of the adjacent streets. This is the case with the Grand and Gravois store – it’s front entrance is right on the Gravois sidewalk.
However, walking to the entrance from Grand is incredibly dangerous! If you come via the driveway from Grand, there’s no walkway at all, so I usually just cut diagonally across the parking lot. Trouble is, so do most drivers, since that lot is ridiculously oversized and usually only about 50% full (or less).
And the entrances on Gravois are both so ridiculously wide, it’s quite impossible to cross them at a walking pace. You have to jog. This despite that a lot of people do walk or ride the bus to this store.
And don’t get me started on their new policy of requiring all backpacks and bags from other stores to be left behind the front counter – with nobody keeping an eye on them! And then they check your receipt as you leave to make sure you paid for everything in your Walgreens bag!
Walgreens: the drugstore that doesn’t trust urban customers.
With the tower in the back near SMS/sports complex/convention center, the pics appear to be downtown Springfield. Granted, it’s not the heart of downtown Springfield about their urban plaza/roundabout, but it looks close. Sad though then that this small city’s downtown looks like Brentwood.
As for urban Walgreen’s, I remember visiting one in Chicago near the Belmont CTA “el” station. This store in Lakeview area (not downtown but dense north corridor) sat directly on the sidewalk with a revolving door entrance on the street corner. But what I remember as a tourist is having my own bags in this very urban Walgreen’s (I had just arrived from Midway via CTA) as well as nearly everyone having backpacks or other bags. Given that this locale had no surface parking and its very urban surroundings, everyone walks there, thus often carrying bags. So, I can see how discouraging bags in a store (the urban walker’s surviver kit) would also discourage folks from walking there.
I actually went to college at Drury University down there in Springfield, and I am very familiar with this Walgreens. I always thought they did a great job with it, and I actually incorporated that sidewalk and the nearby park into my jog. After a few weeks, I started to notice that many others had done this, as well. Hopefully, more businesses here in St. Louis will pick up on subtleties like that corner feature and institute things like that in to their designs.
While I was out driving today down Kingshigway, I noticed that the new Walgreen’s at Kingshighway and Chippewa, in the new Southtown Plaza, has a similar setup to the Walgreens pictured in Springfield. On the corner of Kingshighway and Chippewa, Walgreen’s built one of those structure/monument things right in front of the entrance and the parking lot. This allows a clear sidewalk from the corner of the intersection to the front door. In addition, they don’t have any advertising on the structure either….yes, that’s right, no advertising, not even the name Walgreen’s itself. Walgreen’s even thought of leaving a gap in the iron fencing, with a sidewalk, on the Kingshighway and Chippewa street sides. So I guess if a person is jaywalking in the middle of Chippewa or Kingshighway, they don’t have to climb over the fence…nice touch.
However, that area could use some nice trees, flower boxes/pots, nice lamposts, urban looking trash cans, or something. Oh well, I guess you can’t have everything.
Springfield, Missouri has a divided downtown into four sections. Originally, Springfield was two towns and each had its downtown one, Commercial Street in the depressed north, and the quickly reviving South Street with multiple buildings being rehabbed into lofts and shops.
Three structures on Walnut near Kimbrough, one large one along Pershing west of Jefferson, one at the southeast corner of Jefferson and Walnut, and several others on Walnut. Springfield’s South Street downtown had a grocery store months before downtown St. Louis! And an organic bread maker too! When Springfield was conjoined a government downtown in the early 1900s was built along Booneville between South and Commercial. The picture above with the 300ft black glass tower (known as the Darth Vader tower) is the Hammons downtown. Hammons has built two, maybe three hotels, two office highrises, a ballpark, Jordan Valley park, skating rink, and convention center separate from the hotels. The downtowns do not have the large share of jobs or offices usually found in a downtown because many of those buildings have been demolished, abandoned, and replaced with suburban-style locations.
So, Springfield has four downtowns if you break them up, but three of them will be unified and expanded with the Jordan Valley plan for an extensive park that’s professionally landscaped and lined with midrise stores/residential.
Sorry for the length, but as an SMS City Planning student I have adopted Springfield as my second home to St. Louis and have walked weekly from campus to downtown.
[REPLY – Shaun thanks for the background on Springfield. I didn’t get to spend as much time as I would have liked exploring. Our 12+ mile bike ride we did twice took us to the East and South of downtown(s). I’m going to post more on Springfield later today… Stay tuned. – Steve]
I’ve always had friends and/or family living in and around Springfield, so I’m pretty familiar with its downtown and the ups and downs it’s experienced over the years.
Shaun’s post provided an excellent and extensive background of Springfield’s downtown(s), so I’ll try not to rehash anything here.
Springfield, like Saint Louis and Kansas City, has benefitted immensely from Missouri’s historic preservation tax credit program. The surge of residents, businesses, and rehab activity there reminds me of Saint Louis on a smaller scale. Just in the last three to five years, the number of retail and dining options and the interest in downtown living have increased dramatically.
The plans for my favorite Springfield building are particularly impressive. The former Heer’s department store occupies the NW corner of Park Central Square. After 125 years in business, the seven-level store closed in 1995. Prost Builders is converting the upper floors into office space, and the main and mezzanine levels will be home to retail shops and restaurants (several leases have already been inked). The building’s original terra cotta panels, damaged by the glass and steel facade installed in the late 1960s, will be restored, and a parking deck will be built on the surface lot that once served the store’s customers behind the building. The first two levels of Heer’s Tower will be open by fall 2006, with the remainder of the building completed by mid-2007 IIRC.
Plans are also underway to construct a mixed-use complex called College Station on the surface lots one block west of Park Central Square. It will include a movie theater and residential development, but I haven’t heard anything about a timetable on this one.
Springfield is a quick and inexpensive road trip for Saint Louisans- and IMHO its downtown is certainly worth a closer look.
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