An Outsiders Take on St. Louis
I found the following text as commentary on a biodiesel blog:
If anyone who is responsible for planning in downtown St. Louis is reading this: The one thing that really makes downtown look empty is that you’ve allowed the parking garages to take up the ground floor of buildings – which makes every second building, or so, look abandoned because there are no ground-floor storefronts. There aren’t enough ground-floor shops for the foot traffic, especially during the big conventions.
And, you need a more pedestrian friendly “causeway” across the interstate to connect downtown hotels to the archway area. Use air-rights, like Chicago has done with Grant and Millenium Parks.
BTW – the light rail rocks!
The discussion was simply about a biodiesel club in St. Louis and they guy found it necessary to comment. How insightful of this person that visited St. Louis and came to these conclusions. Let’s look at his points one by one.
Parking Garages & Street Level Retail:
Yep, downtown does indeed look too empty because the ground floor of most of our parking garages are blank. These need to be retrofitted soon. In fact, some of our oldest garages such as those on the North side of Kiener Plaza need to be razed and replaced with actual buildings. Note that I said buildings — plural. These banal garages occupy a block each which is just overwhelming. Each of those blocks needs to get broken up again with an alley and have multiple buildings per block. They don’t need massive towers — four to ten floors is good enough. The main floor is most critical.
Foot traffic is so important and many of our blocks offer nothing for the pedestrian so they keep going, and often don’t come back that direction. If a block isn’t “permeable” then it is a dead block. That is, if you as the general public cannot enter a store, coffee house or some other portion of the building(s) on a block then it is not contributing to the life of the sidewalk. In general, building lobby entrances don’t count either. The exception is when building windows are interesting enough to draw you into the main entrance. Such is the case on Washington Avenue with the AIA office.
Connection to the Arch
Plans have been discussed for years to put a lid over I-70 to reconnect our city with our riverfront. The highway, like all our highways, are more of a barrier than a connector. I have somewhat a different perspective on the riverfront. Follow me here.
I love the Arch — it is a stunning sculpture. The problem is the riverfront offers nothing other than the Arch. Who goes there besides tourists? Laclede’s Landing has more things to do but it is still mostly a tourist area. Basically, the civic leaders really messed up a hundred years ago when they got the bright idea to clear the area and build some grand project. They had no appreciation for the buildings and street grid that was there — the massing, the cast iron fronts, the small block grid weaving its way up from the river. This was a spectacular area that, had it not been razed, could today rival areas such as New Orleans’ French Quarter or even NYC’s SoHo and Chelsea neighborhoods. We’ve got a long history in St. Louis of “leaders” wanting to make their mark on the city by razing something great for something less pedestrian friendly. Will it ever stop?
But, those forty city blocks are long gone. We’ve got an exciting loft district happening that has nothing to do with the river. Washington Avenue is our most interesting street at this point (despite the lack of on-street parking East of Tucker). Two obstacles create a disconnect to the river from the loft area. The first is St. Louis Centre over Washington Avenue — that needs to go away before the current Busch stadium does. Second is the highway over Washington is very unfriendly. This is where St. Louisan’s walk — to get to their cars parked in the Arch garage. Burying the highway all the way North of the Landing is what is needed to reconnect these areas to the city. A green lid directly between the arch and the old courthouse are a good idea but we need so much more to reestablish our river connection.
As always I have more thoughts than time. More on this later…
MetroLink
I agree that our MetroLink light rail rocks. I’ve also been impressed with our bus service. I can’t help but think that street cars could reach more of the city and for less money than light rail. Where I live I will never have light rail. That is kind of a bummer. We’ve got the #40 Broadway bus line but I somehow think a #40 Broadway streetcar (like the one we used to have up to the 60s) would draw more riders and make the adjacent neighborhoods more appealing.
– Steve
Steve-
What about smaller-scale, incremental improvements to downtown?
Have you seen the flower boxes attached to City Hall?
Sometimes I wonder if we’d be better off doing a thousand, thousand-dollar projects, than one, million-dollar project.
RB
[REPLY – Absolutely! There are literally thousands of small scale improvements that could be made both publically and privately. Window boxes are certainly one. A $99 bike rack here and there as new sidewalks are poured is another. But, some of these parking garage structures are oversized and under detailed. They need to go!
In general I am in favor of the smaller project over the big project. We need some big projects to undue the damage done by earlier big projects. The rest can be done on a much smaller scale. – Steve]
Density rocks, but the one thing people often don’t realize is that horizontal density is more critical than vertical density, when it comes to vibrant street life.
No matter how high you go, whether General American’s former 3-story offices or 40-plus storied Met Square, each feels dead due to their lacking street presence.
The Kiener garages at least have street-level restaurants, but many tenants take up nearly a half block, thereby limiting horizontal density. And utlimately, Kiener’s wide driveways, gigantic PARK signs, and concrete clading sorely remind the pedestrian that this is vulnerable territory to walk.
Density is usually seen as number of units or gross square footage per acre. But street-level density more so should concern the number of various uses per linear street frontage.
For this reason, street-level retail is better for street-level density when there are multiple businesses, uses and various public entrances at street level. The result is narrow frontage with deeper stores. To make this paradigm shift, we should really value the linear foot of public sidewalk frontage more so than the acreage of private land.
If I had my druthers, the one “big” project we’d do first would be to demolish the StL Centre “bridge” over Washington Avenue as part of an overall repositioning of the Centre, then, at the same time, opening up the Washington Avenue facade of the old Dillards building for historic rehab.
Thinking in terms of smaller, low-cost options, here’s a suggestion (some people will have my head for suggesting this, but here goes….):
Why not CLOSE Memorial Drive (say between Locust and Walnut) permanently, just like we do during the VP Fair? Shut the sucker down for good.
If the closing can be accomodated at the same time hundreds of thousands of visitors descend on the Arch grounds, why not just make it a permanent change?
No more through traffic between the Arch and the Old Court House. Reroute the traffic onto the downtown street grid.
RB
Closing Memorial Drive — a superfluous “outer-road” with no stores or adequate sidewalks — would allow us to do more than just put a lid on I-70. We could envision something greater.
One thing that needs to be undone is the horrible closure of Locust between Fourth and Broadway. Was someone asleep at the wheel with this one? That block carried a lot of traffic and, with St. Charles Avenue’s being blocked at Broadway, was a vital westbound link from Fourth. If the streets were two-way, this closure would only be an aesthetic disgrace but as it is is offends from a traffic planning standpoint and an aesthetic standpoint. It’s one of those moves that is so pointlessly dumb that I can’t understand it at all.
Michael,
You may not have been aware but the Federal Reserve insisted Locust be closed or they would leave the city. The city folded (what’s new?). They claimed security as the issue. It is a post 9/11 world, you know. Gee, the other three sides are still exposed, hmmm…
Also, if you have not noticed they actually added a new multi-story entrance addition to their building where the street used to be. I will say, however, they did a bang up job renovating that god-awful parking garage they purchased from the city. But wait, the city demolished the Marquette annex to build that garage to make the Marquette developable. Now with that garage gone I understand the Hilton garage east of the Marquette will provide their parking. Now that is truly the ugliest thing I can even imagine.
Some of the garages about which you complain DO have street-level retail spaces included. However, those spaces are often vacant, because they are not very attractive retail/restaurant spaces.
The Kiener Plaza garages do a decent job of keeping those spaces occupied, moreso than most, including a fancy new St. Louis Bread Company location. Even the Famous-Barr garage has places like Safari Cafe and Curry in a Hurry in its ground-level spaces.
However, the Marquette Garage retail spaces have NEVER been occupied. Likewise, the former Union Electric paycenter in the old Missouri State Bank building garage at the high visibility corner of Locust and Tucker sat vacant for more than five years, and is only now being renovated for a new Papa John’s Pizza (replacing the one closed last year just across Locust).
And then there’s the ground-floor space in the St. Louis Centre-East garage: once-upon-a-time, it was Woolworths. Now that former retail space has been converted to parking too!
I complained to Ald. Phyllis Young about the closure of Locust from 4th to Broadway when it was first proposed, and you’re right, that was a big part of keeping the FRB downtown. Even earlier, right after 9/11, the FRB had the bus stop on Locust just east of Broadway removed; I guess they didn’t care that some of their employees used that stop to get home in the evenings! Of course, the FRB is perhaps the single most powerful entity in this country’s economic system, so they can pretty much get whatever they want.
Now, of course, most buses that used to run on Locust have been totally rerouted to Washington; the expresses still go on the rest of Locust from 4th to Tucker, but have a silly one block detour to Washington.
While there are a few really atrocious garages with no retail spaces designed into them — the Stadium garages are huge examples of this, as well as the new Cupples Station garage on Spruce — the retail/restaurant spaces in most of the downtown core garages are quite shallow, because of the need to accomodate ramps and service equipment in the center of the garage. But even some of the newly developed retail spaces in regular old buildings have ridiculously huge street frontage. The Ambiente store at 10th and Locust comes to mind.
We do have a few places with appropriately narrow storefronts, and deep stores or restaurants. The south side of the 1100 block of Olive comes to mind: Pino’s, 2-Cents Plain, etc., have limited storefront space in traditional, small buildings, but the dining areas go pretty far back into the building.
Perhaps as demand increases for these spaces, and rents go up, there will be a move to squeeze more storefronts per block.
Close memorial drive…only an option if all the other streets are no longer blocked for construction purposes. Have you tried driving down Broadway from Washington Ave. to the hwy 40 ramp lately? There’s only 2 of the 5 lanes open in some spots. Let’s not make it any harder to get around downtown than it already is. For example, my fiance won’t come downtown period because he says it’s too much of a pain to drive around.
Now for the St. Louis Centre bridge, I will be outside on the sidewalk watching that thing come down. I work in the building just across 6th street from the old dillards building and I can’t wait to see that eyesore come down.