A.G Edwards’ “Street Smart” Brochure Adds to Workers Fear of City
Earlier in the week I found myself on the 2nd floor of A.G. Edwards’ main building and next to the soda machines were some employee brochures. In a few prior posts I had been a bit critical of the A.G. Edwards campus. Wait, that is an understatement. I started off with an expletive laced rant last November.
Street Smart: Facts you need to know about the A.G. Edwards campus and your safety.
I could not believe this brochure. As soon as I read it I was furious. Sure, it is wise to advise employees about safety but you can do it in a way that doesn’t scare them so much they don’t explore the city.
Crime can happen anywhere and at any time.
A.G. Edwards is committed to providing a safe and secure environment for employees and visitors.The Security Department has prepared “Street Smart” to help you avoid becoming a crime statistic. With that objective in mind, here are some suggestions that will hopefully keep you safe, secure and, above all, “Street Smart.”
Oh, good start. I can just see the new suburban employee that doesn’t know the city just having fears reinforced by such language. It only gets worse.
They are told while driving to lock your doors because, “a driver is especially vulnerable immediately after parking or when stopping for a traffic light or stop sign.” Other sections while driving include “be aware of your surroundings”, and “have your keys ready.”
The first subheading after “If your car breaks down” is, funny enough, “Avoid a breakdown.”
I love it. For your safety have “plenty of gas and good tires.” This is good,
“If you have tire trouble in an area of town where you don’t feel safe, keep driving, but go slowly. Tires and rims can always be replaced.”
Granted, if you get a flat directly in front of a crack house then stopping and changing the tire may not be advisable. However, i lived across the street from a crack house for over a year and never had any problems (and no, I was not a client).
In the ‘While Walking’ portion of the brochure the first subheading is good advice — “Know your surroundings, and walk with a purpose.” Makes sense. But the paragraph that follows is just fear mongering:
“Studies indicate that muggers target those who send out a signal of vulnerability. People, who walk down the street looking preoccupied, with their eyes glued to the pavement ahead of them, are especially vulnerable. Let your body language show that you’re alert – in other words, that you’re not a good target.”
The entire brochure (3-panel letter sized) includes very sound advice but in a way that would discourage employees from walking and exploring the city. The safest sidewalk is a populated sidewalk and the A.G. Edwards campus creates lifeless sidewalks. If the area around their campus is not safe it is not because it is in the city but because all their parking lots and parking garages have removed diversity from the streetscape.
If only A.G. Edwards’ architects and planners would have had some urban design “street smarts” the area would likely be more vibrant.
– Steve
There are more than a dozen AG Edwards facilities within an hour of the Arch — including offices in Clayton, Frontenac, and Town & Country. Did you see anything that made you think the brochure was referring just to the City?
[REPLY – Good question and almost clever. However, the graphic on the cover of their main campus pretty much made it clear to me that it was specific to that location. My apologies for not making this clear in my original post. – SLP]
Steve-
If you think A.G. Edwards is detrimental to Midtown/Downtown West, you should read St. Louis University’s “security alerts”. Whenever a crime occurs near the main campus or the medical campus, the Department of Public Safety issues an email to all students and faculty.
Fair enough, right? Sounds like a good service to the university.
However, each email contains similar safety tips that you have mentioned. If I had saved one, I could quote it, but, basically, they suggest that students should not leave the confines of the campus. And I believe it even goes so far as to suggest that it’s dangerous even walking around campus at night…
Now, you, as an urbanist, might say to yourself, surely a university of 6,000 undergrad students would not instill fear in its students and encourage them to avoid the surrounding neighborhood. But, you’d be wrong.
There is no telling how many more retail, dining and even residential options there would be for Midtown if SLU encouraged its students to contribute to the vitality and density of the neighborhood with their dollars and even just their footsteps and “eyes on the street.” But no, we have to allow this paranoia to go on.
If you don’t believe me, I can give you a demonstration. A girl whom I worked on a project with my sophomore year at SLU was about to cross Grand when she saw me. Apparently she knew I was a St. Louis enthusiast and she stopped me to ask me where she could find good Asian food in St. Louis. Of course, I suggested Pho Grand, an easy drive/bus ride from SLU. When she heard I suggested a restaurant on Grand, she asked, with a straight face, “but don’t people get shot at all the time on Grand?” She then told me that the students who “taught” the University’s “welcome” one-hour course for incoming Freshman called “University 101” had told everyone that they shouldn’t venture off campus–near or far–for fear of being shot.
This is lunacy. Whether A.G. Edwards or SLU, our institutions need to quit acting like they’re anchoring a neighborhood when all they are doing is isolating themselves from it. Yes, Midtown is probably mainly viable only due to SLU’s presence. However, SLU is now constricting the (re)development of Midtown into a vital urban neighborhood. As SLU is a Midtown Monolith, developers and owners around the surrounding neighborhood are either fearful to redevelop/renovate any structure lest SLU should want to buy it for a parking lot…or they want to reap the benefits when SLU most needs their parcel for precious parking.
I am going to write a massive letter to Biondi after doing a little research on just how much SLU has hindered the growth of Midtown and turned it into parking/ballfield paradise.
Also, as a final sidenote, our student council president noted on a popular SLU website that she “listens to rap because [she] lives in the ghetto”, referring of course to terrifying Midtown…
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I need to enroll in a school that cares about the neighborhood it’s in and doesn’t encourage these attitudes and allow such misinformation to its students. It’s disheartening to hear that SLU is not the only Midtown institution to be spreading this paranoiac garbage.
–Matt
[REPLY – I hear you! Maybe SLU and AG Edwards are having a private competition to see which can build the more anti-urban campus. I’m not sure who is winning at this point. Both are supposed to be a boon to the area but they really stifle urbanity from happening.
Next time you get one of those emails please forward it to me – I’d be happy to print it. I’d also be happy to print your letter to SLU’s Biondi. – SLP]
Did the brochure mention that eyes on the street from shops and residences make streets safer at night, and that employees would be safer if they avoided going near the AG Edwards campus itself?
Regarding the brochure, I think that AG Edwards has only one facility that it refers to as a “campus” and that’s the scary mess at Jefferson and Market.
I second Matt on that one. I thought I had one of the emails, but I must have deleted it a couple of days ago. What I hate most about the stupid safety alerts is that they are put out even when someone that has nothing to do with the university is involved. DPS tries to say they are just putting them out as part of their commitment to keeping all members of the university informed and safe, but all it does is build fear. And they are often sent out 2-3 times the day of the alert for some stupid reason. Luckily, I don’t think many of the students even read them. I don’t know why I have never done this, but I think I will right back to DPS every time they send one out, and I will certainly forward the emails to anyone interested.
I can happily say I had a different experience with my university 101 class last year. My class encouraged us to go out and experience the community, and just remember reasonable safety measures that should be followed anywhere.
MAN that brochure is creepy. I agree with you, Steve, in your assessment of it. I mean…. a lot of these points are sorta good, but they add up to Never Leave The Building The City Is A Ghetto. I don’t know, the whole thing just seems to go a little too far. The only two things I usually tell people about walking in an unfamiliar place (unless it’s somewhere that really scares me, like my current neighborhood in FPSE, or they will be walking alone at night) is stay alert&look alert, and most of all act like you’re supposed to be there. If people think you’re supposed to be there and that you know where you are, then you’ll usually be fine.
The other thing that really bugs me about crime literature like this is that it leaves two key facts: The vast majority of murders are committed by someone the victim knows, usually a family member or acquaintance. AND the vast majority of rapes–well over 80%–are committed by someone the survivor knows. In other words, the two worst crimes that can be committed against you usually don’t happen on the street. Rape is not usually a strange black man attacking a scantily clad white woman in an alley at 3AM in North City (as is the popular perception of it)–much more likely, it’s someone that the survivior knows. Random violent street crime does happen and it’s really horrible when it does, but I think if people actually had a realistic understanding of how the worst violent crimes typically work, they’d be a lot less freaked out when they walked around unfamiliar urban areas.
As to the Matts, please forward me some of those SLU e-mails. I’m curious. I remember similar e-mails when I attended the University of Illinois at Chicago (I wonder if such notifications are required by law?). Our school was largely a commuter school, so people there did know parts of the city. Also, we had famous, touristy areas like Greektown and Little Italy immediately adjacent to our campus, and some students left campus to go there. But still, a lot of people seemed terrified of the neighborhoods around there, and I think those e-mails had a lot to do with it. A couple of graphic ones would come out, and then I’d hear students and my co-workers at the University saying things like “I live near campus and I run home when I get off work at 7PM, I’m so scared!” “You walked WHERE? Don’t walk there by yourself!” The way everyone talked, I assumed that the area between our East and West campuses was virtually a desert of crime. Only when curiosity and a job as a messenger got me started walking around on foot did I discover that actually, some of the local businesses, old buildings, and the very few, low-rise housing projects (gasp! poor people!) in the area between campuses was a heckuva lot more interesting than Greektown or Little Italy, and infintely more interesting than our grim, AG Edwards-like campus.
I might add, on the topic of universities….
I visited UMSL a couple of months ago, because I want to get to finishin’ my degree (maybe want isn’t the right word…I *will* finish my degree.). As you know, Michael and I have been working on a ‘zine about different individuals’ perceptions of safety in their neighborhoods. Having that topic on the brain, curious to see how the UMSL admissions fellow would define safety, I asked him how safe it was to walk around the campus. He said it was quite safe, cited the emergency buttons and the usual. After I prodded him to say more, he told me not to walk far to the east of the university.
When I got back to Metrolink, I pulled out my handy-dandy map to see if the places he was talking about were what I thought they were. My suspicions were correct: He had advised me not to walk around in Normandy or Jennings, which are the first places I’d want to look around if I was up at UMSL on a regular basis. Innnteresting. This fellow was extremely nice, and I think he was just trying to look out for my safety as a woman and as a solo pedestrian, which is understandable in this society. Still, a voice in the back of my head couldn’t help but think, “Would he still have said the same thing if I was black?”
This does not stop at corporations or Universities. Its been widely accepted in the past that even Downtown St. Louis empties out after 5pm and anyone left after that is surely up to no good. That perception seems like its starting to change with the focus now being on the new lofts and how its cool to be urban. We need to get into the heads that matter both publicly and corporately. Take them to lunch. If you know people who are upper management in the large corporations set up a meeting after work someplace downtown, get these people out of their audi/bmw encrusted shell. I know people who leave their suburban house, park in a garage in or near their building and then go into work only to leave at 5pm the same way they came in. Perception is stronger than fact and the goal is to change the perception since nobody cares about facts.
I can tell you however that I will not swim off the coast of Florida since there are sure to be 30 sharks just waiting to take a bite of me.
The western edge of the loft district will forever stop at AG Edwards near Jefferson, so long as its fortress-like campus blocks access to Midtown. Hopefully, nearby blocks, like those north of Olive, can be developed to provide a link.
Washington and Locust offer the most promising connection between Midtown and the West Loft District, though the City needs to close the public health squalor of Samuel Shepard.
Similarly, Purina has never helped downtown have a link to Soulard, but other nearby development, like the Ice House offer hope.
Does SLU email the reports for crimes ON their campus?
Or maybe SLU’s campus is crime-free?
If the SLU/AG Edwards campuses have as much or more crime than the surrounding areas, perhaps they should send reports to nearby residents/businesses so actual City folk know to avoid those dangerous places. Imagine that.
Me thinks that the University (SLU) has a tiny little ploy going. Isn’t it in the best interest of the university to “play down” how vibrant the surrounding area is (or could be)? I mean, after all, if things were vibrant, real estate prices would be too high, meaning that SLU couldn’t continue with their land grab, like they have near Lindell and Forest Park Avenues.
Maybe thier cafeteria is paying for the “Street Smarts” to keep people buying their food. Gosh golly they might actually walk somewhere and buy real food! More FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt)! I thought “Street Smarts” was a cycling book ;0) (SP focused joke)
I loved taking metro link downtown when I worked at Mercantile / Firstar / US Bank / ______ Bank. If I was single now days I would probably be totally car free! But I got into cycling to save money since we are a one income family. I work in Olivette now where I am a cycling minority. Although I love riding in Olivette / U. City area. Since there is a good population of cyclists.
Claire – Thanks for sharing your comments on UMSL. I grew up in Jennings and yes it probably could be considered a dangerous place at night if you don’t know where your at…but that can be anyplace. I know my wife’s father says the same thing about Bellefountain Neighbors. Since moving out of that area when I was 25 to Florissant and now Ferguson I don’t see any draw to even going to Jennings (I only go there to visit my parents). The place to visit is Ferguson! You can bike/walk there or even take a bus. I prefer riding my bike . Just go down the hill from the UMSL North station and you will see the new “Jones” Multi-Use Bike Trail. It will take you to Ferguson (just two miles away). It is all signed and has plenty of room. It does close after dark. After the trail ends you will need to walk either down the hill (spot rd.) Make a right and then you will pass Ferguson Post office. Once you pass the Aldi store you will end up at the Victorian Plaza. On your right is a info board / bike racks. Within walking distance is a chinese restaurant, hardware store, whistle stop (custard shop), coffee shop and much more! Ferguson is much more walkable than Jennings, Normandy, or Florissant. Don’t get me there are improvements to be made! But they have much more going for them already! Enjoy!
Jeff
My father is a broker for A.G. Edwards at a branch in my hometown. When he visits, I often take him for little mini tours of the different neighborhoods, because he loves the city and its history. He always gets very nervous whenever we start to head north across that imaginary horizontal east/west line that runs through A.G. Edwards/downtown. One of the main reasons is that everytime he is in town for one of the company’s big seminars/training sessions, they always stress to absolutely not go north, and to be very careful when out on the streets. This is a huge disappointment to me for such a large employer to not encourage out-of-towners to explore our beautiful city.
As much as this company is an asset to our city and downtown, it is also a hindrance. I pretty much completely agreed with your assesment of their campus in one of your early posts on this site.
Many of the same arguments could also be made with SLU and their treatment of Midtown.
“If the area around their campus is not safe it is not because it is in the city but because all their parking lots and parking garages have removed diversity from the streetscape.”
“If only A.G. Edwards’ architects and planners would have had some urban design “street smarts” the area would likely be more vibrant.”
Steve, you said it all with these statements. By choosing to isolate itself from the city, A.G. Edwards has created a campus that looks and feels deserted.
Empty walls, empty space- it’s exactly this kind of environment that fuels the perception of high crime.
I’m terribly disappointed that a major company that chooses to call Saint Louis home does it such a disservice by isolating itself from its surroundings and fueling tired misperceptions about personal safety in and around downtown.
Two more things-
I agree with Jeff- I think the AGE cafeteria could use some nearby competition. As much as I loathe parking garages, AGE would’ve done themselves (and the surrounding area) a favor if they built them facing Market and/or Jefferson with space for retail and restaurants. My guess is that the employees might appreciate the convenience of having restaurants and services close to work as well, especially since they’re literally isolated from the rest of downtown.
Also, I was having a George W. Bush moment in that last post- I promise it won’t happen again! I meant to say “misconceptions”, not “misperceptions”.
Wow, Steve. Great to show your ignorance. I work at AGE and know several people who have had their cars broken into and even stolen on campus. I know of women who were attacked on the sidewalks around the campus.
I observed a woman walking from the Market St. garage late evening. 50 feet or so behind her, a guy stopped and was looking her up and down. He started towards her, but she made it into the building. He then tried to force his way into the building before fleeing from Security.
These are just events that I know about. There is a good reason why AGE warns it’s employers about wandering around.
[REPLY Well, Matt, the only ignorance is the design of the AGE campus. Any lack of safety is primarily the fault of the campus & building design. It is anti-urban and isolates people and uses. The entire area pretty much needs to be leveled and started over to a safe and vibrant area. – SLP]