Festivus vs. Rams
I was downtown yesterday and today. Both days had lots of people but the feeling was totally different. Saturday was the “Festivus” celebration with lots of stores and restaurants open and people milling about on the sidewalk. It was thrilling to see so many people spending time shopping downtown.
Today was different. It was a Rams football game. I had already committed to be downtown so I couldn’t back out. Normally you couldn’t get me close to downtown during a major event such as a Rams game. Tons of suburbanites clogging our streets all headed for one destination, all at roughly the same time. When they are done they are all leaving at the same time. It is completely unnatural and the total opposite of the joy I experienced on Saturday. The Rams games only happens downtown 10 times per year but it seems like we went through a lot to make it happen. The saga and expense is hardly over.
For 2005 we had to ensure the dome was in the “first tier” of NFL stadiums or the Rams could have exercised a clause in their lease to give us a year’s notice to leave. With the stadium only 10 years old that wasn’t such a big deal. But what about in 2015 when the same clause comes up again? Will we will be in the top 25% of stadiums? Doubtful. How much will it cost us at that time to keep the Rams around? Since we are 10 years into a 30-year lease this means we are only 15 years away from starting to discuss replacing the dome because it is outdated and no longer competitive with the stadiums of other teams.
The state and city still have 20 years to pay for the building. St. Louis County uses hotel taxes to pay their share, assuming tourism holds out. With updates to keep the Rams happy we will have likely spent a billion dollars over a 30-year period. That works out to just over $3 million for each regular season home game. When paid for we will most likely have an antiquated and obsolete structure on our hands. Old Wal-Mart stores become thrift stores, indoor paint ball centers and such but what do you do with an old football stadium?
If we didn’t have to keep paying the $6 million per year to pay for the stadium I’d say let the Rams leave in 2015. But we can’t afford to let that happen, we are too much in debt. We need them more than they need us. I can just see myself selling someone a house and saying that after paying for it for 30 years and maintaining it along the way that when they finally own it they’ll likely need to junk it and start over. Somehow what doesn’t work for a $200K house will work on a sports stadium costing hundreds of millions of dollars. The irony is that investment firm Edward Jones has the naming rights to the building. I wonder how they’d advise their clients about investing in sports stadiums?
But the dome wasn’t necessarily supposed to pay for itself. It was seen as a way to rejuvenate downtown. Translated that means clearing away old properties, building a massive building to help out the buddies that own contracting companies to house a team owned by other rich buddies — all of whom give generously to political campaigns. The sad reality is the dome and convention center are major detractors of the urban environment in St. Louis.
This massive building presents a blank face on all sides except Washington Avenue. But even the Washington Avenue face contributes little to the life of the city with the row of taxi cabs blocking the sidewalk. You see people coming and going during conventions but even then it is not part of the urban experience even for a downtown resident. Well, it is part of the experience in that huge events are something to avoid. Residents in lofts further West such as the Sporting News Building at 2020 Washington should be thankful they are far removed from the “benefits” of major events.
The year after the football Cardinals left for Arizona we began this costly road to get football back in St. Louis. It has cost us a pretty penny and will continue to do so for the next 20 years. I say if it will cost us more than $30 million to stay in the “first tier” in 2015 then don’t even bother. Let the Rams leave. Tear the place down along with the rest of the convention center. Put back the street grid and sell of fthe individual blocks to developers to pay off the debt. Let the developers build new buildings to bring life to the area. But no superblocks, I want a start grid. And no massive buildings taking up the entire blocks, I want at least 3 separate buildings per block. It will be a great place. We’ll call it Frontiere Village.
[UPDATE 12/5 8:30AM – It has been suggested in the comments section that I’m being overly negative and stereotypical in my views. Let me clarify a couple of things. Sports fan have no choice but to clog the streets to get to the dome — that was the poor choice that was made not by the Rams or the sports fans but by anti-urban leadership that believes such events are a positive addition to a downtown. They are not. I don’t blame the fans, or the Rams, or the NFL. In fact, with the debt we need them to come and help pay for the thing. I just don’t want to be around. On the other hand, on Saturday it was many suburbanites that came for Festivus but they were there to enjoy city life. Again, no value judgement but it was just a much better fit. I’m a strong believer that huge single purpose venues just don’t belong in a place where you want a lively city life. Some rare exceptions do exist in the country but those are older examples. New stadiums and domes seldom fit in to the fabric, even when faced with red brick. So all you Rams fans keep coming down for the games, I’m make sure I’m off the road so you’ll be able to get through.]
– Steve
I love football, big events, etc… I went to big football schools and everything (WE ARE PENN STATE) so big events and such, for me, are fun. What annoys me more than traffic or perhaps not the nicest of stadiums is that these *fuckers* (is cursing allowed in blogs?) want cities to pay for stadiums with tax dollars. They are making more money than most will ever see in a lifetime and want public dollars to go to their infrastructure — they have no shame.
[REPLY – If people want to watch football that is fine. Just please stop putting these massive buildings with 65,000 seats in the middle of a city — just doesn’t make any sense. – SLP]
Should we put it in the suburbs? The location may not be quite right, but I would much rather have the Ram’s playing downtown than way out yonder. I can tell you aren’t a sports person.
[REPLY – I have nothing against sports. In fact, I love auto racing of all things. If I’m not mistaken NASCAR is the biggest spectator sport but I’m not going to advocate a race track in the city (Pruitt-Igoe might be big enough) because the sheer size and single use is counter to the goals of a city. In my view big league sports just don’t belong in the middle of what is to be a pedestrian area. – SLP]
Don’t think for a minute that this sports-o-mania afflicts only St. Louis.
Quite by accident, while out with a citywide walking group recently, I passed the location of the new Yankee Stadium, to be built not far from the existing stadium in the southwest Bronx.
From a mass transportation perspective, it is a jewel of a location. But it is also the site of an enormous public park with generous playing fields and other resources, located in one of the city’s most densely populated neighborhoods. This park gets serious use.
Yet literally overnight, with no public input, to solve a political problem for Mayor Bloomberg and an ego problem for George Steinbrenner, owner of the NY Yankees, the state legislature de-mapped the park.
While this outrageous land-grab is being fought now, after the fact, the effort to overturn it is doomed. Another private facility paid for with public funds and the loss of a much-needed public resource.
I also hate the fact that taxpayers are often forced to subsidize the owners of sports teams.
Even so, I’m not prepared to condemn “suburbanites clogging our streets” during a downtown football game.
There’s an intolerant tone creeping into some of your posts, Steve. What’s all this about “our” streets? Doesn’t sound very open-minded.
[REPLY – This may be a fair criticism, I’ll take a look at that for future posts. However, much of the history of downtown solutions have come from interests outside downtown & city. People with little understanding or love for cities have been given control and allowed to make decisions such as locating stadiums.
These streets are our streets. They connect our properties and it is how we relate to each other. We cannot continue to be dumped on by having the city altered to continually accommodate outside interests. At what point do our interests get to come first? – SLP]
I have to agree with the above comment that you posts seem to be increasing negative in a stereotypical way.
I’d just like to point out that the Rams haven’t been as hard on the city as they could be with the stadium-quaity clause of the lease. The Jones Dome is the league’s worst dome (now alone in first place thanks to Hurricane Katrina) despite the stadium’s young age. The stadium was poorly designed, cheaply built, and is horribly run. As easy as it would be to blame the Rams for this, the fact is that much of the blame stands with the St. Louis administrators and planners that allow for mediocrity in the name of laziness.
[REPLY – I was just moving to St. Louis when the effort to bulid a dome was starting. I was young and trying to earn a living so I didn’t pay too much attention. It did seem like the dome went up quickly in the hope of drawing an expansion team — which didn’t happen because of two factions fighting for a team here. See update to original post above. – SLP]
Re. major league sports in a downtown, pedestrian area, I was one that strongly supported keeping the Cardinals in DT.
I feel less attached the Rams, but on balance am glad that they are a city team as well.
Sticking to baseball, the Cardinals are a St. Louis institution. They belong in the City.
Personally, I would have been happy if they would have built an intimate ballpark at Kingshighway and Chippewa. Realizing that idea never had a snowball’s chance, keeping them downtown is a good thing.
We all listened as nauseum to the “sage” wisdom of so many internet posters claiming the Cardinals were only bluffing about their threatened move to somewhere in Illinois or a St. Charles County flood plain. Had a DT deal fallen apart, they would have done it.
Cards fans travelling from Iowa to see the Cardinals wouldn’t have cared if the Cards played in a cornfield or DT. But to a kid growing up in St. Louis, the Cards are their team, and they belong in their city–STL City.
Major league baseball, especially the traditional teams like the Yankees, Cardinals, Cubs, Red Sox, Tigers, White Sox, Giants (recovered in a DT ballpark after 30 years of gloom in the ‘Stick), are an urban phenomenon.
I am grateful for our civic leaders for pulling together to find a way to keep the St. Louis Cardinals a key ingredient of our urban landscape.
[REPLY – I’ll agree the Cardinals are a St. Louis team, just as the Browns were. I find it interesting both played at the old Sportsmans Park on North Grand. Such ballparks were not a downtown thing until “urban renewal” came along and someone got the wild idea that if 50,000 people are attending a game wouldn’t it be great if they did so downtown rather than somewhere else. This is where the problem started. Then it became a downtown vs. the far exurbs debate of late. I think baseball stadiums are much more approachable and urban than domed football stadiums just by the nature of the sports and the time of year they are played.
The arena for the Blues, the dome for the Rams and the stadium for the Cardinals could each have gone in a number of places within the city besides downtown. The old Pruitt-Igoe comes to mind. The Carondelet Coke plant site as another. The old Corvette plant site at Union & Natural bridge would have been another. Or instead of the Chouteau pond projecct we locate the dome replacement projecct where the train tracks are now so we can repair downtown in 20 years. At some point we have to let go of the 1950s urban renewal mentality that places incompatible uses and their parking downtown. – SLP]
I’m confused about this opposition to stadiums downtown. In addition to providing jobs downtown, they also contribute (at least theoretically) through entertainment taxes, concession taxes, etc. And especially in the case of the Cardinals, they provide a lot of business for nearby hotels and restaurants over the course of an 81+ game home schedule.
You can certainly make an argument that other cities have done it better as far as downtown stadiums (Seattle, Baltimore, Denver) to name a few…but especially for the dome, it’s more a St. Louis issue than a stadium one, IMO.
[REPLY – Seattle’s stadium is not in what I’d call downtown. Technically yes but it is on the Southern edge — a good two miles from the center of their financial district. I’ve walked all over downtown Seattle and never once did I run into a huge, massive and empty stadium. It is nearby so that when a game does exist people can get there without disrupting life in downtown (too much).
Cardinals vs Rams is a whole other story. The dome occupies too much real estate for 10 home games. Sure, we’ve got conventions in the space sometimes but those don’t add to the life of the city.
Too often the taxes to be gained are given away as incentives to draw or keep a team in place. Still other taxes are used to pay for the public portion of the new facility. Yes, these create jobs but I’d hope that a billion in public investment would create jobs. But could is this the best way to create jobs with a billion dollars? – SLP]
I’ll chime in here and say that most of us who actually live downtown love sports event days. It makes us feel like we are living in a true urban environment. There is nothing worse than the days when there is nothing going on down here and you can literally crawl down the middle of most streets. Rams fans do not just get in their cars and leave either, they stick around for a few hours after each game and populate of fields of asphalt. If they had built the stadium anywhere else besides downtown, we would not be as far along on our redevelopment, simply by the fact that we have over 60,000 exposures to downtown every Rams game day. That is a lot of free advertising for downtown, The same goes for Blues games and even more so for Card’s games. Money well spent I say! Keep the people coming downtown!
[REPLY – It is not so black & white. It is easy now to say this helps downtown but this is a false cause-effect. Yes, some folks come down early and stay afterwards. Some even decide to move downtown after seeing all the neat lofts, shops and restaurants and meeting cool people like yourself. But we’ve had the Cardinals downtown since 1966, including the football team from 1966-1988. We’ve had the Blues since the early 90s. Some are arguing it has just taken a while for the benefits of this to kick in but I’m taking the other road, that downtown loft was going to happen and it was not so much the people but the destruction for the venue and parking that kept downtown from coming back.
Your argument assumes that if we didn’t build a dome and bring the Rams here we wouldn’t be as far along downtown and that things wouldn’t be as interesting. Sorry, I can’t make that assumption. I can’t help wondering what could have been instead. What if we had really focused on creating a world-class urban environment for people and invested our hundreds of millions into making that a reality. I think we’d be further along than we are now both in terms of residents but in terms of liveliness of our downtown. – SLP]
Old stadiums were built into the surrounding street grid, whether it’s Fenway, Wrigley, or whatever. They were also built at a time where people walked/used public transportation to the games. There was little or no need for parking.
One of the big advantages of a downtown stadium is accessibility to public transportation. Indeed, it’s one of the few times that people actually use Metrolink. Put a stadium elsewhere in the city and chances are that you have limited public transportation options that are viable. Furthermore, downtown makes sense for STL as there is already a base of support services (hotels and restaurants namely) in place.
With the Cardinals drawing something like 30%+ of their fans from out of town, it only makes sense. Sports fans aren’t the only revenue for businesses around the stadium, but it’s a healthy push. Put a stadium in an area with little infrastructure, and people have even less incentive to come early or stay late. Plus, stadium business alone can’t keep an establishment going.
Done right, stadium development can be very good for downtown. You can certainly argue about who pays for it – but for my two cents, I’m glad we don’t have something like the suburban complex in KC.
[REPLY – The old Busch stadium was downtown for nearly 40 years, what did it do for downtown development? Nada! Plenty of time passed for life to develop around it but it never happened. Couples Station was only in the last 10 years and that is a pretty static. On the other side, had we built one of these facilities at the old Pruitt Igoe site we could have provided a mass transit link to the site. – SLP]
To be fair I think your views on old Busch and the dome are wrong. The money spent on the dome I belive has was the first step toward the massive development that has occured along Washington Ave. For good or for bad, the dome sent a signal that downtown and the city were intersted in seeing development along Washington Ave. There were many steps taken along the way, but the dome was the first, and while there are many aspects of its development that are anit-urban, its role as a catalyist for the washington strip is important.(remember would the bottle district be puroposed at all or even in its current location without the dome?) Second, take a look at any older photo of downtown and you will see the massive changes in the land scape of downtown south of market since 1966. While many developments were simply office and garage combos, old Busch did help extent downtown farther south. SImply because a development isn’t urban in evern facet does not mean it is without value.
[REPLY – Just because the dome was built prior to the loft development on Washington Avenue does not mean there is a connection. Based on that same logic we have St. Louis Centre to thank for the loft district. We know that is not true. It was the Washington Avenue streetscape project that finally signaled to people something was happening in the old garment district. Do not give credit where it is not due.
And what development South of Market? It is a wasteland of sterile office buildings and parking garages. Busch did nothing to help the area. All it did was manage to wipe away our China town. – SLP]
The streetscape project is still going on. There was life on Washington much before that – different than the shops, restaurants and lofts today to be sure, but it already had a buzz.
As far as the old Busch, if the stadium wasn’t downtown for the last 40 years, things might look even worse down there. No one is saying that a stadium by itself is always a catalyst, but it’s not an automatic detriment either. It isn’t just a “build it and they will come”…but, fact is that Busch brought millions of people downtown each year, many of whom otherwise wouldn’t be there. Not having the new stadium downtown would have been a big blow to downtown, but economically and pyschologically.
People are just beginning to rediscover downtown – the Final 4 helped, Riversplash helped, Taste of St. Louis helped, 1st Fridays help – it all builds on itself. People love the energy downtown when there’s a Cards game, especially playoff time – and if sports traffic can keep a restaurant going, or convince another to open, so much the better.
We’re getting very close to the point of critical mass…more restaurants opening on Washington, Locust becoming the new Washington in terms of clubs, success of the new furniture stores, etc.
[REPLY – Yes, Washington Avenue already had a buzz going which discounts your dome helped theory.
It is fair to say that attracting people to downtown for something other than work is, in general, a good thing. However, it is quite another to say that a particular building has made a positive, neutral or negative contribution. Every building downtown has brought people there — yet they do not all make positive contributions and a good many have contributed to a lack of character that has reduced overall interest in downtown.
Going back to an earlier comment, the old Busch Stadium #1 which was also known as Sportsmans Park did, in fact, have mass transit — it was called streetcars. But when Busch stadium opened downtown in 1966 it didn’t have mass transit service for nearly 30 years. Please don’t rewrite history to justify why something is where it is.
After having Busch Stadium downtown for nearly 40 years I might agree that it would have been pyschologically devistating. However, had it been located a little further to the South on the other side of I-64/Hwy40 I think we would have had a chance to mend more of downtown back together urbanistically. Still, I think they are doing a good job with the new Busch from an urban perspective.
But I must repeat, just because something preceeded something which is positive it does not mean that it contributed to it. It may well have hindered the positive effect. In 1966 we didn’t have a vacant Pruitt-Igoe site to locate a new ballpark. Of course, we didn’t have much that was vacant because we had a city full of people. We went on a destructive rampage and forty years later we down about 300,000 people. If you want a clear cut cause & effect that it is. – SLP]
A win-win solution? Next time around, put the dome in Illinois, either in East St. Louis (it can help spur urban redevelopment), Scott Air Force Base (if it gets shut down) or out at Mid-America Airport (there’s plenty of parking available), and Missourians can let the other half of the metro area pay for the privelege of hosting a pro football team!
Further South for the stadium, S of 40, would have been interesting. As it is, the new stadium is as far S as you can get without crossing the highway. In some ways, I guess there is a question of how far out you can push a stadium and still have it connected to the rest of downtown. It’s too bad that Wash Ave and the like are on the other side of downtown from the stadium, though we often make it to places like 10th St Italian for a quick dinner, then stop at City Grocers for snacks/water to bring in…
When the street scape was proposed, many loft developments were already hapening, therefore it is clearly not a point of origin.
Whether you want to admit it or not, the dome and redoing of the convention center marked the city’s first major investment in the coridor. St. Louis Center was in decline and offering nothing positive to future development. The dome/convention center was shortly followed by the new convention hotel. No dome/redone convention center, no convention hotel. The investment along washington (dome/convention center/hotel) lead many specularos to purchas land along Washington. Speculartors bought the land because they and the market recognized that the city was tyring to encourage development along the washington coridor. The dome was a huge part of this.
As for the area south of market, look at any photo and tell me what was lost? yes, china town was taken down to build the stadium, but other than that the land was nothing more than a series of squalty vacant buildings. No great loss. The stuff in its place, while not urban and certiantly steril, were important developments that kept St. Louis from fading completely as a center for business in the metro area.
Non-Urban development does not mean it is unimportant.
[REPLY – Okay, let me follow the logic pattern here. St. Louis spent hundreds of millions on the convention center and done which then prompted others to invest. Of course, St. Louis Centre was supposed to do the same thing and didn’t happen. The original convention center was supposed to do the same thing and it didn’t happen. Columbus Square was supposed to do the same thing and it didn’t happen. Could it be that the market was finally ready and the pieces fell into place following the dome? And what if that investment in the dome/convention center had been something else besides the dome? Would things have turned out better, worse, or the same?
South of market. I’d rather have all the ordinary buidings back than the trashy mirrored crap & parking structures we’ve got now. We’d be so far ahead of the game had we not raped downtown at every opportunity. – SLP]