St. Louis’ Neighborhood Boundaries Need to Be Examined
For those of you that don’t take well to change, I suggest you have a seat or maybe don’t even read this post. Why? I’ve got a real shocker for you: the boundaries for the city’s 79 neighborhoods need to be reexamined and, in many cases, be completely changed.
For centuries villages, towns and cities had their commercial districts as the heart of an area with residents walking to the center for goods, services and social interaction. This built strong neighborhoods. Following WWII, however, things changed with the car. We started seeing strip shopping centers and malls and the perception that it was best to separate uses — keeping single family houses away from multi-family housing and away from retail which was separate from office and industrial uses. The idea was we’d have all these separate uses and we’d easily whisk back and forth from one to the other in our individual cars. Time has taught us this vision didn’t turn out as imagined and it is really not the way to build strong communal ties. Having learned a hard lesson, we are back to mixing uses within a neighborhood.
During the Schoemehl administration the city was carved up into 79 entities and labeled as neighborhoods. I believe these neighborhood boundaries follow the old line of thinking — commercial districts belong at the edge rather than the center. But if we look back at history and how St. Louis developed we can reason that commercial streets, of which we have many, were the centerpiece of the neighborhood.
By placing our commercial district streets at the edges of neighborhoods rather than as their traditional center I believe that we’ve prevented these commercial districts from rebounding as they should. First, we need to look at Euclid in the West End. As always, it has served the surrounding area and is not a border between two neighborhoods with different leadership and interests. To contrast this we can look at MLK on the north side and Cherokee & Chippewa on the south side. All three streets, once quite vibrant and the center of commercial life in their respective areas, now act as edges. rather than unifying centers.
Cherokee (West of Jefferson) has Benton Park West on the north side of the street and Gravois Park on the South side of the street. A commercial district association adds yet another layer to the bureaucracy. The divisions for the various neighborhoods, created 25 years ago or so, was likely arbitrary or possibly political. Dividing Cherokee among two separate neighborhoods has not served the formerly thriving commercial district well. On a related note, Chippewa to the South is a dividing line between Gravois Park and Dutchtown. Again, this was a thriving commercial street at the center of its neighborhood. If I had to draw a line it would be down Miami street — halfway between Cherokee and Chippewa. North of Miami you’d be part of the neighborhood that contained the Cherokee commercial district and South of Miami you’d be part of the neighborhood containing the Chippewa commercial district. These neighborhoods could then focus their attention on building their neighborhoods around a strong commercial center, rather than ignoring the decaying street at the edge while assuming the neighborhood group on the other side will take care of things.
Along MLK on the north side we have a similar situation, magnified by the length of the street and the amount of physical decay. On the North side of MLK we have 8 mapped neighborhoods with another 9 on the South side of the street. In the 8 miles or so of this street only a few blocks are within a single neighborhood on both sides of the street (JeffVanderLou, east of Compton). Everywhere else MLK is seen as an edge and not as the formerly strong commercial center that it once was. Not that we want an 8-mile long neighborhood along MLK but you get the idea — the street needs to return as the centerpiece for commerce and jobs in the area and doing so is a challenge when it is used as a dividing line.
I believe we need to look at the center from the perspective of commercial districts and reposition neighborhood boundaries such that each neighborhood once again has a commercial heart. Yes, there will be instances where this is not possible or feasible but I believe it to be a worthwhile exercise to determine if we can achieve better outcomes along these commercial streets. It would also follow that major intersections, such as Cherokee and Jefferson or MLK and Goodfellow would be centers. The dividing lines should be at minor streets or along alleys. Let two neighborhood groups fight over the cleanup of an alley or problem properties on a minor road, not over the rebuilding and rejuvenation of a major commercial street.
Countless other examples of this division exist. South Grand comes to mind as does Delmar and Natural Bridge. On the positive side we do have examples of situations where the commercial district is already within a single neighborhood — such as Ivanhoe, Meramec & Virginia, parts of North Grand and 14th Street. Interstate highways, on the other hand, serve as solid edges that cannot be ignored.
I don’t know that we have the political will to change boundaries, no matter how logical it may be to do so. What I think we need is 5-6 planning districts, each comprising several neighborhoods. A planning district would work with a staff member of the Planning and Urban Design Agency to help with the bigger picture of visioning for their part of the city. This would hopefully move beyond ward or neighborhood boundaries and create some strong areas within the city, focusing on commercial streets as the centerpieces. It is time we examine how we look at our neighborhoods and see if changing some boundaries would potentially produce better results.