How Does St. Louis Stack Up To Detroit
I’ve only been to Detroit once, this past July. Actually, it would be more accurate to say I’ve been through Detroit. I was returning to St. Louis from Toronto via Greyhound and had a brief pitstop in the U.S. Customs check point as well as the bus terminal. Neither, as you might expect, were impressive.
As the bus returned to the surface after going through the tunnel under the canal connecting two great lakes: St. Clair & Erie, I managed to snap the shot you see at right. The tall towers are Renaissance Place, home to General Motors and one of Detroit’s costly “urban renewal” attempts. The towers looked much better when viewed from across the canal from Windsor, Ontario.
Detroit has many things in common with St. Louis, besides being in the 2006 World Series. For starters, we both have a Fox Theatre. In fact, our Fox and their Fox are twins. The attractive similarities end there. Tragic similarities include massive highway projects that divided both cities, large scale urban renewal projects designed from an anti-city perspective and massive population losses. St. Louis has Delmar as a racial dividing line while Detroit has 8-Mile as the separator between city and county.
Detroit, at its peak in the 1950s, had around 1,850,000 in population for a density of 13,309 people per square mile. St. Louis, also peaking in the 1950s, had roughly 850,000 in our smaller 62 square miles for a population density of 13,709. Today, however, detroit is more densely populated than St. Louis. Per MayorSlay.com, Detroit has “approximately 950,000 residents” and is “approximately 139 square miles in area.” To refresh your memory, St. Louis has roughly 350,000 residents within 62 square miles. That works out to a density of 6,834 people per square mile in Detroit and only 5,645 people per square in St. Louis. To look at this another way, to equal Detroit’s recent population density we’d need a total of 423,708 residents — an increase of 73,708 people! That represents more than a 20% increase over our current population numbers, and that is just to get to their low number with respect to density. I want to see St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay bet Detroit’s mayor not on the outcome of the World Series but that we’ll match their population density in say 10 years.
I’ve posted a few more pictures, including a couple of Detroit as seen from Windsor, Ontario, on my Flickr account in group on Detroit. Not that Wiki is perfect but here are links to St. Louis and Detroit.
Well, time to stop writing and start rooting. It is top of the 7th in Game 4 of the World Series and we are down a run to Detroit.
Did you notice that at the East-West Gateway Great Streets Symposium that no one from the Mayor’s office participated? It worries me that the Mayor has this cavilier attitude about even learning what might be involved in making a great city.
According to news reports, it looks like the population density around Busch Stadium is about to soar.
Reports say there will be 250 new condos as part of a $350,000,000 Ballpark Village project to be announced today.
If anything, they could probably build and sell another 500.
250 will sell out in a week.
We will see.
St. Louis Centre was supposed to be a huge change for downtown and look at it now.
These huge “fix Downtown” projects are not the silver bullet.
The stadium has a 35 year contract. Once that is torn down can we expect large disruptions in the BPV area for a new Stadium?
This entire situation is really short term hedonism. Look at the history of these big projects. Will this really be sustainable in the long run? Can we expect inflated ticket prices, a bowling alley, and corporate food to attract residents downtown? I remain skeptical and I remain against the subsidy which is being issued.
Doug,
You sound like you want Ballpark Village to fail.
Doug…
Believe!
I’ve been to Detroit several time and have had an opportunity to explore various parts of the city. I love Detroit. It’s a hard-luck city with loads of character and full of soul. However, it FEELS considerably less dense than St. Louis. South of Grand River Ave. is the “old city” that feels very similar to any big old industrial city. But north of that street the blocks become much wider and most homes have driveways. You can see it’s a hybrid city– the older parts definitely feel like an old Northern city built pre-automobile, but vast other parts are prototypically suburban.
While St. Louis and Detroit have both lost a massive proportion of their populations, Detroit’s decay seems much more widespread. Even in the healthiest neighborhoods, there are signs of abandonment, whereas signs of St. Louis’s population loss is much more concentrated on the North and West sides. With a few exceptions, Detroit’s “prized” urban neighborhoods would equal a transitional neighborhood here– comparable to worn but populated parts of South City.
All in all, I love Detroit and I definitely feel a sense of familiarity there.
Steve, I am not sure if you are giving commentary by calling the Detroit River a canal or just unaware that it is referred to as a river. The tunnel runs under the river. An interesting fact: At the base of the Ambassador Bridge is the home of the Westcott II, the only U.S. Mail Boat which delivers mail to the many ships that navigate the waters. The Westcott delivers mail to the ships while both are underway. The tug pulls along side the ships and mail is conveyed up and down in a bucket. http://www.boatnerd.com Gooooo TIGERS!
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