Rollin Stanley Presented “Lessons from St. Louis” at Louisiana State APA Conference in New Orleans

A guest editorial by Matthew Mourning

On Friday, September 21, 2007, in a city noted for its amalgam of cultures and linguistic influences, Canadian citizen and St. Louis’ Planning and Urban Design Agency Executive Director Rollin Stanley served up generous portions of “aboots” and “pro-grums” to an eager smattering of planners, architects, and students assembled at the Louisiana Chapter of the American Planning Association’s annual conference, this year in New Orleans.

In a seminar entitled “Lessons from St. Louis,” Stanley proceeded to showcase a PowerPoint (in a room without audio capabilities) of St. Louis’ ascendancy from contemporary equivalent of the ancient sacked city of Troy to an urban exemplar whose recent success story is, though remarkable, also replicable.

The city of New Orleans has lost more than half of its population since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in August and September of 2005. Many neighborhoods remain partially ruined; water lines tell the story of the storm’s destructive remnants and extant FEMA spray paint on row after row of New Orleans’ flamboyant Creole-style architecture indicates the number rescued from (and the number deceased found within) each splendid but forlorn structure. While it’s hard to believe, certain neighborhoods near the Levee breach have few structures remaining at all. The often spoken of Lower Ninth Ward, including part of the tight knit Holy Cross neighborhood, saw nearly complete devastation. Only concrete slabs and, against odds, a determination to rebuild persist.

Stanley’s concept was rather simple. St. Louis is like you, New Orleans. St. Louis’ “Katrina” is, in fact, worse and more debilitating than yours, a half-century long storm of urban blight, white flight, substandard schools, a bleeding population, deindustrialization, disinvested infrastructure, and abandoned solid brick architecture. Quipped the Canadian at one particularly bleak demonstration of St. Louis’s extant urban problems: “I’ll sell you a 5,000 square foot Victorian for $1,000…and I’ll give you a 10 year tax abatement.”

Stanley’s speech dichotomized St. Louis as a city with unique and monumental challenges which it is now gracefully and astoundingly seeing some triumph over. And while comparing St. Louis’ half-century free-fall to the overnight ravages of Katrina on one of America’s most celebrated cities is not particularly popular with native New Orleanians, it lent the presentation a tone of gravity that captured attentions that in previous presentations had been on the coffee thermostat, complimentary snacks, and conference packet materials. Rollin set out to show New Orleans how it could best lick its own wounds, using the St. Louis example.

The Einsteinian City, the presenter maintained, is the successful one. That is, the energy of a city (E) equals its mass of services (m) times its density, or concentration (c) squared to produce the well-known equation. In this urban planner’s twist on it, maximizing density justifies services and creates an energetic city. The theme that sound urban planning is much like this simple equation was echoed throughout the presentation. At one point, Rollin scrunched up his face and searched for a word—“What do you guys call it—TOD? In Canada, we call it good urban planning.”

In showcasing what he and conference organizers termed the remarkable turnaround of St. Louis, Mr. Stanley had to relate the raw product that he, upon entering the position, had to work with. And so, a wide-angle video shot driving down Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. popped up on the screen and evoked an audible audience reaction. “I know. It’s hell. It’s absolute hell,” Stanley stressed. He augmented the visceral decay with the numbers to back it up—a loss of 508,000 residents since 1950 as well as the loss of stature having been the nation’s fourth largest city in 1900. He even featured a slide of Pruitt-Igoe’s demolition to detail the loss of 3,000 housing units in the City of St. Louis over the course of just a year and a half.

When the audience had been bludgeoned with the point that St. Louis “was crap,” as Stanley concisely summed up the state of the city, he moved on to the strategy that could lift New Orleans out of its storm-induced doldrums. Ironically, Stanley seemed to have done no research on New Orleans, however. He asserted that, unlike St. Louis, New Orleans had no powers of Tax Increment Financing, only to be corrected. He also lent no time to the acknowledgment that New Orleans too had been losing a considerable portion of its own population pre-Katrina and suffered from an as-bad or worse crime rate as St. Louis for the last decade.

He included all of the expected topics: building diversity, improving education, thinking regionally, increasing density, and introducing new and improved transit options. Up until this point in the presentation, Stanley was engaging, energetic, witty, and, most importantly, rather accurate. In discussing St. Louis’ climb upward, however, he mentioned in passing that he and Mayor Slay had proven and continue to prove themselves panaceas to past planning blunders and even to urban blight itself. In one of his strategy areas, leveraging historic resources, Stanley appropriately pointed out that the state of Missouri is the leader in the nation with its generous historic tax credits program. Further, St. Louis has proven a tremendous beneficiary. But Rollin depicted these tax credits as his own tool towards selling St. Louis’ venerable but dilapidated beauties. He made the Mayor and himself seem ardent preservationists, salvaging inimitable structures that once fell to the wrecking ball of urban renewal. Homer G. Phillips Hospital was one of his examples of the city’s (and his own) recent reclamations—while in the next breath he appeared frustrated that the city had to resort to eminent domain to demolish a row of historic (but, to him, “unmarketable”) Ville shotgun houses. A slide bragging of new development in the low-income Ville projected the image of suburban style homes (far set backs, vinyl clad) that stayed on the screen only long enough to perhaps convince the audience that this was some collection of New Urbanism or HOPE VI pastel housing units that New Orleans itself has seen popping up in place of outmoded low-rise public housing.

And on the note of historic preservation, I have to ask, did Rollin Stanley protest the infamous demolition of the Century Building for a parking garage (quite sardonically dubbed the “Garage Mahal” by embittered opponents of the garage that is said to draw its “architectural inspiration” from the marble clad turn of the century mid-rise it replaced)? What about the wholesale clearance of the McRee Town neighborhood, part of which rested in a local historic district? Or the erosion of the last remaining fabric of the Bohemian Hill neighborhood for strip center shopping? Ongoing demolitions within the historic districts of Hyde Park and Murphy-Blair/Old North St. Louis? The mysterious destruction by Bobcat of the rear corners of buildings in McKee’s targeted neighborhoods of St. Louis Place and JeffVanderlou?

To his credit, Stanley did belabor the point that he was a progressive in a decidedly backward city and state. He expressed disillusionment that Walgreens felt it needed front parking lots to develop urban sites and that fast food restaurants required drive-thrus. “If you can’t get out of your damn car for a hamburger, something’s wrong,” he remarked to the delight and applause of the crowd. He also attacked the stature of planners in St. Louis, saying, “In Canada, you can’t make noises with your armpit without going to a planner first. In Missouri, they shoot ‘em [planners].”

In a strategic point entitled “Implement Big Ideas,” he used the Chouteau Lake project (spearheaded by McCormack Baron Salazar) to offer up but one of St. Louis’ big ticket development projects while simultaneously rejecting it as coming too soon. He believed that it would drive up demand for lakeside real estate outside of downtown, causing a shift of development away from the downtown proper that he stated he wanted to see filled up first.

In the “putting it all together” slide, Rollin praised the recently passed Urban Distressed Areas Land Assemblage Act and called it a great opportunity to redevelop large sites in the City of St. Louis (to be brief, or convenient, without a mention of the Paul McKee, Jr. controversy). He lauded the King Louis Square development (whose photo on the slide, I would note, did not reveal the “mullet” style brick-in-front, vinyl-on-the-sides-and-back construction)—“all done with tax credits!” Pointing out that the new Busch Stadium was one of the least publicly subsidized stadium projects in the country, he offered a bit of helpful advice to Cordish, the developers of Ballpark Village. “We need retail and restaurants that don’t exist anywhere else,” he emphasized, even though he called for a Disney-owned ESPN Zone on the site.

In a slide entitled “How We’re Doing,” he tells of increasing population after decades of decline, decreasing poverty, and the city’s coveted “Urban Renewal” award bestowed by the World Leadership Forum in London this past year.

He then closed his presentation and opened it up to questions. I found myself still bothered by an urban planner calling MLK Jr. Blvd. “hell” and championing the demolition of historic structures in what was St. Louis’ premiere African-American neighborhood all within in the same presentation. And so I asked, “How does one interested in historic preservation balance the idea of preservation as economic development with the political and economic pressure to tear down vacant buildings and replace them with buildings that do not even approximate the older structures?” He told me that the City of St. Louis vigorously protects anything in a historic district, which covers 40 percent of the city, and that he can’t reasonably save every structure. After all, he noted, St. Louis needs new construction anyway, and nobody will buy a shotgun house these days. Wow. I suppose New Orleans must really be having a difficult time with recovery if no one will live in a shotgun! And of course, images of demolished Garden District bungalows make me question what this city’s idea of good new development is.

If the city is to recover, and especially to the point where it is felt that it can present an example to even more beleaguered cities, historic preservation and quality infill housing become ever more important focuses. St. Louis’ political structure, its acceptance of Aldermanic fiefdoms and aldermanic courtesy, preclude Stanley’s idea of “good urban planning.” As long as zoning codes reflect the “urban renewal” mentality of the 1940s and beyond, St. Louis, as a city, will see its “renaissance” give way to another protracted “dark age.”

Stanley’s presentation points out a single and incredibly important fact about St. Louis. Indicators haven’t looked this good in decades. Now is time to “think big.” But thinking big doesn’t necessitate large casino developments or more parking garages downtown. Thinking big, in St. Louis, means challenging the status quo rather than working within it. It means that developments such as Southtowne Centre on Kingshighway and Chippewa should be illegal. It means that demolition in Bohemian Hill (too small to be considered a neighborhood, I’m told by many) should be decried and rejected by nearby residents, business owners, and preservationists alike. It means that “Botanical Heights” should conform to setback and spacing guidelines. It means supporting the businesses of Cherokee Antique District, Cherokee Station, Grand South Grand, Euclid, Ivanhoe, Morganford, Macklind, Gravois, and, in the future, the 14th Street Mall, or Crown Village, especially the local ones (and NOT ESPN Zone). It means biking or taking public transit to work.

To borrow from Mayor Slay, “we’ll be a great city” again, but not until we start acting, investing, and building like we deserve to be one.
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Matthew Mourning is a St. Louis native, from the Bevo neighborhood, with a bachelor’s degree in Urban Affairs from Saint Louis University. Matthew is a graduate student in the Masters of Urban and Regional Planning Program at the University of New Orleans.