Tow Firm Story is a Literal Dead End
The relationship between St Louis Metropolitan Towing and the St Louis Metropolitan Police has been closely investigated by the St Louis Post-Dispatch. They’ve done an excellent job. The Police Chief Joe Mokwa has already retired amid fallout over the scandal and how his daughter and offers got the free use of impounded vehicles. Last week I shared my own St Louis Metropolitan Towing story.
Articles in the P-D mention the guard stands and razor wire but I thought some visuals were in order for the massive towing operation.
Leaving the relatively small location on 10th, after you’ve paid your ransom, you head Southbound on 10th Street because it is a one-way road used to get high volumes of cars from the interstate into downtown St Louis. At the corner of the tow facility you have a stop at O’fallon St with a view of the back of the beautiful St Joseph’s Catholic church.
Heading West on O’fallon you don’t get very far:
Just past Tucker at 13th O’fallon St is closed to through traffic & pedestrians. The once public street is now private property. This tow facility has managed to acquire quite a bit of public land through street closures. The result is drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians must go around the facility rather than taking a more direct route.
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Of course St Louis Metropolitan Towing is not the only private firm to benefit from the city’s bad policy of giving away streets and alleys.
KDNL and Hogan Trucking are two other firms in this small section of the city on downtown’s North edge that count former public streets among their private real estate holdings. The McDonald’s drive-through is the old alley. The McDonald’s consumes it’s entire city block so it is not like adjacent property owners need to use it.
All these street closures serve as barriers between parts of the city on opposite sides of these larger holdings. Decades ago the walk from downtown’s CBD to Crown Candy Kitchen in Old North St Louis would have had numerous possible routes and taken the pedestrian past many buildings. Now, after a half century of bad public policy that devalues land (especially public streets) the walk is limited in route and is very unpleasant. Some things don’t change — a good walk is still necessary after a visit to Crown Candy.
From above we can see the vast waste land that has resulted from destructive urban land policies. The abandoned Schnuck’s is in the upper right corner. St Louis Metropolitan Towing’s main building is just below the old Schnuck’s. Tucker runs North and South in the center of the above with St Louis Metropolitan Towing’s lot #2 in the left half of the image.
This area didn’t always look this way.
As you can see above in 1909 the area was full of structures. OK, maybe most were in poor condition — so you replace those structures. You don’t just turn blocks of land into vast parking areas for towed vehicles while giving away the streets and service alleys. Yes people left for the suburbs but we’ve also used bad public policy through various entities to destroy swaths of the city such as this one.
I believe this area was planned to be taken by the state for on & off ramps for the original design of the new Mississippi River Bridge before it was scaled back. Funny that on/off ramps might have actually improved this once thriving area.
As amusingly explained by Kunstler, public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead what we have in America, especially in StL as you have made clear in numerous entries, are communities of places/buildings/road designs not worth caring about. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4345#more
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It’s funny but ironic and certainly shameful that ramps become preferable to the current conditions designed by hideous public policies. It’s not surprising that a case concerning favoritism brings this to the public’s attention. The overall situation is uglier than simply the story published in the PD.
Mixed feelings – These larger, not-pedestrian or residential-friendly operations have to go somewhere. They DO generate tax revenues and jobs. St. Louis struggles with large areas of truly vacant land, as well as with keeping and attrcating jobs that can support both its citizens and its tax base. Should we wait (and wait and wait) for similar-scale warm-and-fuzzy urban uses to come back? Or should we settle for less-desirable-in the-long-run (and hopefully) interim uses? Are vacant lots better than viable businesses? Does having this private tow lot somewhat accessible to the CBD make more sense than putting it in a more-remote, more-truly-industrial area? Where someone who doesn’t have a car because it’s been towed has a harder time getting to to retrieve said car?
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I understand the urban design implications that super blocks bring, both positive and negative. I also accept that the way we live in the 21st century is markedly different than the way the city developed in the 19th century. Personal stables and access for coal delivery are no longer significant urban issues; accomodating the motor vehicle and big box retail ARE significant issues. One answer to change is to simply say no. Another is to work to accomodate it, grudgingly. A third is to embrace it and run with it. I doubt there is one right answer that works in every situation – more likely, it’s much more fuzzy.
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Personally, I have a bigger problem with streets being randomly closed in the name of reducing crime and/or discouraging outsiders. When it comes to industrial uses (which a tow lot is), if someone is able to assemble a large land holding on both sides of a little-used street, I don’t have much of a problem with the city letting them close it, especially if it allows them to operate more efficiently or if it encourages them to stay in the city. On a macro level, industrial uses tend to be in non-residential areas. They’re served, like this one, by major streets. And to address your Crown Candy example, I don’t need “numerous possible routes” to get from point A to point B, I just need one decent, direct one. And while walking “past many buildings” would be an added benefit, I, like most other people, likely would rarely, if ever, actually walk, we’d drive.
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Bottom line, industrial uses, such as these, are place holders, reflecting the current land values. Much like mobile home parks or self-storage units or drive-in theaters, you don’t find them in areas where land values are increasing, you find them where land is dirt cheap and all the market will support is open industrial yards and cheap, crappy, bottom-feeder “architecture”. If and when demand increases for “more-appropriate” and urban-scaled uses, they WILL return – New Town St. Charles is the perfect local example – it could’ve just as easily been built out as more warehouses as a new urbanist community. The key to not “turn[ing] blocks of land into vast parking areas for towed vehicles while giving away the streets and service alleys” is economics – create demand for better and you’ll get better. In the meantime, you’re only going to get what the local mico-economy can support.
[slp — part of our lack of vision is that we’ve put a dirty superblock user in between areas that could be beneficial to each other. What we’ve not done is leave that one decent walking route — it is all poor. We’ve now created so many of these desolate areas that creating demand for better does go to places like New Town. ]
I’m glad to see such a creative use of the MU Library fire insurance maps. They’re very cool, albeit depressing to see how many interesting buildings we have lost.
Of course, it’s not like a business like St Louis Metropolitan Towing (whose tow-truck door lettering always seemed strangely official-looking to me), could have been located outside the city limits. However, I believe most of the land in this area has been zoned “J” Industrial for decades, so they can get away with the razor wire and such.
Meanwhile, driving around that area is pretty challenging, just to get to the McDonald’s these days, with N. Tucker being closed to traffic. Strangely, you can still cross Tucker via Carr Street. I wonder whether the reconstruction plan for N. Tucker will just mean filling in the tunnel with cement. Does the Post-Dispatch still get newsprint delivered by train, or is all the printing done out in Maryland Heights now anyway?
And I suspect that most people, even in the old days, would not have frequently walked the dozen blocks from Crown Candy into downtown, since there were several streetcar lines that you could have hopped onto. Of course, it’s still a shame to lose these streets, but way more such streets have been closed or vacated in the North Riverfront industrial areas as part of site prep and consolidation plans over the years. It’s very difficult to find a street that leads all the way from N. Broadway to the flood wall anymore. Branch Street is one of the few remaining; hence its status as a trailhead for the trestle.
The street closings shown here speak of the city’s total abandonment of and disregard for this area as a viable neighborhood. Who cares, it’s just the near north side. Block it off, it’s just a blighted area we want to bulldoze anyway. Sickening.