Brilliance Continues at Loughborough Commons
I’ve gotten lots of good material from Loughborough Commons over the last couple of years. They start off by taking homes on the corner of their large site. They open the Schnuck’s without any pedestrian access from the public street (including a bus stop used by employees and customers). The Lowes still lacks a pedestrian access route as required under federal civil rights law, the ADA.
One of my favorites was the curb ramp at the bottom of a flight of stairs:
I also enjoyed the half buried fire hydrant:
But they managed to correct this:
Note the pedestrian crossing in the upper left. Behind me is parking, including a couple of disabled spots. However people parking behind me have no way to get to this sidewalk, curb cut and crossing unless they have the ability to walk through the planter that separates the parking from the walk. But that is OK because they’ve got you covered:
Brilliant! They have two crosswalks 20ft apart and one is of little use to those its intended to serve. The hydrant, walk and crosswalk from above is at the front of the vehicle in the above image.
Last month the Suburban Journal reported a Fifth Third Bank branch and a Burger King will be built on two of the four outlots. Of course these two are also required by the ADA to have a pedestrian access route to their front doors. We’ll see if that happens or if they end up out of compliance like the Lowe’s.
But hey, had they built a nice urban mixed use project on this site I’d have nothing to complain or laugh about. Again, they have provided me with a wealth of content. I have a feeling the bank and Burger King will simply be more of the same.
Easy solution: boycott Loughborough Commons.
That just horrifies me. It’s obvious that they’re cutting corners… I’ve got a feeling someone will get hurt because of those ADA violations.
My mother-in-law lives on Blow Street so I’m in that area all of the time (actually, more than I would like 🙂 Maybe the curb ramp is for all the skateboarders grinding the stair rails. If it wasn’t for the bread bowls, I would boycott too 🙂 Overall, I much prefer what is there now compared to the former structure. It would have been fantastic if they could have given the plaza a sort of City feel to it. Maybe they still could. Any ideas?
steve, we normally dont see eye to eye but i’m in complete agreement with you on this one, particularly the curb cut that leads to a set of stairs. what a joke!!! this developement is a total cluster f…
Steve,
Who can I/we call, e-mail, or write regarding atrocities such as this? There has got to be more we can do, even if we are stuck out in Des Peres for another year.
🙁
One possible “explanation” (but not a good one) would be the retail version of NIMBY. Many smaller tenants in strip shopping centers (like this part of LC) object to having accessible parking in front of their storefronts – they want convenient parking for the majority of their customers who aren’t disabled. Many center owners try to accomodate these tenants by restriping their parking lots to move the accessible parking to a “less intrusive” location. I have no idea if this was or was not the case here, but it could explain why there’s no ramp at the end of the striped crosswalk (Paint, cheap. Concrete work, more expensive, Full compliance, priceless!).
If you move the accessible parking you have to have a reason. If you see someone has moved the accessible parking away from the door to make it more convenient for able bodied customers I would question them. Unless they are doing it to meet slope issues (the old spots were too steep), and even then it needs to be equally convenient for the accessible spots as it was originally, they could be sued.
In the end- this is where most of these issues wind up. It will take a lawsuit to change anything.
Jason
Because of the location on the interstate, and the fact that Lowe’s was one of the main stores, I always thought it made sense for this to be a more suburban type center, counter to what Steve would like to have seen. But, even then, their execution is terrible. I just don’t get why they would spend so much money on the project, but not demand better results.
Burger King, what a joke. Now we in the Holly Hills/Boulevard Heights area get to smell the noxious combination of the enormous mulch piles in Carondelet park AND whopper smoke.
This is the Schnucks I most frequent so I witness these problems firsthand often.
I had heard a Cracker Barrel was going in that lot, was that abandoned or never the case? I think I read it on Slay’s blog.
Yeah… I still think its better than what was there before hand
Traffic sucks, but hey at least it’s not as bad as Gravois Buffs
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