SLU’s “Urban Oasis” Open on Former Vista Ave
A year ago another street near Saint Louis University’s Heath Sciences complex was closed to traffic. The one block section of Vista Ave East of Grand was closed on Aug 24, 2007 (see prior post). From the press release issued by SLU last year:
Saint Louis University soon will increase beauty, safety and accessibility to the Medical Center with a new pedestrian mall.
The area along Vista Avenue between Grand Boulevard and Carr Lane Avenue will be transformed into an urban oasis that mimics green space near the Doisy College of Health Sciences building as well as parts of campus north of I-64/Hwy. 40. The section will be bordered by the School of Medicine complex on the north and the building that now houses the department of neurology and psychiatry on the south.
Pedestrians will be welcomed to the mall [by] one of SLU’s signature red brick monuments, and beautiful landscaping, trees and flowers will provide a parklike atmosphere. Safety also will be enhanced, as city streetlights will be replaced by upgraded lighting that will shine brightly on the mall.
In addition, SLU’s design and construction team is extending the “green†attributes of the Edward A. Doisy Research Center to the mall project. By removing heat-soaked pavement and adding more grass, the area will become more environmentally friendly.
The block of Vista Ave was your typical street — part of the disappearing street grid in the immediate area. It’s sidewalks were old and it’s lighting poor:
Today there is no traffic but there is green grass:
There is nothing inherently safer about Vista Ave now that it is closed to vehicular traffic. The lighting is certainly improved but that could have been changed without shutting off through access. Sidewalks could have been replaced too.
By removing traffic and on-street parking they’ve removed eyes from the street. In people’s minds this may seem safer but that has more to do with the care-for look and improved nighttime lighting. Granted someone walking here now doesn’t have to worry about a guy jumping out of a parked or passing car and mugging someone. On the other hand a criminal knows that nobody in a car is suddenly going to drive down the block and catch them being mischievous. Again, the cared-for image sends a message to criminals to stay out. The same could have been accomplished by redoing the sidewalks & lighting and perhaps eliminating on-street parking at each end by having curb bulb outs. This would have slowed traffic and sent the same message to criminals.
The neighbors in the next block East wouldn’t feel cut off from Grand as I imagine they now feel. But I think that is part of the intent – to isolate adjacent property owners to the point they are willing to sell out to the university. By cutting them off from a major arterial road this limits and alters their access to their homes. This limited access reduces marketability and price. Unable to sell to others they are happy when the university comes knocking with any offer.
For years now SLU has slowly been choking off the neighborhood to the East and buying property and razing buildings. The neighbors see the writing on the wall. When an entity such as SLU can make you change your route home you know it is only a matter of time before they come for your house. SLU is not buying property to build new housing. They don’t want a strong residential neighborhood next door because that would mean people that would object to more parking garages. SLU wants to wipe out everything East to Compton and little by little it is happening.
Furthermore, the above is hardly an oasis. If they really wanted it to be park-like a park bench or two would have been nice. When you have a disabled blogger walking down the former street a place to sit and enjoy the oasis would be nice. But they realize it isn’t really a safe place to sit and hang out — there are no building entries facing this block and pedestrian traffic passing through is pretty minimal.
If closing streets to cars was such a safe thing to do then 14th Street in Old North must have been a really safe place since 1977. Why not close all the streets in the city? That would reduce crime big time because we’d all leave because we could no longer get around.
Redo streets? Yes! Narrow streets? Yes! Improve lighting for pedestrians? Yes! Close streets? No!
Ah, yes, the make-it-a-park “solution”. I agree, a much better answer would’ve been to narrow the street by one or even two lanes, put in a grass planting strip, some more trees and better lighting, but it looks like the make-it-a-fortress mentailty wins again . . .
If one can use the eminent domain card when developing a shopping mall, how much more so for a university?
Remind me again how *removing* a street “increases accessibility”?
They are missing guard towers and gun turrets.
I know I’ve said this before but it wasn’t just people driving down the street. It was leaving derelict cars and approaching parked cars. Granted, it was great to put in 15min for the meter and run into the MCL without having to park at the garage but I literally would run from the entrance of the MCL to my car.
And again, if you guys had only been on the campus just 10 years ago or 25 years ago when my mom first started teaching here. If SLU hadn’t stepped up and honored their committment to providing a safe learning environment then we would have been in a worse situation and constantly responding to police calls. We all must realize that a balance must be struck with retaining original neighborhood structures and creating a safe academic environment.
Don’t even get me started on how unsafe the trek down Grand is to the Salus Center or ABI from the Metro station. Ask how many female faculty and staff have stopped using public transportation because of having cars stop and harass them.
More SLU ghetto.
“We all must realize that a balance must be struck with retaining original neighborhood structures and creating a safe academic environment.”
So where is the balance? SLU is tearing midtown to shreds. How is that balance?
SLU should be designated as an honorary member of the federal interstate system. In somewhat of a “T”-shape, its path of destruction along the spines of Grand and Lindell is remarkably interstate-like.
I-1818 sound good?
What this comes down to is SLU thinks they are making the area safer by closing streets and making them ‘pedestrian malls.’ While I don’t want to seem these streets closed, I know that people were robbed all the time around the medical school campus. That being said, I wish SLU would keep the street open, make some of the improvements Jim Zavist recommended, and hire another security guard. The points raised by Mary Homan about women being harassed around SLU property and along Grand by MetroLink are valid and I wish SLU & St. Louis police would step up patrols instead of closing streets.
Clearly, the solution to harassment of women on Grand is to close Grand from 40 to Lindell and make it into a sculpture park.
I’m a woman who is concerned about harassment. A dear friend was harassed at a bus stop near Grand and Lindell today by a jerk in a car. However, I don’t think that closing streets is the problem. Jerks have feet too, and are actually more dangerous when they approach you on foot.
So, lets talk about what is best for women’s safety. To get from my neighborhood (Old North) to U City, ideally you would take StL Ave to Jeff to Delmar. But you can’t, because of SLU. You have to work around their athletic fields. Choices are north through one of the most poorly lit areas of JVL on a street with a wreckers’ bar and a junkyard, or south, wending through SLU-ville. I’ve used that street more than once to get home on the south route. So, yet another safer choice gone.
One thing Mary may not get — SLU is creating a little oasis of “safety” for special people (or at least, a vista that looks safe to visiting parents) by making an already relatively safe route inaccessible. This forces the rest of us not in the special group to have less choice of routes and therefore have to travel through less safe areas. Fine, I understand students deserve more cossetting than the rest of the population (wev), and therefore deserve a “safe” college campus that has literally turned its back to its community, but I don’t see why they should get my streets, byways and good routes home too.
Fr. Biondi is not a dummy. He knows what he is doing. SLU hospital is landlocked and approaching 75 + years old. It would not surprise me if in the next 5 to 10 years we see a new SLU rising on the east side of Grand, just as the shriners are building a new hospital in the CWE and SSM built a new hospital in Fenton.
Considering what once was (unsafe to say the least), this is a vast improvement.
The neighborhood does create a conundrum for the institution. They have a lot of history here, but there’s also a lot of precedence for pulling up stakes and building a new hospital elsewhere, and “on the east side of Grand” may not be the reality. More like BJC’s threats to move to the burbs, I can see them abandoning this site completely and moving someplace “safer”, like Chesterfield. In Denver, three hospitals (CU, VA & Children’s) have all built new hospitals on a new, shared suburban campus and abandoned the core city (and neither area was as “scary” as the area around SLU). Bottom line, be careful what you wish for – we might get our city streets back, but only with a vacant hospital complex.
I never cease to be amazed at the persistent tendency of businesspeople and “civic leaders” to stamp their feet and say, in effect, “Ahem. We have a passionate and long-standing dedication to the City of St. Louis, its citizens and care deeply about its future…but ya know what? If you don’t shut yer yaps, pony up, and sound off in favor of our new stadium/piece of Forest Park/parking garage/demolition/TIF/combination of all, well, we’ll just walk away and leave you nitpicking ingrates alone with your festering, historic sewer of a city. It will become even more of one, ya know, once we take our business/hospital/team/jobs/taxes outta this godforsaken hellhole to which we are so ardently dedicated. So, given our deep commitment to the City of St. Louis, we really hope you can see past your limiting hostilities to our noble and unquestionably superior leadership and stop halting progress, but if not, well, fuck all ya’ll, and we’ll just go build in St. Chaz or O’Fallon, even though it should be abundantly clear to you that we deeply love the shitty — er, CITY of St. Louis.” There are those with occasional vested interests in the City retaining its abysmal self image and entrenched self loathing. These keep the City from enforcing meaningful standards and bargaining effectively to ensure long term success. If leadership is willing to confirm, however tacitly, that the City offers nothing and will hence be grateful for anything, bottom-line decision-makers will readily exploit that posture.
I kinda resent being referred to as a “special person.” I basically grew up on SLU’s campus and did undergrad and grad there and am currently a Med Center staff person. I still remember when I was little arriving right when Des Peres Hall closed it’s computer lab with my dad to pick my mom up or staying inside the West Pine Gym until my dad honked the horn to pick us up after volleyball games when I was in high school (and that was only the late 90s!) or calling public safety when I need to get escorted to my car late at night. I’m no victim or fear-monger.
What I think these comments are lacking is the truthfulness of the surrounding neighborhood. There is a lot of crime and no one calls it in. It’s more than getting cat-called while crossing Grand; it’s having a car stop, some guy jump out and tell me what he’d like to do this fine *** of mine. Having more street lights and cars driving through does not solve that problem. I would argue that plenty of nearby residents could care less about the health sciences student that is getting car-jacked.
I’m sorry if I sound harsh or bitter but when I first started going to the MCL for late night physical therapy classes, we did travel in a pack because so there were so many problems. I do think that yes, some of us as staff/faculty/students can set ourselves up by not observing as we exit cars and garages and texting on our newest handheld and swing our Dolce & Gabana purses
I get that the neighborhood is trying to revitalize itself and I don’t make any claim that only bad people live in the surrounding neighborhood. I think SLU did its fair share of knocking down buildings too soon but I also think that I’m a lot safer now than when I first played with legos on the blacktop behind the nursing school.
Barbara on 19th,
SLU’s athletic fields don’t block anyone from traveling west on Delmar. Delmar is interrupted by Cardinal Ritter High School, which is not affailaited with SLU. Besides, you can take St. Louis to Vandeventer south to Delmar, or use Enright to get around Cardinal Ritter. No oen is forcing you to go through the mean streets of JVL, certainly not SLU.
(1) I think SLU Hospital is no longer owned by the university.
(2) While some SLU students have given them all a bad name, most are caring and decent people. I wish some of these people could tone down their resentment.
(3) STUDS LONIGAN: I understand and agree with you that I’m tired of hearing local leaders of institutions, public and private, bully the city with the threat to leave the city. On the other hand, maybe these institutions have tried more legitimate tactics and haven’t had traction. For example, how bad does the MetroLink stop on Grand have to be before SLU threatens to tell their students not to use MetroLink until the station is cleaned up and made safer?
(4) Back to the topic at hand…what should the city & university do besides closing streets? I don’t want that to be a rhetorical question, I’m interested in the ideas of posters on this blog!
The soultion to crime is NOT to close off most of the streets and destroy the street grid! The City was not built FOR SLU. I resent them destroying the fabric of Midtown, destroying viable historic structures, destroying neighborhood continuity (I can hear it now from the ivory towers, those po’ folk don’t deserve to have neighborhoods, too much crime, doesn’t look photogenic on our happy brochures, etc, etc.) and all for the illusion of safety and piss-poor erotic Biondi sculpture-laiden pocket parks! If they want to FEEL real safe and look more like U-CONN, I will be happy to help them find large plots of land in St. Chuck, Gumbo Flats or McKee-Wingnut-valley!
I for one do not think that SLU (and Fr. Biondi) has destroyed the city center. Yes, many buildings have been torn down needlessly, but the area is a h…l of a lot safer, property values of all has risen, yada, yada, yada.
Overall the many positives outweigh the negatives. Not that I am saying that is a good thing. As I’ve pointed out, some are good, some are bad.
But if Fr. Biondi was to pull a Barnes trick and threaten to move out to the county, he would have done it 10 years and 500 – 600 million dollars ago.
Lets face it, it took a large institution to turn around the city center. It wasn’t Harris Stowe, it wasn’t A. G. Edwards, and it wasn’t ATT that stepped up to the plate, it was SLU. And yes, the city center has turned around in the past 18 years.
Oh, and Tenet owns SLU hospital currently but there are contract stipulations tying it to SLU for many years. Cardinal Glennon is owned by the SSM group, and they aren’t going anywhere as long as those sisters stay around.
Dole-
I’m not sure what could be done to make the Grand Metro stop safer. The obvious solution, which Metro seems eager to implement, at least in the newspaper, is to increase security at each stop throughout the day. Metro should and hopefully will do everything in its power to control crime and bad behavior aboard its trains and buses. As for other approaches being explored before teams/companies/institutions threaten to fly the coop, you may be right, but in all honesty, I doubt it. I guess we have a difference of opinion. I worked at a city development agency for years and saw the blackmail tactic employed shamelessly, fluently and with righteous indignation, whenever someone was being challenged on receiving some subsidy or other. A homeowner might snap, “Well, I’ll just move to the county!” Lamping might just murmur at a press conference that gosh, the Cardinals sure hoped to stay in their downtown home, but that they were “happy to look at Illinois”, where presumably they could get their collective snoots deep in the public trough. Both are blackmailers of a sort, cynically preying on the City’s historical “desperate plight” to advance their own monetary interests. This sort of manipulation would be easier to hear if they didn’t break the bullshit meter by piously proclaiming their “love” for the city out of the other side of their mouths. Don’t be too punk ass to pick a side: a self-interested barracuda whose interest in the city begins and ends with subsidies it might afford, or an earnest corporate/private citizen who actually cares about the city and ITS interests? These can be mutually exclusive.
I think oasis is a way of life.