Parking Garage Contributes to Dead Zone
Continuing my look at the vast dead pocket of downtown St. Louis that is north of Washington Ave and west of the convention center. Â Last week I looked at buildings at 10th & Convention Plaza (formerly Delmar). Â See posts from Tuesday & Friday.
The blocks between Lucas Ave and Cole St are an unfriendly zone between the residential neighborhood north of Cole and the improving core of downtown. This garage is the only structure on the block bounded by 9th on the east, Martin Luther King Dr on the south, 10th on the west & Cole  on the north (aerial)
Cities can handle poor planning here and there, but multi-block areas just can’t be absorbed. Â These must be redone. Â That doesn’t mean raze everything within the area and start over, just take a close look at the area and plan for fixes to the problems. Â Changes to zoning & sign codes would eventually improve the area.
I suggest a detailed look and the issues in the small area bounded by th, Lucas Ave, Hadley & Cole.  Both sides of the boundary streets would be included in the evaluation because the blank wall of the convention center along 9th is dreadful.  A larger downtown plan can’t address this area at the level of detail it needs.
– Steve Patterson
Parking garages really do destroy the pedestrian environment, especially at night. Unfortunately, from what I've seen, cities are during periods of time (such as now) all to desperate for some kind of development so things like wrapping garages with active uses and such go out the window…
Sadly, it's not the only dead zone in Downtown. On a recent visit back to my hometown, I wanted to check out the new Citygarden sculpture park. While touring the park, I noticed my bank had a location across the street. I first walked up the stairs to find the building closed and available for lease. Then I saw the drive-thru and began searching for walk-up ATM or ground-floor retail bank. But much to my surprise, nothing but a drive-thru was open on these two blocks fronting the city's latest attraction. It was embarrasing for me that my East Coast companion would see my hometown as such an auto-oriented place, including its downtown, and a site next to a major attraction. Clearly, St. Louis needs to stop worrying about building new attractions, convention centers, and sports venues, but rather, help small business breath life into the street-level spaces of existing buildings, as well as require such of new development.
The sign in the street is a nice touch . . . . The real problem isn't that it's a parking garage, the problem is that it is a single use structure. If ground-floor retail were included, like in the new garage across from City Hall or the one in the CWE with the Library on the ground floor, then there's much less impact on the pedestrian environment. The parallel problem, however, is there really any real demand for new/more ground-floor retail or office uses here?! In some situations, like this one, you're right, the only way to “fix” things is to start over, but is there any real justification for removing marginally-functional structures here when there are multiple other locations that are truly vacant? Places like Pruitt-Igoe, many other adjacent blocks of surface parking lots and McKee's Northside plans? We do need to learn from our mistakes, but given STL's multiple pockets of unused potential, let's focus on getting people to invest and build, not come up with other reasons to demolish entire blocks . . .
This looks suspiciously like an urban renewal area from the 1960's and '70's, complete with the creation of superblocks by closing existing streets. Check out the area on http://www.historicaerials.com/
Schlafly Library is such a great example of combining a garage with ground level activity. It's easy to forget that the garage is even there. There is a bus stop directly in front of the library and many people step off the bus and into the library. The pedestrian entrance seems to be the most heavily used entrance.
The library provides an active street area where you can walk by and look into the windows at the library activity, and of course, it is open till 9:00pm on most week days. Too bad there is a huge surface parking lot directly across Lindell from the library.
Or just do a really cool garage: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01…
garage floor epoxy coatings can give you a far more lasting coating than garage floor paint (which just sits on the surface)if it is given a chance to work properly. Wait a month.