Potential Development Sites Along Proposed Streetcar Line, Part 3: 14th & Olive To North Florissant & St. Louis Ave.

In the first two parts of this series on development sites along a proposed streetcar route I looked at Olive from 15th-16th and Olive from 16th-18th. In both cases it was a small area and I looked a specific buildings and parcels of land. Heading to N. Florissant Ave. & St. Louis Ave. nearly everything is a development site.

Let’s start downtown and work our way north. At 14th & Olive you have the library on the NE corner and the library administration building & a charter high school on the NW corner. I think the library admin building has office space available for lease.

Before we go any further north it makes sense to look at the route on a map along with a development zone on each side of the line. Light rail has stations miles apart, whereas streetcars are more like buses by having more frequent stops along the route.

The area between the green lines is the immediate area that I estimate to be part of a special transportation district with slightly higher property taxes, pro-rated based on distance.  The red lines are a quarter mile distance, the usual distance a person is willing to walk.

Quite a bit of this area is in what will be one of the Northside Regeneration job centers.

With so much vacant land & buildings, this stretch of the proposed streetcar line has the greatest potential for redevelopment. It will also be a challenge initially to get projects funded. Once the line is open and Paul McKee builds one of his job centers near Tucker & Cass things will start to take off. Form-based codes requiring dense urban design will be key to getting the right kind of construction.

It’ll take at least a decade, if not two, for this to be built out.

— Steve Patterson

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Poll: What are your top three (3) brew pubs in the St. Louis region?

In a previous poll I asked about favorite brewery, but excluded brew pubs.  This week I want to find out the brew pubs favored by readers. This time I think I have all listed, but if not you can add an answer when taking the poll.

The poll is in the right sidebar until May 26th, results presented May 29th.

— Steve Patterson

Street Trees Must Be Planted Deep Enough the Root Ball Won’t Dry Out

The Crown Food Mart at 1515 N. 13th opened in 2009, with street trees planted on all sides. Few have survived.

Some will say the city is a harsh environment for street trees, the road salt and chemicals used to clear snow & ice from streets is too much for new trees to handle. Perhaps, but when half the root ball is above the level of the adjacent sidewalk the tree is going to dry out and die. If it happens to survive it will eventually bust the sidewalk as shallow roots seek water.

How should it be planted? Deeper!

I don’t know if a contractor for the new building or the city planted these trees, whomever it was did a poor job.

— Steve Patterson

St. Louis Hills Medical Center Violates ADA

Every once in a while I run across a blatant ADA violation, usually when I’m trying to go somewhere in my daily life. This one I discovered purely by accident, while looking for a neighboring property on Google Street View.

From October 2008:

Owners of the vacant St. Louis Hills Office Center at 6500 Chippewa Street last week received preliminary approval from the St. Louis Board of Adjustment to do interior and exterior renovations on the five-story brick building.

In meeting with neighbors, they also have resolved some, but not all of the concerns of surrounding residents about traffic, parking and other issues.

The board required that cars going from the center’s parking lot into an adjacent alley turn right toward Chippewa. There also must be a privacy fence. (Suburban Journal)

The wing had already been torn off by that point. Let me show you the problem…

In case you missed it, the problem is the provided pedestrian route isn’t accessible to everyone. If a pedestrian entrance is provided, everyone must be able to use it.

Presumably a licensed architect was involved in this project, their errors & omissions insurance may be paying for a ramp.

— Steve Patterson

Central Valet Zone Now On Tucker

I’ve been writing about valet parking since July 2005. Years ago valets would take every on-street parking space on the block in front of the restaurant that hired them. leaving no spaces for the public to use. They’d place valet signs in bike lanes.

Finally the city to placed signs on the meter of the spaces that were permitted for valet service, including days of the week and hours of operation. The valets continued to take more spaces than given, again inconveniencing the general public. For example, until recently, we had three different valet stands in the two city blocks of Washington Ave between 10th and Tucker (12th), two were directly across the street from each other!

The city has permitted valet on Thursday-Saturday evenings after 6pm. Lately the city did something it should’ve done 8 years ago — created a central valet zone to cover these two blocks. So now on Tucker from St. Charles St to Washington Ave you have a bus stop and a valet zone. This area didn’t have any on-street parking before, it was just excessively wide.

Valet problems are solved, right? Wrong! The valet companies still feel they have the right to take public parking whenever and where ever they like.

Empty spaces mean the city isn’t getting revenue to pay off bonds to cover parking garage debt. Since it was before 5pm I was able to email the above pic to the appropriate people so they could come out and tell them they couldn’t do this.

I personally don’t care if valeting happens 7 days a week, as long as it is in the central spot on Tucker so the public spaces remain available for the public to use.

— Steve Patterson