Poll: Was The City’s Switch To Gmail A Good Or Bad Decision?

Last month the City of St. Louis changed their email accounts so they’re now hosted by Google’s Gmail service at a cost of $275,000.  Why?

This spring, a city department head admitted he sent an email from his work account urging acquaintances to attend a $500-a-head golf tournament benefiting the campaign of his boss, Mayor Francis Slay. (St. Louis goes Google, ends ‘archaic’ email system)

In short the system the city had used for years had virtually no tracking information. When the above email was sent the holes in the city’s 20th century email system became apparent. Also:

Employees complained that their old service did not work well with mobile devices and computers outside of the network. Now, in an effort to fix the system and cut costs they have switched to Google’s cloud based service. (St. Louis City Switches To GMail)

What do you think? Good decision? Bad decision? Comment below and vote in the poll (right sidebar) now until Sunday July 8, 2012. Final results to be published Wednesday July 11, 2012.

— Steve Patterson

Happy Third Birthday Citygarden!

Citygarden in downtown St. Louis has become such as important place it’s hard to think it’s only been open for three years. The dedication took place on June 30, 2009.

Citygarden is an urban park and sculpture garden in St. Louis, Missouri owned by the City of St. Louis but maintained by the Gateway Foundation. It is located between Eighth, Tenth, Market, and Chestnut streets,in the city’s “Gateway Mall” area. Before being converted to a garden and park, the site comprised two empty blocks of grass. (Wikipedia) 

These two blocks were completely passive before, and mostly overlooked.

Overall Citygarden has been a huge success, attracting residents and tourists. The only part that wasn’t a success was the restaurant, The Terrace View. From September 2011:

Jim Fiala has announced that he’ll be closing The Terrace View when the lease expires at the end of the year. The restaurant will go to lunch service only Mon. through Fri. from 11am until 2pm beginning Oct. 1, and the space will still be available for private events through the end of the year. (Feast)

 

In the above article Fiala said he couldn’t get enough evening customers. My personal experience on numerous visits was the food was good but the service was lacking. I still think about an excellent ratatouille I had once but that dinner with a friend is most remembered by the poor service. The menu was also wrong for the location, too upscale.

The space was only vacant for a few months though:

Unlike Jim Fiala’s Terrace View, which previously occupied the restaurant space in Citygarden, Joe’s Chili Bowl (808 Chestnut Street; 314-241-7070) is a complete departure from upscale dining. The surroundings remain exquisite, featuring views of Market Street and Busch Stadium, but the vibe is much more casual.

Joe’s Chili Bowl opened for lunch on April 13, and it started breakfast service this past Tuesday. General manager Roxanne Williams says that further expansion to a late-night menu will come slowly with time.

The menu at Joe’s Chili Bowl is more appropriate to families with kids wet from playing in the water features, I wish them well.

— Steve Patterson

North St. Louis Founded 196 Years Ago Today

Today when we think of north St. Louis we think of the north half of the city whose boundaries were established in 1876. Sixty years earlier North St. Louis was founded as a separate municipality from St. Louis:

June 29, 1816:

A town was incorporated which rivaled its southern neighbor, St. Louis, for many years. The new town, founded by Maj. William Christy, was named simply “North St. Louis.” Its southern boundary line was Madison Street, then a considerable distance from the northern boundary of the city which Christy and his associates referred to as “St. Louis under the hill.”

Christy had come to St. Louis from Pennsylvania with advanced ideas about city planning. With two partners, he proposed a scheme for developing a city which would appeal to the settlers flocking in from the East. Street names reflected the founders’ interest in politics — Madison and Monroe; Benton for the young lawyer who would become one of Missouri’s first senators; and Warren, for a hero at Bunker Hill.  A boatyard was established, and inducements offered steamboats to land at North St. Louis instead of farther downstream. A ferry made regular runs between North St. Louis and Alton.  In 1841, just a quarter century after its founding, the city was absorbed into St. Louis. (Source: St. Louis Day by Day by Frances Hurd Stadler, page 122) 

Hence most of the area is known today as the Old North St. Louis neighborhood today.

Keep in mind St. Louis was founded in 1764 and incorporated in 1822. If my sources are correct, North St. Louis was incorporated six years before St. Louis was! St. Louis’ population was small but growing quickly:

• 1810: 1,600
• 1820: not available
• 1830: 4,977
• 1840: 16,469
• 1850: 77,860
• Source: Wikipedia

My original intent of this post was just to note the anniversary but the part about North St. Louis offering inducements to steam ships has me thinking about the many municipalities in our region still doing the same thing nearly two hundred years later.

I was a resident of Old North St. Louis from 1991-94 and I try to get to Crown Candy Kitchen 2-3 times per year.

— Steve Patterson

Carr Street Now Features Hot Steam Pipes

Cambridge Heights is the neighborhood just north of America’s Center and the Edward Jones Dome. For many years it contained the Cochran Gardens high rise public housing project. Today it’s a nice mixed income neighborhood. The school where I vote is located here.

But earlier this month, after voting, I was making my way back downtown and spotted something I found rather odd, a section of the road closed off. I decided to get a closer look.

Hot steam was coming from two pipes, with very little protection. Could this be related to the incident blocks away on April 5, 2012?

A broken pipe sent up a giant white plume of steam in downtown St. Louis this morning.

The 20-inch steam line under North 11th Street just south of Convention Plaza ruptured sometime before 7 a.m. (stltoday.com)

Maybe it’s an unrelated problem?

Hopefully the local media will look into this and how it may be affecting local residents. I passed by the area on a MetroBus recently and the “hot” yellow pipes remained at that time.

— Steve Patterson

Historic District Standards Need Updating

Many of St. Louis’ first historic district regulations were written in the early 1970s, the thinking at the time was we needed to strip away “clutter’ such as projecting signs in order to compete with the tidy new suburbs.  Later regulations used the earlier ones as a base so today we have many regulations that are out of sync with our thinking 40 years later. Attitudes and thinking change.

In 1947 the St. Louis Comprehensive Plan called for razing all of the Soulard neighborhood and building a new suburban-style subdivision, complete with cul-de-sac streets!!

Plate Number 16 is a plan for the reconstruction of the Soulard Neighborhood. Some of the more important features of the plan are: the extension of Gravois Avenue from Twelfth Street to the proposed Third Street Interstate Highway, providing a direct route to the central business district; the widening of 18th Street, the widening and extension of 14th Street, the widening of Park and Lafayette Avenues; underground garages in the multi-storied apartment area between 12th and 14th; a neighborhood part of 10 acres or more complete with spray pool, community facilities and game courts; the extension of Lafayette Park to serve this as well as other neighborhoods; landscaped areas throughout the community for passive recreation; enlargement of the City Hospital area; grouping of commercial areas into orderly shopping centers and the complete reconstruction of the neighborhood into super residential blocks with a new street pattern to serve these blocks and to discourage through traffic.

Such a plan would transform an obsolete area into a fine residential neighborhood with a good standard of housing, enlarged open areas, greatly improved environment, small concentrated shop centers, and much needed park and recreation space. The new interstate highway passes diagonally through this neighborhood and could be most advantageously undertaken simultaneously with the reconstruction. This is an area well suited for families of medium incomes. (Obsolete areas)

Just 25 years later Soulard is designated a historic district! Again, those early days of preservation regulations attempted to freeze the natural evolution of buildings, no doubt a reaction to a few decades of pro-demolition thinking. It’s possible, I believe, to preserve the historic neighborhood while allowing solar panels but not white vinyl windows with too many dividers between the panes. Yes, it’s subjective. In 25 years solar panels can be removed…of course so could inappropriate windows.

Here are the poll results from last week on this topic:

Q: St. Louis denied a solar panel on a visible roof in historic Soulard, thoughts:

1. Ridiculous, all the air conditioners that are visible in Soulard are equally out of place 46 [39.66%]
2. Just following the set standards, but they’re outdated and need to change 31 [26.72%]
3. Good, we need to keep historic districts looking nice 12 [10.34%]
4. Owners of historic buildings are better off buying power from alternate sources rather than clutter up their buildings 11 [9.48%]
5. Understand the rules before you buy/rent/lease a buildling! 6 [5.17%]
6. Other: 9 [7.76%]
7. unsure/no opinion 1 [0.86%]

The “other” answers were:

1. Why not rent rooftop space from a more practical building (warehouse, box store)
2. dumb, other cities can add this to the evidence that STL is a dying city.
3. I guess no one has noticed the potential of energy shortages
4. Where are the options for letting them install solar panels???
5. I think it is interesting that this was enforced, but Pevely was demolished…
6. Creative solutions that maintains the historic facade but allows modernization.
7. It’s not rediculous, but well designed/installed panels should be allowed.
8. is there a compromise such solar panels in the shape of tiles?
9. Understand the rules before you buy/rent/lease a buildling!

Just like ordinances, these historic district standards need to be reviewed and updated on s regular basis. Monday the Preservation Board granted a variance to allow solar panels at Bastille.

— Steve Patterson