In January 1965 the song made it to #1 in the United States. This was a time that downtown needed a positive image.
Linger on the sidewalks where the neon signs are pretty
Except that sign laws in many cities made these great signs disappear — they were visual “clutter.” Very glad to see the projecting blade sign make a return. Although in St. Louis you must jump through hoops to have one.
This classic song has been covered by many artists, I’m fond of the B-52s version.
Last Sunday I was walking from my place to the London Tea Room. I went the long way to look at old cars lined up on 17th for the Veteran’s Parade. So I crossed through CPI’s parking lot which is just North of my building.
I noticed a driver get into an SUV after pulling two notes off the window. Pulling away I saw the car pictured above with the same notes. Basically CPI doesn’t like residents from surrounding buildings parking on their lot overnight. I was very pleased to see the notes could be easily removed rather than those requiring elbow grease and a razor blade.
But it brings up a question about how we use our land. The above image shows their parking lot thinning about 4pm on Monday. Washington Ave runs left to right in the background. !7th Street and CPI’s building are on the left. This is one of four parking lots for CPI.
The parking lot continues over to 16th Street (right). The massive Ely-Walker building is across 16th. It has underground garage parking but I think some residents have more than one car per unit.
What I’d like to see is shared use of the lot. For a fee, a fixed number of residents could be allowed to use CPI’s lot from 5pm -7am weekdays and 24/7 on weekends. I hate seeing this lot sit mostly vacant evenings and weekends.
Ideally CPI would do well to explore ways to reduce the number of employee’s vehicles each day. Offer employee’s $25/month if they didn’t bring their car to work. This would prompt some to look at transit or carpooling.  The money paid out to employee’s would come in from fees collected from others using the parking on off hours.
A CPI-sponsored WeCar vehicle (car sharing from Enterprise) could help employees that use transit or carpool if they need a car to run errands at lunch. The many residents living in this part of downtown might become members as well. The nearest WeCar to us is 7-8 blocks away. With a close WeCar some 2-car households might drop down to one and some one-car households might go to zero. A sponsor covers the cost each month if a vehicle is not rented by members often enough each month.
Promotional video from Enterprises’ WeCar program:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDhHo3bJ9bM
Know that I’m not picking on CPI — they are a good neighbor. I’m just suggesting ways in which they might alter how they view the land around their building used for car storage.
Cities are very good about finding money for capital projects. Money for operations and ongoing maintenance, however, is often scarce.
Citygarden splash fountain, August 2009
But when a leak was discovered under a portion of the splash fountain at the new Citygarden downtown there was no cause for panic to find the funds for repairs.
November 6, 2009
Citygarden was generously built by the Gateway Foundation. But they didn’t just build it and hand the keys to the city, they are responsible for maintenance on the two downtown blocks. The fountain repair is probably covered under warranty but it is nice to know this garden will not fall into disrepair like so much of our public infrastructure.  At the end of Summer crews were busy replacing quite a bit of the grass that got worn out due to the huge crowds of people that visited the new spot.
I say new but the use of these two blocks as public park space goes back to 1993 when we had two blocks of… grass. Yawn.
Watching Citygarden change from Summer into Fall have been a pleasure.
Any infrastructure we have (highways, bridges, transit, etc) we need a plan to pay for the operations and maintenance once built. Some of our existing MetroLink light rail stations are looking a bit shabby — rusty railings and such. Maybe each station needs a corporate sponsor to help with maintenance?
Kiener Plaza & the Morton May Amphitheater, just East of Citygarden, are in disrepair as is much of the Gateway Mall. When any project is new it has decent maintenance. But a decade or so later, and two or three administrations later, existing infrastructure takes a back seat to ribbon cuttings on the next big thing. We don’t have enough generous foundations in town to build and maintain our infrastructure. We must figure out how to do it ourselves. Part of the solution is in building less infrastructure.
The Cross County MetroLink extension cost far more than originally planned — miles of tunnels rather than at-grade service will drive up the capital budget. But in 20 years those miles of tunnels and flyover structures will require far more maintenance than the simpler original designs.
This is not to say we should never again build expensive infrastructure. I think we need a system of streetcars to pull together city neighborhoods and the inner-ring suburbs. Property taxes along the routes should help fund long-term operations and repairs.  So build what we need just have a means to fund it through its lifespan. In the meantime I’m going to keep enjoying the well-maintained Citygarden.
Crepes in the City, a popular downtown eatery, closed last month month after only a year in business. New owners are taking over the space and plan to reopen with the same menu and name. Changes will be minor. For example, more comfortable seating, I’m told.
Each weekend the line was always out the door but Tuesday-Friday business wasn’t enough to make it work. The new owners hope to do things differently enough so the place turns a profit. No date yet on when the business will reopen.
Downtown businesses have it tough. Some in the middle of the central business district tend to cater to the weekday lunch crowd but are closed evenings and weekends. Get West of Tucker (12th) and you lose the business lunch crowd but the weekend loft dweller crowd becomes important. Either way they must figure out how to pay the rent. Staying open longer hours to attract more customers sometimes costs them more in employee salaries and utilities.
I’d heard the Pasta House Pronto at the Old Post Office closed as well but it is still listed on the Pasta House website. Espresso Mod on 9th Street closed last week. They blamed the heavily subsidized Culinaria grocery store for their drop in business.
Restaurants or retail, some places endure and some go away replaced with something new. One thing is certain, I’ll take my changing restaurant options over a series of chain places along the interstate any day of the week.
From my desk at home I can see Locust Street in my peripheral vision through the glass door to my balcony. As I see movement on the street I’ll glance over that direction. More often than not when someone parks at the on-street metered space they fail to keep their car behind the parking meter.
When you parallel park sometimes you have no choice but to be off a bit based on the cars in front of and behind your own. But this space I see off to my left is the one space between our drive and the next corner.  Everyone just pulls front-forward into this space. And yet most don’t get it right.
Some cities, such as Clayton, mark on the pavement the allotted space where you are to park.
You can sorta see the parking meter in the above picture.
From the sidewalk you see this driver had nothing to prevent parking properly.
And yet the driver missed it by a long shot. OK, you are right, in this location it doesn’t matter because the city foolishly has too few spaces. At 11am early in the week there are not many cars around. The commercial spaces on the 1st floors are vacant at the moment and on the weekends the street is full, especially if a neighbor is having a party.
This bad habit, repeated daily, makes me wonder if drivers need those pavement markings on the street in order to park properly? But I also think drivers are better at parking naturally. If we had a “pay-n-display” parking system, where the parking space length isn’t pre-determined by the meter spacing, our drivers would do a better job of parking.
In the meantime I’ll just try to resist the urge to leave these drivers a note saying, “Align the meter with the front of the car, not the side mirror.”
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