Minimum width sidewalks are less than optimal

I recently stopped at 7-11 located at 17th & Pine to rent a movie from the RedBox.

As I was standing there a customer came out of the store and needed to get past me, he was using a motorized wheelchair similar to my own wheelchair and the sidewalk was at the minimum width so I had to move to the side so he could pass.  Not a big deal but I’m not the most mobile person in the world.  When you build walkways to the minimum standard you inconvenience pedestrians.

– Steve Patterson

Before the highway cut off downtown from the river

The razing of 40 blocks of St. Louis along the riverfront began on October 10, 1939. There was no plan at that time, a design competition wasn’t held until 1947.  So St. Louis created the biggest surface parking lot on what was the original village.

Ground breaking for construction of the Arch was held nearly 20 years later, on June 23, 1959.  For 20 years the only reason to connect with this location was to get to your car in a sea of cars.

Two years after the ground breaking we see that all that had changed was the reduction in the amount of land for surface parking.  By this point the city’s leaders saw this site as a wasteland, nothing we’d ever want easy pedestrian access to.

Future mayor Raymond Tucker was 43 (my current age) when the city razed these blocks.  One of his first duties as mayor would have been the ribbon cutting at the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex.  He was 68 when the depressed highway lanes created a permanent divide between the central business district and what would become the Jefferson Nation Expansion Memorial we know today.  He and others leaders at the time must have thought they were making good decisions for the future of our city.

But to them the site was simply parking.  They worked hard to get the Arch funded and built.  Tucker saw the Arch completed but not the landscaping, he died in 1970. This generation of men had experience with a very different St. Louis than us today.

Thank you to to Tom Bradley & Jennifer Clark of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial for the use of the above images.

– Steve Patterson

Support for the City to River concept growing rapidly

The groundbreaking for the main span of the new bridge over the Mississippi River was canceled last week because federal officials were unable to get out of Washington D.C. to make the event.  But the contracts are set and work is starting:

The New Mississippi River Bridge is part of a group of roadway improvement projects that will connect I-70 at the I-55/64/70 interchange in East St. Louis to I-70 near Cass Avenue in Missouri. The entire project will cost a total of $670 million and is being funded through a combination of federal and state funds. The New Mississippi River Bridge project is expected to be completed in 2014.

When complete, in just four years, I-70 traffic that is currently routed between the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (aka The Arch) and downtown St. Louis will now bypass the area to the North.

With I-70 traffic being rerouted we are given an rare opportunity to correct a past mistake.  For decades the Arch grounds have been disconnected from the rest of the city.  Many of us now share a common vision to make a better connection and  support is quickly growing:

“Today’s editorial in the St. Louis Post Dispatch calls for big thinking in aligning solutions for transportation and the decades-old challenge of eliminating the barriers between Downtown and the Arch. The Post suggests that the new Mississippi River Bridge is the key: this major public works project is expected to carry a lot of I-70 traffic, potentially making it possible to eliminate the depressed freeway and create a boulevard that would connect Downtown to the Arch. More details about this radical idea are available at www.citytoriver.org.

Before the naysayers get going, thought I would share: this is similar big thinking to what they did in downtown Fort Worth ten years ago. An elevated six-lane freeway divided the southern end of their downtown, cutting the downtown in two, and contributing to blight for more than forty years. When a freeway expansion was proposed by TXDOT in the late 1990’s, downtown leaders rallied around an alternative solution to instead tear down the elevated decks, and build a grand boulevard designed to slow traffic and revitalize the southern end of their downtown. This big idea was very controversial, and it took tremendous political capital, funding and even legal action to accomplish — but it got done, when many said it would never happen. Since the freeway was re-routed and the new Lancaster Boulevard opened there, millions of dollars have been reinvested in adjacent mixed-use properties, and most recently a new $200M convention hotel opened within a block of where the old elevated freeway stood. Similar projects have been undertaken to remove or reroute freeways adversely affecting the downtown experience in cities like San Francisco and Milwaukee; the effects are transformational. Today’s editorial calls for creative solutions and inclusion of this idea of a boulevard as a viable solution in the National Park Service’s Gateway Arch International Design Competition currently underway…..sounds reasonable and worth exploring to me. – Maggie Campbell Partnership for Downtown St. Louis President & CEO March 1, 2010″

Can’t get a much better endorsement than that! Still not convinced? Read on….

Last year MoDOT finally improved the ability to cross over the depressed highway lanes:

But the ramps and crossings don’t make the experience anymore inviting.

The experience of walking along Memorial Drive is anything but memorable, except that you may remember how drab it is.

Can it get any worse than the above? Why yes, it can.

Just rotate to look to the West and there between the buildings is Busch Stadium. The distance as the crow flies is 960 feet, less than a quarter mile walk.  Before and after the 81 home games per year fans should be walking up and down Memorial Drive and spending time on the Arch grounds.  The nearest route from Busch to the Arch grounds is along Walnut. That requires a walk of 2,570 feet to reach this same spot.  For the new accessible crossing at Market St you’d need to walk 3,250 feet. People will walk a quarter mile but not more than a half mile each way.

Hopefully you will support the effort to remove what never should have been built in the first place!  Many predicted disaster when MoDOT shut down 8 miles of I-64 for two years but we survived.  This can happen. This should happen!

Please support the City to River movement:

• website
• Twitter
• Facebook

With a competition  (FRAMING A MODERN MASTERPIECE: The City + The Arch + The River 2015 international design competition) currently underway now is the time to tell everyone you know about this idea.  Ideally we’d spend the next four years planning the work while the new bridge is being constructed.  When the new bridge opens to carry non-local I-70 traffic then work can begin on removing the old lanes as well as lots of private development on adjacent land.

– Steve Patterson

Disabled parking not always closest parking to the door

Many, incorrectly, believe that disabled parking is right in front of the door and that those of us with state-issued parking permits always get the best parking.  In many cases we do get prime parking relative to other spaces.  Yesterday was a good example to dispel this myth.

I went to a crowded event at the Webster Groves Community Center.  In the above picture the people in red are walking into the building entrance.  The white car on is closer to the entrance than where I parked at right. I parked in the disabled space closest to the entrance.  Other disabled spaces behind me are closer to the ramp shown on the left but I was lucky to get the space I did — I waited about 10 minutes for it to open up.  Why not just park closer?

There were no closer spaces open but even if there was I couldn’t have parked there anyway. I have the ability to do the steps that would have been required at the main entry so why not park there?  To get in & out of my car I need to open my driver’s door fully.  Sometimes I get a regular space next to say a sidewalk or planter where I can open my door fully but in those cases the curb makes stepping out of the car difficult.  Regular spaces, even those closer to my destination are generally not an option for me or others.

– Steve Patterson

Lingering snow creates accessibility issues

Snow presents problems for most everyone but those of us who are disabled the challenges can linger long after the roads are cleared.   When using my wheelchair I typically use the sidewalk shown above to get to Washington Ave.  While the snow was long gone the pile from the adjacent parking lot remained in my way.

A few days later it had shrunk in size but I still went another way that is less safe.

I still couldn’t go around, I had to go through. The snow was soft enough finally for me to do so.

I use this side of the street because of issues on the other side.  The first issue is no ramp at the end of the sidewalk.  When this side is blocked I use the other side — riding in the street until I reach the access to that garage:

People plowing snow need to understand that sidewalks are not an acceptable place to store snow cleared from parking lots.

– Steve Patterson