City to Pedestrians: Don’t Cross Locust at 9th

The new Culinaria grocery store on 9th between Olive and Locust has helped to dramatically increase the number of pedestrians in the area near the store.  A friend of mine pointed out something that I and many others hadn’t noticed at 9th & Locust (map).

When crossing Locust on the West side of 9th Street signs indicate that pedestrians should not continue straight ahead — they should use the crosswalk on the East side of 9th.  The pedestrian above is crossing Locust while the light is green.  The “use crosswalk” sign is seen on the right.  No pedestrian signal exists, but many intersections downtown are missing such signals.

Note that the crosswalk stripes on the pavement have been covered over.  So while the other side of the street is close enough to toss a quarter across the street the city doesn’t want you to cross here.  Instead they want you to cross 9th twice as well as Locust.  But why?

During the construction of the Roberts Tower has 8th Street closed between St. Charles St & Locust.  Before then 9th Street was a one-way street Northbound.  But with Southbound 8th closed part of 9th was changed to 2-way traffic.  Before Culinaria opened 9th was 2-way up to Olive with traffic directed left on Olive (one-way Eastbound).  But the two-way traffic was pushed back one block from Olive back to Locust.  That meant Southbound traffic on 9th had to turn right at Locust, as the above signs indicate.  The city took the lazy way out — giving drivers a right arrow and telling pedestrians that is not a valid crosswalk.

But person after person crosses at this non-crosswalk.

Most, but not all, wait for a green light:

The person above, crossing Locust walking Northbound, is going against the light.  When the light turned green the couple with the stroller crossed as well.  In fact, all that I observed crossed at this non-crosswalk.  It is natural to cross at this point.

The city, I guess, put up the signs and covered the crosswalk stripes to reduce their liability in the event a right turning car from 9th onto Locust injures or kills a pedestrian.  A cover your ass action.  Except that a person with visual impairments is not going to see the signs.  Their white cane or guide dog will read this as a conventional intersection.  The solution in this case, to meet the ADA is to place a physical barrier that would be detected by cane.  A guide dog would know not to cross to the other side.

But the real solution is to give pedestrians the right of way.  Remove the right arrow from the traffic signal and use right arrows on the pavement so that motorists know they must turn right to avoid oncoming traffic.  Signs cautioning drivers to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk would be good although my observation was that motorists were doing this anyway.

For the record using the East side of 9th coming from or going to Washington Ave is not an option.

Just a short block from Locust you can see that the above corner lacks a curb cut. The city needs to be more concerned about the flow of pedestrians.

– Steve Patterson

Pruitt-Igoe’s Foundations Have Not Prevented Development

For less than 20 years 33 towers stood on 57 acres on the city’s near-north side (map).  Pruitt-Igoe was a failure of massive proportions. The reasons are numerous and complex.  The towers were razed over a two-year period starting in 1972.  Since then the site remained (mostly) vacant.

I continually hear people make the false claim the site has remained vacant because of the old foundations that were left in place.  To debunk this often repeated myth I turned to the person that would know best: Martin Braeske.

Braeske, a planner formerly with St. Louis County, was working in the planning office for the St. Louis Public Schools in February 1994 when they broke ground on the Gateway Middle School for Science and Technology to be built on a portion of the former Pruitt-Igoe site.  Braeske, now retired, is an Adjunct Professor at Saint Louis University.  So I emailed my one-time instructor and asked him his thoughts on the foundations preventing site development:

Each tower had a partial basement for boiler and mechanical systems equipment. The ones we found were intact and simple filled in with dirt. We dug them out, punched holes in the bottom to equalize the water table and demolished the walls to about eight feet below the finished ground level. While this did cost a bit, it is not a major deterrent to redevelopment of the site.

The old foundations are not a big deal.  If anything has prevented development of the Pruitt-Igoe site it has been the city’s fragmented politics over the decades.  Late December 1992:

The federal judge overseeing the area’s school desegregation program is giving the St. Louis Housing Authority two weeks to hand over part of the old Pruitt-Igoe tract as the site for a $30 million magnet school.

U.S. District Judge George F. Gunn Jr. noted in his order that the federal court last year had approved the Pruitt-Igoe location as the site for the Gateway School.

In May, the St. Louis School Board filed an application with the Housing Authority to acquire 18 acres at Pruitt-Igoe, a public housing complex demolished in the 1970s.

The authority owns the property and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has a lien on the tract.

The Tenant Affairs Board, which represents public housing tenants, opposed the deal. It contended that under federal law it has the “first right of refusal” in land transactions that affect public housing tenants.

Gunn disagreed, at least regarding the Gateway case. In an order late Wednesday, he said the tenants’ board cannot block the Pruitt-Igoe deal. He pointed out that the site is a “vacant debris-strewn area” that has had no residents for more than 15 years.

He ordered the Housing Authority to disregard the tenant board’s intent to develop the site the School Board wants for Gateway School.
(Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch 12/25/1992)

The remaining 39 acres are still vacant 15 years after the school opened, becoming an urban forest.  Interest in Pruitt-Igoe remains as strong as ever.  Local filmmakers are hard at work on a documentary on the project.  See their site at Pruitt-Igoe.com (under construction) or follow them on Twitter @PruittIgoe.

Pruitt-Igoe is known around the world.  I recently received this email:

My name is Phil Bosch. I’m an artist based in Holland who is coming this Oktober and November to St. Louis to work on a special video documentary project.  I would like to investigate the memories of former residents of the now defunct Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. For the citizens of St. Louis this place is still an open space in the city, like an inverted monument of a history that seems to be forgotten.

Slowly this housing complex seems to have taken on a mythological status.   My film will be a study on its mythological status on the one side and the realm of experiences of the former residents on the other. The goal of my project is to enter, imaginatively, this huge building complex, even though its physical appearance is no longer there to be seen. While the Pruitt-Igoe no longer exists physically, it still exists in the memory of the former residents. It appears that despite the negative aura of the complex (the death of Modernism, the site’s history of crime and vandalism), there is still a coherent social group in the area who meet regularly. Thus, my goal would be to search for memories of a place where many lives were connected by this architecture that no longer exists.

I would like to document these memories. First of all, I would like to video the site of Pruitt-Igoe, which now has been taken back by nature. Next, I would like to contact people who had lived there or who otherwise have memories of the buildings.

If you can help Mr. Bosch email him.

– Steve Patterson

Defining Urban

The title of this blog is Urban Review St. Louis.  Its subtitle is “a look at urban planning and related politics in the St. Louis region.”  While we can all pretty much agree about what “planning” and “politics” likely encompass, there seems to be a big disparity about what “urban” actually might be.  The dictionary definition is fairly simple: “of, pertaining to, or designating a city or town.”  The reality seems to be much more complex, and likely mirrors the definition of pornography (“I’ll know it when I see it”).  Is the urban threshold crossed when population density or the number of dwelling units passes an arbitrary number per acre?  When buildings exceed a certain number of stories or when the front and/or back yards shrink or disappear completely?  When sidewalks and alleys appear and residential curb cuts disappear?  When true mixed use and viable public transit really function? When parking goes from convenient to a real pain in the a**?

New Town St. Charles and Seaside, Florida, both look a lot like parts of Soulard and San Francisco, but I doubt any of us would describe either of them as being “urban”.  Parts of our north side have fewer dwelling units or residents per acre than parts of Chesterfield.  East St. Louis is closer to our downtown than many city neighborhoods are, yet the only thing urban about the place is the wasteland part.  College dorms, state prisons and high-rise condos all have similar densities, yet have completely different interactions with the urban environment.  The core of every midwestern small town, the part laid out before 1930, is “walkable”, but few would be considered to be “urban”.

My guess is that our individual definition is a direct result of where we grew up. Like Steve, I grew up in a series of residential suburbs.  Going away to college, I experienced and learned to appreciate both higher-density urban living and the joys of owning an older home.  As an architect, I’ve worked on both urban and suburban projects, in everything from single-family residential to high-rise commerical structures.  So my view is that pretty much every part of St. Louis City is “urban”, even places like St. Louis Hills and the private streets in the CWE.  If I’d grown up on the upper east side of Manhattan in New York City, my viewpoint would most likely be much different.

The nearest common denominator for “urban” that I can identify are the old streetcar lines that were the preferred/de facto choice for transportation in many cities during the first forty years of the twentieth century.  They were the genesis for most of the commercial and mixed-use architecture that seems to define the urban ideal today.  They were also responsible for the growth of the many walkable urban neighborhoods that abut these old business districts.  Surprisingly (or not), these districts and neighborhoods were usually built with little direct government design review.  The buildings, both commercial and residential, were built simply because they were what sold, they were what the buyers of the time wanted.  The residential lots were relatively narrow because it maximized the number within walking distance of public transit.  More-expensive, higher-density, multi-family buildings could be justified if they were closer to the streetcar line.

All this changed, drastically, in the last half of the twentieth century, as the private automobile replaced public transportation as the preferred and most-prevalent form of individual transport.  Not surprisingly, architecture and what passes for urban planning evolved to reflect this changing environment.  The question then becomes what exactly is suburban and what is the new urban?  Clayton here and Tyson’s Corner in Maryland are both prime examples of the new urban – both started out as rural crossroads and both are now dense and important economic centers.  And while both are now integrating rail public transit, they remain primarily autocentric urban environments.

Every urban area has shades of grey, places/neighborhoods with very high densities and ones with lower, some even approaching suburban, densities.  Urban, to me, is both simple and complex.  Urban equals dense and diverse, in people, architecture, jobs, incomes and streetscapes.  There are no truly right or wrong answers, just an ongoing, hopefully denser, evolution.  St. Louis’ fundamental challenge is that we were once 800,000, we’re now 350,000, and many of us want to get back to 500,000 or 600,000.  We have the infrastructure.  We have the diversity.  We can focus on what was.  We can focus on a certain urban form.  We can be idealists.  But to really succeed, we need to temper our idealism with making sure we attract both new residents and new businesses AND keeping the ones that already here.

– Jim Zavist

If St. Louis Had the Density of Other Cities

Many think population density is all bad or all good.  To me it depends up0n how the population uses the land.

Much is said about St. Louis’ peak of 856,796 in 1950 and how over the last 50 years we lost over half a million people out of our small 61.9 square mile city.  We will never again be at that level but how we use our land with our current population level is important.  I think we can do better with the population we have.

For grins I thought it would be interesting to what the population of the City of St. Louis would be if we had the recent density of other major cities.  I picked 13 cities that came into my head and used density figures available from Wikipedia.  The results were both surprising and intriguing:

Portland OR has lower density than St. Louis?  Interesting.  I think they have a different mix — a very high density center transitioning to a very low density edge.  Oklahoma City is massive in total land area but with only a few rare exceptions it is uniformly low-density.  St. Louis of 1950 had greater population density of current day Chicago? Yes, St. Louis, in 1950, was more densely populated than Chicago today!

I’d like to think that with good planning (form-based zoning) we could aspire to a Seattle or Baltimore level of population density – at least 7,000 persons per square mile.

What this looks like is increasing the density along our major corridors such as Olive, Jefferson, Kingshighway, Natural Bridge, etc.

Goal posts should be something like:

• 6,000/sq. mile (371,400) by 2020
• 6,500/sq. mile (402,350) by 2030
• 7,000/sq. mile (433,300) by 2040
• 7,500/sq. mile (464,250) by 2050
• 8,000/sq. mile (495,200) by 2060

This growth will not happen organically like it did a century ago. Our current zoning and other policies prevents such growth.  It will require hard work to create the plan & zoning for dense corridors.  These will need, and will support, excellent mass transit.  Our tidy streets of single family, 2-family and 4-family buildings need not change from their current density levels.  The growth will occur along the corridors that last century changed into to-centric.  Hell, basically.

I doubt I’ll be around for the 2060 Census but I want to steer us in the right direction so by that time we can reach this goal.  Plus the US population is expected to grow some 45% by 2050.  If we grew at the expected national rate we’d have 514,000 by 2050.  So to have 464,250 by 2050 (31% growth) seems like a reasonable expectation.

We have the vacant buildings ready for new occupants.  We have the vacant land for in-fill construction. Still need to work on the schools to educate the youngsters.

– Steve Patterson

New Crown Food Mart Strip Center Lacks Required ADA Acess Route

Just North of downtown at Cass & North 13th (map link) an entire block has become a Crown Food Mart strip center with gas station & car wash.  Food choices are very limited in the immediate area so this will serve a need.  The problem is the auto-centric/suburban design.

I’m not talking about the design of the building.  I’m talking about the site design.  The site is surrounded on all sides with streets.  At one time buildings were built up to the street.  A modern example is the strip at Grand & Arsenal — store in front, parking in back.

The sidewalks are generous and have street trees.  They’ll see lots of use too because the area is surrounded by residential with residents that don’t all have cars.  Besides, why drive to a place you can see just a few blocks away?

The problem for the pedestrian is the sidewalk is great if you want to walk around the perimeter of the site but not actually approach any of the stores.  Like so much new construction, this development completely ignores the concept of an ADA access route.  In the short time I was taking these pics I saw a woman walking North and a man heading toward the development in a wheelchair.  He was on Florissant Ave because the area’s sidewalks are in such poor condition, if they exist.

But the incompetent designers of this development wrongly assumed that all customers would arrive by car and that real pedestrians would not use their new sidewalks to get to the businesses.  You may recall the wheelchair bound woman who was struck & killed by a motorist on Delmar at Jefferson after leaving the Crown Food Mart at that intersection.  The city was to blame in that case because the sidewalks were non-existent or not passable.  But like this new location, that location doesn’t have provisions to get from the public sidewalk to the front doors of the businesses. Pedestrians are subjected to enter/exit in the same spots as cars.

Cars & pedestrians are not mutually exclusive, or at least they shouldn’t be.  The way we do it here is we design for cars at the exclusion of pedestrians.  Good design designs for both pedestrians and motorists.  It is possible.  It just takes that as a goal — or a requirement by the city.

– Steve Patterson