Brick by Brick: 2857 Cherokee Street

At the West end of the Cherokee Station Business District lies a three story brick storefront property. Ruined by years of neglect, this rotting structure stands in defiance of being utterly forgotten by its owners.

The city finally issued a condemnation notice last week. The door had been kicked in by vagrants, unmasking the internal ruin. This debris-filled stairwell degrades right inside of the front doorway. Plainly visible to any passerby; and enticing to anyone needing a free place to stay the night.

Saint Louis doesn’t need to be losing any more buildings, that goes especially for 107 year old brick storefronts. South City has done a remarkable job of avoiding the wholesale tear-downs that ravaged North City. South City has thoroughly rejected bulldozers and the McKee’s that circle over them. Thanks to dedicated landlords, an undaunted Alderman, energetic entrepreneurs and activists, and a sprinkling of idealistic artists Cherokee Street has managed to save, restore, and invigorate its numerous historic buildings.

2857 is the only building within the mixed-use/commercial district in the shape it’s in.

20th Ward Alderman Craig Schmid, once contacted about the property’s condemnation, committed to finding what resources the city has in getting the property into the hands of a responsible developer.

The situation is ripe for a community-driven rehab project. As a resident and proprietor on Cherokee Street, I have a vested interest in seeing this building reconstructed. Other stakeholders, business owners and residents, have expressed interest in pooling what resources they have to save this building.

To be sure, this is a major job. The structural report states plainly that whole walls will need to be relaid. Internal damage is severe, water has had nearly every window open to its invasion. Plants have managed to grow from the windowsills and a tree has sprung out of the garage.

This post is a call for more involvement. Brick by Brick Saint Louis needs to be preserved. If you are a rehabber, a member of the Cherokee Street community, or simply a fellow Saint Louisan dedicated to the preservation of architectural history I ask that you join this project.

For more information on how to get involved please contact me.   With enough volunteers we can start putting together an organization and a plan to save this building.

Update: Before I’ve even managed to post the first installment, new developments have arisen. On Saturday, June 20th, workmen were spotted making superficial fixes on the building. A real door has been placed in the front; no other changes are visible.

Photos provided by Cranky Yellow’s photographer Amanda Beard; www.amandabeardphotography.com. All rights reserved.

– Angelo Stege

Screening of Select Scenes from Documentary Film on Pruitt-Igoe

Saturday June 20th scenes from the still in-production documentary film on Pruitt-Igoe will be screened.

The 33 buildings known as Pruitt-Igoe only stood for two decades. The bulk of the site has been vacant now nearly twice as long.

Here is a short clip from a 1981 program entitled Trouble in Utopia:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd7VOz_Wstg

Pruitt-Igoe’s architect was Minoru Yamasaki.  Yamasaki is best known for the World Trade Center project that was destroyed on 9/11/2001.

The scrrening location is the Des Lee Auditorium at the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park at 5700 Lindell Blvd (map).  Bike parking is presumably available and access is easy from the Forest Park MetroLink light rail stop.

– Steve Patterson

Darst-Webbe Public Housing Project Long Gone

The old high-rise housing projects that used to ring downtown are gone now.   One such project that struck me upon my arrival was Darst-Webbe.  The J.M. Darst Apts., opened in October 1956,  consisted of four 9-story towers and the A.M. Webbe Apts., opened in May 1961, consisted of two 9-story, one 12-story and one 8-story towers.  Darst was bounded by Lafayette, 12th (now Tucker), Hickory and 14th.  Webbe was to the North bounded by Hickory, 14th, Chouteau, and 12th.  To the West, across 14th, was the Clinton Peabocy Terrace 2 & 3 story apartments which opened in July 1942.  Click here to see a map of 12th (Tucker) & Hickory.

I took the above picture a few months after my arrival in St. Louis.  I believe this is the Webbe Apts. located North of Hickory. The housing in the background still exists.

• Darst/14.75 acres/645 units built/683 units razed
• Webbe/12.27 acres/580 units/578 units razed
• Clinton Peabody/27.49 acres/657 units/687 units razed

All of the above information is from an early 1970s St. Louis technical report titled, History of Urban Renewal.

Thanksgiving of 1990 I had visitors from my home state of Oklahoma visiting St. Louis for the first time.  Driving them around my newly adopted city I took them past Darst-Webbe.  I said, jokingly, “maybe we’ll see a fire.”  Guess what?  There was a large fire in a dumpster near one of these towers.  In the years that followed I’d drive by and see lights on in a few of the apartments.  I was shocked that people lived in what appeared to be ruins.

The reasons high rise public housing failed are numerous and complicated.  But very simply we would have been better off had they left the old slums in place rather than razing them for the new slums.  Hindsight is a wonderful teacher.

– Steve Patterson

The Use of the Drive-Thru Lane

Most of you reading this have been to a drive-thru.  Be it a bank, fast food establishment or for coffee.  For your visit you were likely in a motor vehicle.  Duh, right? But what if you don’t have a car or don’t drive?  The most obvious is as a pedestrian.  Other options might include a bicycle or motor scooter.  When I rode a motor scooter I was able to use the drive-thru if they knew I was there.  Bicyclists have, for years, complained they have been refused service at banks and at other drive-thru lanes.  What about mobility scooters?

A reader sent me a link to an interesting story:

A White Castle in St. Paul, Minnesota, is a 24-hour establishment, but it locks its dining room doors at 11 pm. Unfortunately, its drive-through service is restricted to customers in cars, so the employees refused to serve a 37-year-old woman who pulled up on an electric mobility scooter. Now she says she’s madder than fish grease, which is pretty mad, and she wants to sue them for discriminating against customers who can’t drive.

Fish grease? Anyway, if a business is open is it legal to refuse access to the disabled who are not in a car?  Or even the able-bodied not in a car?  Our society has become so auto-centric we don’t know how to relate to other humans not in a car.  We use their car to judge them — their income & social standing.  The lack of a car presumably puts them at the bottom.

As someone who drives a car as well as an electric wheelchair I can tell you I expect service regardless of which “vehicle” I’m using.  I hope the woman in the story forces White Castle and such places to examine their policies.

– Steve Patterson

Are Developers Evil?

First, full disclosure – the bulk of my work as an architect has been for and with developers and their cousins, commercial property managers.

In the world of urban design, developers, many times, become the fall guys and/or are blamed for building the suburban blandness that we all love to take pot shots at. I fall into the camp that the development community is much like any other – you have few crooks and sleazeballs, you have a few truly outstanding, creative and “sensitive” individuals, and most just fall in the inoffensive middle. I’m also a big believer in the three-legged stool analogy – developers don’t and can’t act in vacuum. Before anything can be built or renovated, in addition to the developer, a project requires approvals by “the government” and willing buyers or renters. Granted, developers are “in it for the money”, and many times tend to favor “cost-effective” choices over more sustainable ones, but they can only “get away with it” IF the government approves and/or IF their customers are willing to write the check for the finished product. People are buying vinyl-sided boxes in O’Fallon for a variety of reasons (including “affordability” and a “yard”), but having a gun held to heads isn’t one of them. The same goes for the proliferation of Walgreen’s at the expense of the locally-owned corner pharmacies – people are voting with their wallets.

Unless you’re one of those real rarities, a fourth of fifth generation living on the family farm/homestead, you can thank a developer for where you live, where you work and where you go to school. Someone, sometime, took a risk and laid out your block or cul de sac. Someone built a structure, and it may have been renovated, one or more times, by other people, or even you, willing to take the risk, a.k.a, developers. And in the realm of higher education, nearly every institution continues to invest and reinvest in their facilities, acting very much as developers.

The second leg of the stool is “the government”. I’m going to save a discussion of the quality of our elected officials for another post, but we can certainly kick around the wonderful world of government regulation. If you go to any jurisdiction that has a Planning, Community Development or Public Works department, you can be pretty sure that you’re going to have rules that limit what you can do and specify what you can’t do. And while appeals of and challenges to the regulations remain a possibility, most developers and most clients would much rather just comply with them, get the project done, and move on. These rules and regulations don’t just magically appear on the law books – they originate either from the professional staff or from the legislative side, and almost always are enacted, with the best of intentions, to address, in someone’s eyes, a bad or problem situation. Unfortunately, that Law of Unintended Consequences has a nasty habit of kicking in, and bland is “safe”, which is one big reason why suburbia looks remarkably consistent across the United States.

Finally, the third leg is the consumer. Like they say, never overestimate the taste of the American public. We’re a country that has embraced the mullet, shag carpet, avocado green appliances, vinyl siding, PBR and jacked-up pickup trucks. There’s a saying in the auto industry that “there’s a butt for every bucket”. Most developers aren’t stupid – if nobody’s buying at the price that they’re selling, guess what, they don’t do it again! So while it’s easy to sit in our ivory towers, in front of our keyboards, lamenting that too many people simply “don’t get it”, the hard reality is that they DO! The developers are giving them what they want, at a price they can afford, and everyone (except maybe “us” urbanists) is walking away happy . . .

– Jim Zavist