Do We Even Want to Keep the Rams, Can We Afford To

I’ve never been to a football game of any sort. That is saying quite a bit considering I did my undergrad work at the University of Oklahoma where football is seemingly important to everyone. Upon finishing at OU I moved to St Louis in 1990 just in time to catch the city trying to win an expansion team and finally getting the Rams from LA a few years later. I’ve never been to one of the few home games because frankly the sport bores me greatly. Baseball is an interesting game to watch in person, football is not.

Still I recognize the many fans the sport has. I also recognize what major sports can do for a region. Although we must accept the long standing history the baseball Cardinals have in St Louis. The Rams, I’m afraid, do not have the same strong ties to St Louis or the taxpayers, er, the fans.

Out of desperation in the early 1990s we gave the Rams a sweet deal to lure them to St Louis — that over the 30 year lease on the then new dome we’d make sure it stayed in the top 10% in the NFL, reviewed every 10 years. If we don’t keep up, the Rams are free to graze in other pastures.  As the Post-Dispatch reminded us recently, the last review point, at the 20 year marker, is in 2015 — just seven years away.   The P-D also had a rundown of some new stadiums coming online.  They are, in a word, expensive.  Try a billion dollars.

Last time the city, county and state all found a way to fund the dome (even without a team).  But the billion dollar question is this — at what point does keeping the Rams in St Louis get too expensive?  At what point does the cost far outweigh any real or perceived benefit the community gets in return for the investment of public dollars.  A billion dollars can do a lot for a region if leveraged properly.  I’d personally put the billion into a low cost per mile streetcar system and run it through an area prime for new construction with new zoning with some hefty density requirements.  I think  dollar for dollar return would be far greater and longer lasting than with a new football stadium.

The second question I have is this — assuming we think the Rams are worth keeping and that building a new billion dollar stadium is just par for the course —  where should it be built and what do we do with the old dome?  Baseball fits nicely into an urban context but football fans have the tailgate tradition that requires acres of surface parking.  For this reason I don’t think football belongs in a downtown setting, especially given the few times per year they play home games.   Locating a new dome on the East side of the river could be a nice gesture toward the idea that we are all part of the St Louis region.  There is also plenty of land available, transit access and by then a new bridge across the river for fans that can afford tickets and gasoline.

Another option is to place the new dome near downtown — in the old Pruitt-Igoe site.  Tie in a downtown streetcar circulator system running to the new dome and we might just get new development along the line.  The area around the new dome wouldn’t become village probably but the zoning of the area we set the stage for what it would become.  The village might end up being on the way to the dome.

Other options include far flung suburban locations along an interstate highway. Ug, boring.

And finally we have the issue of the abandoned dome.  Do we keep it around as addition space for the convention center?  No, get rid of the big thing so we ca repair that part of downtown — restoring streets lined with buildings oriented to the street.  Currently the convention center and dome acts as a large barrier between downtown and the residential areas to the North.  We need to do what we can to reconnect the city to downtown.

To recap the questions are as follows:  Is it worth a billion dollars to the region to keep the Rams in town?  If yes, where should a new dome be built?  And lastly what do we do with the old dome?

Have Wheelchair, Will Travel

Before my stroke I would walk the 10 or so blocks from my place at 16th & Locust over to City Grocers at 10th & Olive.  While I am able to walk again thanks to a couple of months of physical therapy I can really only handle short distances at a time.  As an example walking to a  seat at the Chase theater after getting dropped off at the Lindell entrance was pushing my limit.

This is why I’m so happy I’ve got an electric wheelchair — it gives me mobility that I thought I wouldn’t have.

Over this past weekend a friend and I  walked across the Eads Bridge.  OK, she walked and I wheelchaired.  What a great bridge — connecting two parts of our region for pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and those using light rail.  The bridge make it easy for me to wheelchair all the way to Illinois!

On the Illinois side is a ramp from the top down to the MetroLink level.  A couple of short elevator rides and we we back on the platform for a train to take us back to Missouri.

What I found is my wheelchair tourism is that I can get pretty much anywhere.  Sometimes the direct route is not an option —  such as the above to the Arch Grounds.

A block South at Walnut the situation is just as bad — the crosswalk lines lead directly into a high curb.  I think if I try back by Washington Ave I can get to the grounds but encountering obstacles such as the above can prove frustrating.  At these times the last thing you want to do is travel several blocks out of the way with the hope of stumbling upon an accessible route.

For years now the “lid” project has been discussed.  The latest problem is the who has design review over the area. I say forget the lid and all the useless plaza concepts and just fix the sidewalks to make them accessible sooner rather than later.

Interestingly one of the benefits of being limited by the wheelchair is it forces me to explore my local environment, such as the ‘Meeting of the Waters’ sculpture & fountain by Carl Miles in Aloe Plaza across Market from Union Station.

Union Station is remarkably accessible given that the renovation happened prior to the passage of the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act).  Perhaps the building code of the day mandated a certain level of accessibility?

Given this freedom to explore (on dry days at least) I’m considering my other options.  I’m so close to MetroLink that I could get to places such as the loop or Clayton easily.  I could use a few items from Trader Joe’s and via Metrolink can get close easily & quickly.  The problem is the shopping center is one of those that assumes everyone drives a private automobile.  Although a sidewalk runs along Eager it doesn’t connect to the shops (at least to my recollection).  Ditto for crossing Brentwood and making it to Whole Foods.

The Central West End is certainly an option too.  As soon as I figure out how to get on & off the bus with a wheelchair that will give me many more options.  I think I need to get to Loughborough Commons in the chair so I can evaluate their after the fact accessible route.

While you might see people in wheelchairs and feel sorry for us don’t.  To me the wheelchair represents freedom and mobility.  Without the chair I’d be stuck at home.

City Needs to Ban Future Skywalks, Ameren’s is Latest to be added

What better way to destroy a city than to take pedestrians off the public street? Back a few decades ago skywalks were all the rage — every city just had to have at least one.

St Louis has it’s fair share and the most noteworthy is the one above as part of the failed St Louis Centre indoor mall. Making Washington Ave feel like a tunnel and blocking urban views up and down the street this is most certainly the largest. This bridge over the street is pretty universally accepted as major urban blunder even though it was hailed as wonderful just 20 years ago.

Many of the skywalks we have connect multiple buildings while others connect building to parking garage.

Above is a new skybridge at Lumiere Place on the formerly historic Laclede’s Landing area. This one connects a renovated hotel structure to the casino, saving guests from having to go outside on the sidewalk.

The latest skywalk being constructed is at the HQ of electric utility Ameren located just South of Union Station. This bridge doesn’t connect buildings or even a building to a parking garage. No, this skywalk goes to a surface parking lot.

In a prior post I was critical of the lack of street trees on 18th/Truman Parkway and as I was taking these images I felt like I was in the roadway given how close traffic was. We really should not be building pedestrian-unfriendly roads like this.

It should be telling that Ameren is going to such expense to keep employees from crossing five lanes of traffic. Their own HQ building and numerous surface parking lots has contributed to the destruction of an active and thus safe public sidewalk.

We need to stop removing people from the sidewalks in this manner — it only makes bad situations worse.

Lumiere Link is Nice, Route to Tunnel Needs Attention

Earlier in the week a new tunnel under I-70 connecting Baer Plaza (East of the Edward Jones Dome) and Lumiere Place casino in Laclede’s Landing opened to the public. St Louis Development Co. head Rodney Crim suggested the city wants convention goers, “when not in session and looking for things to do” to take the tunnel to the casino and Laclede’s Landing. Never mind conventioneers taking a stroll down Washington Ave or other streets downtown where retailers are struggling to have enough customers. See Crim on KSDK here.

So much was made about this great new privately funded $8 million dollar connection I just had to see for myself.

I started by heading East on Washington Ave, passing by the main entrance to the convention center, aka America’s Center. Of course the taxi stand on the sidewalk gets more space than us pedestrians. I can tell you that being in a wheelchair heading straight on toward a taxi that is moving toward me is not a comforting feeling. Oh the driver saw me as he repeatedly tapped his horn as he drove off. Behind the cabs was a St Louis police car that was so far to the right I had to go to the left to get around it. Welcome to St Louis.

When I got to 7th I turned left as I figured conventioneers might use the courtyard/plaza doors as their starting point for their walk to the casino. Above is looking back South from the plaza entry at 7th & Convention Plaza. As a side note Convention Plaza used to be Delmar but it was renamed when it ran in front of the original convention center. Later in the early 1990s when the center was expanded to the current configuration the street go cut off by the building. So now we have this short section of Convention Plaza on both the East & West sides of the center. It should have reverted back to the name Delmar.

Leaving the circle drive area at 7th & Convention Plaza we see surface parking lot and the back of the Drury Inn.

Heading East toward Baer Plaza & Lumiere Link we are along the side of the Edward Jones Dome. I’m not sure why street trees were not part of the plan when this was built but thet are sorely needed. The Jersey barriers were likely added after the Oklahoma City bombing or after 9/11.

Almost to Broadway now and we see a nice collection of Jersey barriers, seemingly blocking our path across the street.

Above, I want to cross Broadway which is to my left but I can’t get my wheelchair close enough to the pedestrian signal button (it is the one on the right on the light pole).

Above is the same pole and signal button from another angle. The ramp to cross Broadway is to the left of all the Jersey barriers you see. Current ADA guidelines require signal buttons to be closer to where they are needed.

Finally we make it. I can’t believe that Rodney Crim wants visitors to make that walk — it has to be among the worst in the city. I’d hope conventioneers would never see this side of the dome — instead making their way down Washington Ave to see sidewalk dining and increasingly active sidewalks.

So we are now at the entry to Lumiere Link. We are at Baer Plaza. Who?

Robert J. Baer was the first chairman of the St Louis Regional Convention and Sports Complex Authority. Baer was also the former head of Bi-State Development and he took over the position again at Metro after Larry Salci had a very public crash & burn. From the plaque:

“Preservation of land for this park reflects Mr Baer’s recognition for ‘green space’ as an attractive front yard for the Stadium/Convention Center.”

With the trees now mature this has the potential for a decent public space. Sadly it has no natural users as the area is pretty desolate. Although now we have people coming and going to the casino and maybe a few to Laclede’s Landing beyond the casino. So how attractive is this front yard? Above you can see the weeds popping up between the seams in the concrete, not a good start.

All around the edges is debris from the trees.

There is even part of a dumpster lid. The whole plaza looks and feels rather abandoned. This is not St Louis putting it’s best foot forward. You’d think someone from the Visitor Commission or whomever has responsibility for this space might had tidied up a bit before the opening of the new tunnel.

Visitors to the tunnel have three choices for the decent — stairs, an escalator or an elevator. At the other end of the tunnel you end up right smack in the middle of the complex. You are not on the casino floor of course because you must show ID and such to enter the gaming area. Still you can see the games and certainly the restaurants.

The interior was more posh than I expected. Pity they had to go and ruin it with all the gaming machines. I also have to wonder how of the $8 million for the tunnel was in video screens. Despite the richness of the whole place I couldn’t wait to get out. I may use the link again so that I can check out the exterior of the casino & hotel as it looms over what little remains of Laclede’s Landing.

Overall I think the link is a good thing — the more connections across I-70 the better. If only the route to get to the tunnel wasn’t so pathetic.

Old Urbanism, Suburbia & New Urbanism

Here in the St. Louis region we have a little bit of everything — we have old urbanism in the inner core (the city of St Louis) as well as in the many older suburbs that ring the city on both sides of the river. Like every region in America, we have too much suburbia — that auto centric muck that has been growing since WWII.Your know what suburbia is — residential streets with big lawn, no street trees and an increasing number of garage doors. The big box centers with enough parking for the day after Thanksgiving. The indoor mall surrounded by acres of parking. The office park with similar looking buildings casually placed on lush green lawns all set between yet more parking. Being a suburb of the core city is fine — Webster Groves is an old suburb that is walkable in ways St Peters will never be. So my issue is not with suburbs but with suburbia — that very soulless form of building that has predominated America fot the last five or six decades.

So much of our good old urbanism has been destroyed remaking core cities with touches of suburbia.

Old urbanism was built for people on foot. Streets were narrow by today’s standards. Each neighborhood had a commercial area within a short walk. The streetcar was not far away which could get you to the bigger stores downtown. No zoning regulated this. It just was. And it worked well until we reached a tipping point with the car — fewer pedestrians and more cars through it all out of balance. While old urbanism was great for people it did a poor job accommodating the car.

The solution of the day was not to tweak our existing environments but to rip them out entirely. The new suburbia was proudly proclaimed as “progress.” Once narrow streets were widened and those neighborhood shops moved to the new strip centers or the open air mall.

In the early 1980s a few people began questioning the status quo and looks to the past for ways to make walkable communities while still making room for the car. The first result was Seaside, Florida — as seen in the movie The Truman Show. Widely dismissed due to its resort nature, many said the principals couldn’t be applied elsewhere — that we were basically stuck with suburbia as the model for future development both in core areas and on the edges.

But a diverse group of Architects and Planners refused to accept suburbia as the only way, founding the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) in 1993. Today people are still foolishly dismissive of New Urbanism — saying it is just nostalgia in the corn field. This view is so narrow it looks at a few projects but doesn’t take into account the depth of the guiding principals found in the Charter of the CNU.

About a decade ago there started being talk of a big New Urbanist project in our region. The resulting project was Paul McKee’s Winghaven (yes, that Paul McKee). In August 2001 Peter Downs authored a story on Winghaven for the RFT; The Gospel According to Paul.

Though the experiment is barely half-done, some people are already proclaiming it a stunning success. “WingHaven will be cited for the next 25 years as a great example of a new form of urban development,” says Richard Fleming, president and chief executive officer of the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association.

By this point we had seen enough to know that Winghaven was not New Urbanism, despite what Fleming had to say. At the time I was part of a casual group of architects and planners known as New Urban St Louis. After this article appeared architect John Hoag, planner Todd Antoine and I drafted a letter to the editor on behalf of our group. We wrote, in part:

While we applaud Paul McKee’s efforts to break the current mold of suburban development in the St. Louis region, several points are worth mentioning.

New Urbanists identify with one of two camps: developments in suburban “greenfields” or revitalizing existing neighborhoods in the urban core and inner suburbs. New Urbanists believe strengthening the urban core is vital to sustaining long- term regional growth while acknowledging that greenfield development will continue. New development, whether in the urban core or in greenfields, benefits by incorporating New Urbanist principles. New Urbanism does not imply a strict return to nostalgic remembrances of the past. Instead, it is based on design and planning principles nurtured and refined over centuries of town- building that have been largely forgotten over the last 50 years. Problems such as affordable housing, lack of connectiveness and inadequate public transportation plague many suburban areas. Solutions include pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use and transit-oriented development which offers real alternatives to auto-oriented sprawl.

The St. Louis region is blessed with fine older examples of traditional neighborhoods exhibiting many aspects of New Urbanist designs. However, the region is lacking the breakthrough projects seen in Memphis, Dallas and Minneapolis. We encourage developers, bankers and local government officials to explore the rich variety of New Urbanist developments in the U.S. already completed or in the planning process.

Since this time we’ve seen real New Urbanism come to our region via New Town at St Charles. New Town is a project of Whittaker Builders. I’ve had the good fortune to have spent some good one on one time with Greg Whittaker talking about the project and what led him in this direction. Whittaker, like most large home builders in our region, was responsible for a number of the typical subdivisions that define suburbia. Greg Whittaker spent vacation time at Seaside Florida and he began to wonder if they could do something different than they had. The answer was yes.

Building new (or old) urbanism is not a simple task. First of all, based on current zoning, it is illegal —- even in the City of St Louis. Zoning in much of the country mandates suburbia — be it in the old urban core or on corn fields at the edge of each region. The site where New Town is located was zoned for industrial park development. If someone wanted to recreate the intersection of Euclid & Maryland (old urbanism) on the long vacant Pruitt-Igoe site they could not do so based on our current zoning code which dates to 1947.

Our zoning code is like most in the U.S. — it is what is known as use based zoning. That is the code tells you where certain uses are allowed (so much for mixed use areas) and finally how much parking each use much have. Always back to parking — this is why instead of contiguous commercial districts as in the old urbanism newer areas have each building surrounded by parking. With all this parking between buildings you lose that connected feel of a truly walkable environment.

New Urbanist developments like New Town use their own codes — with the city or county adopting that code as an overlay for that site. These codes are not use based — they don’t care if you want to put a hardware store or an insurance company in a storefront space — they are more concerned with the design of the storefront. This is not to say that you can open a slaughterhouse on a street of single family homes. But having commercial spaces with residential units above just around the corner from single family homes is to be expected — something you don’t see in residential subdivisions today.

Codes in new urbanist projects are “form-based” codes — these control how the buildings relate to each other and to the public street. Cities such as Denver are also using form-based codes to regulate how urban infill will be built in various parts of town.

While New Urbanism is not perfect it is a starting point for building communities that respect people while also accommodating the car. New Urbanists such as Peter Calthorpe tend to have a much more modern aesthetic as opposed to DPZ (planners behind New Town) that rely on a more familiar vernacular aesthetic. Aesthetics aside they all seek to mix uses, provide a walkable environment and reduce dependence on the car. Rather than dismiss New Urbanism we should embrace it as a means for ending the mandated suburbia we have now.

Keep in mind I personally would not want to live in a New Urbanist place on the outer edges of a region. However as a model for sites such as the former Pruitt_Igoe it is ideal. I could live there as I’d be close to the old urbanism that remains in the city. Nobody should have to live in zoning mandated suburbia.