ALERT: Church wants to raze eight properties in Hyde Park Historic District

The House of Deliverence Pentecostal Church of Hyde Park is seeking permission from the St. Louis Preservation Board to raze it’s own church building and seven other buildings on the block. I’m told the church wishes to put up a steel warehouse type building with massive parking lot. Demolition permits for two other buildings on the block were denied by the Preservation Board but the more politically influenced Planning Commission overturned this decision and allowed the demotions.

The church is threatening to leave the city and go to the county if they don’t get their way. I think they need to start packing – and take the Planning Commission with them!

View of existing church to be razed under current proposal. (photo: Cultural Resources)

The meeting has already started but these properties are later on the agenda – go to the meeting if you can.

Click here to see Preservation Board agenda

A. G. Edwards headquarters is an urban liability, not an asset

St. Louis Construction News & Review awarded a new building on the A.G. Edwards campus a Regional Excellence Award earlier this year, stating:

“The technical challenges in building this project were enormous, as is the project’s importance to St. Louis. A.G. Edwards is a major employer, its campus connects downtown to mid-town, and in pursuing this project, the company not only built on its commitment to St. Louis, it also upgraded the environment and infrastructure that will help its neighbors, such as Harris-Stowe State College.”

BULLSHIT!!! Let’s take a look at each of these claims to see the folly of the thinking:

• Technical challenges: I’m not really sure what the challenges were – the building looks as boring as the rest on campus. Certainly no more thought was put into connecting to the city on this building than prior A. G. Edwards buildings.

• Importance to St. Louis & being a major employer: The only importance A.G. Edwards has to St. Louis is the 1% employment tax and real estate taxes. Boasting of such a major company having their HQ within the city gives the boys at RCGA something to talk about.

• Connecting downtown to mid-town: Actually, quite the opposite is true. The massive A.G. Edwards campus is a growing virus in the middle of the city. Yes, they are “investing” millions of dollars in construction funds and they are employing many people. So what. Does that automatically create a connection just because they are between two points? Hardly. If fact, the design of the campus literally creates a disconnect between two areas we should be connecting. I’ll explain in much greater detail below why this campus creates a vacuum that has sucked the life out of this area.

• Commitment to St. Louis: This is the part where we are supposed to bow and thank them for not fleeing to Clayton or the hinterlands.

• Neighbors to benefit from upgraded environment & infrastructure: This is a prime example of the ‘spend millions and other development will be spurred’ fallacy.

I repeat, bullshit. All of it.
… Continue Reading

Wisdom from unlikely urbanists, the Beastie Boys

When I was in high school in the early 80s I was a bit of a musical prude – preferring soft pop rock tunes over more progressive music. The Beastie Boys was a group I dismissed. Interestingly, these guys are my age – one is younger while the oldest is barely two years my senior. They, like me, are quickly approaching forty. With age does come wisdom.

A diverse musical library has been a big part of my growth. I’m happy to report that I can’t get enough Beastie Boys. Their latest album, To the 5 Boroughs, is awesome. From the album title to their videos, it is clear these guys really love New York City.

Pay attention to the lyrics and you know they get it. Consider this verse from the track Right Right Now Now:

I went to get a loan and they asked my race

It ain’t the bank’s damn business how my lineage trace

Banks have long been a destructive force in cities. Past crimes of racial & economic red lining have, for the most part, disappeared but the damage has been done. The effort now required to undue what has been done by prior generations of bankers and planners is monumental. But, we of the Generation X crowd (1965-1975 by some accounts) are a group reaching increasing political power. It is becoming our time to make our mark on the City of St. Louis.

Let’s make our mark more meaningful than prior generations.

Click here for the complete lyrics to Right Right Now Now.

Click here to preview the song on the iTunes Music Store.

More Wisdom from Jane Jacobs

As I make my way through Jane Jacobs’ 1961 classic, “Death and Life of Great American Cities.” I realize just how fucking brilliant this woman is!

“Probably everyone is aware of certain general descriptions by a city on its heart. When a city heart stagnates or disintegrates, a city as a social neighborhood of the whole begins to suffer: People who ought to get together, by means of central activities that are failing, fail get together. Ideas and money that ought to meet, and do so often only by happenstance in a place of central vitality, fail to meet. The networks of city public life develop gaps they cannot afford. Without a strong and inclusive central heart, a city tends to become a collection of interests isolated from one another. It falters at producing something greater, socially, culturally, and economically, than the sum of its separated parts.”

This really deep stuff. It is taking me much longer to read this book than I usually spend – mostly because I’m finding myself reading a good many paragraphs several times to fully grasp all that she talks about. Thinking back to see if what she says rings true based on my personal experiences and so far she has been dead on. I only wish this book had been forced reading for every high school student in America. If so, we might live in a much different society?

But, no point crying over spilled soy milk, right? We’ve got the lessons now we must apply them. If that means electing new leaders then so be it. Mayor Slay – time to send you back to the family trucking business.

You aldermen need show more understanding of urbanity and cut out this “aldermanic courtesy” shit that removes all accountability. Don’t vote in favor of another alderman’s ward-destroying project so that alderman will vote in favor of your ward-destroying project. You are not helping anyone but yourselves!

Fire Departments encourage sprawl

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting, “The St. Louis Fire Department has denied the Cardinals permission for further construction of their new stadium because of safety concerns, namely the proximity of the stadium to the highway.”

I’m not sure what good the objection will do at this point. While I’m not thrilled about losing the current Busch Stadium for a new “retro” stadium and the promised “ballpark village” I also think we need to get it done as quickly as possible.

But, back to the issue of the fire department. I know in other cities the unions require a certain number of firemen per truck – not sure about in the City of St. Louis. Whatever the reason, most fire departments are buying bigger and bigger equipment. This requires bigger and bigger streets. Any transportation engineer will tell you, the wider the street the faster the traffic will go – regardless of the posted speed limit.

In making cities more pedestrian & bicycle friendly we try to slow down traffic. In fact, a bit of congestion is a good thing.

Consider this from “Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream” by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck:

When fire departments are allowed to usurp the role of town planner, they generally commit two errors. First, they put more weight on fire rescue than on the prevention of injury in general; they try to minimize emergency response time, without considering that the resulting wide streets lead to an increased number of traffic accidents, since people drive faster on them. Fire departments have yet to acknowledge that fire safety is but a small part of a much larger picture that others refer to as life safety. The biggest threat to life safety is not fires but car accidents, by a tremendous margin. Since the vast majority of fire department emergencies involve car accidents, it is surprising that fire chiefs have not begun to reconsider response time in this light; if they did, narrow streets would logically become the norm in residential areas. In the meantime, the wider streets that fire departments require are indeed quite effective at providing them with the quick access to the accidents they help cause.”

They continue on this subject…
“The second mistake fire departments make is purchasing oversized trucks, vehicles that have trouble maneuvering through anything but the widest of streets. Sometimes these trucks are required by outdatad union regulations, but often they are simply the result of a town’s desire to have the most effective machinery it can afford.* Unfortunately, a part of a truck’s effectiveness is its abillity to reach the fire in the first place. Once purchased, the truck turns from servant to master, making all but the most wasteful and unpleasant steet spaces impossible.”

In the footnotes the authors basically say these big trucks may be due to fire marshalls comparing “the size of their trucks” at conventions.

I’m guessing this issue with the stadium will get resolved with a nice donation to the fire department’s retirement fund.