Nineteen year ago I started this blog as a distraction from my father’s heart attack and slow recovery. It was late 2004 and social media & video streaming apps didn’t exist yet — or at least not widely available to the general public. Blogs were the newest means of …
The new NGA West campus , Jefferson & Cass, has been under construction for a few years now. Next NGA West is a large-scale construction project that will build a new facility for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in St. Louis, Missouri.This $1.7B project is managed by the U.S. Army …
Book publisher Island Press always impresses me with thoughtful new books written by people working to solve current problems — the subjects are important ones for urbanists and policy makers to be familiar and actively discussing. These four books are presented in the order I received them. ‘Justice and …
This post is about two indirectly related topics: the new Siteman Cancer Center building under construction on the Washington University School of Medicine/BJC campus and an update on my stage 4 kidney cancer. Let’s deal with the latter first. You may have noticed I’ve not posted in three months, …
The Railway Exchange occupies city block 128, bounded by Olive, 7th, Locust, and 6th. It contains 1.2 million square feet but not a single parking spot. In the early 60s buildings to the South were razed so a 1,000-car garage could be constructed.
The parking garage for the Railway Exchange building was built in 1962, per city records. Shown here in 1966 while the Kiener West garage is getting started. The Railway Exchange is in the background. Scanned from my collection, photographer unknown
Looking from the former department store into the bridge over Olive St connecting to the garage, January 2011
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6th & Pine corner of the garage
7th & Pine
7th St focus group at 7th & Pine on May 1, 2012
A little further up the group is under the only ramp into the garage. The ULI TAP recommended the ramp be removed and access be gained another way
The garage has lots of issues:
It’s 54+ years old
It has low heights
Looks dated inside & out
Is awkward to use as a motorist
Is unsecure — elevators open onto the sidewalk
Using some of the building’s square footage for parking is an option, especially the basement level. The problem? The building doesn’t have a back side. All four facades are finished and face public streets.
West/7th St facade
North/Locust St facade
East/6th St facade
South/Olive St facade
Last year parking came up for the Mark Twain Building in Kansas City, another future project of Hudson Holdings:
According to Chuck Reitzel, a project manager with Ebersoldt + Associates Architecture, Hassenflu is not planning parking on just four floors. Reitzel, who is Hassenflu’s architect for the Mark Twain project, said parking is planned on six levels: the lower level, first floor, a mezzanine level, and floors two through four.
The parking would be accessed off of Baltimore Avenue through a new garage doorway cut into the northeast corner of the building, Reitzel said. He said a driveway would proceed from the entrance through what his now retail space occupied by Goodden Jewellers, with a circulation ramp allowing motorists to access higher levels.
See the facade they wanted to cut open for garage access here, next door is a parking garage.
Back to the Railway Exchange…
When the indoor mall St. Louis Centre was built North of the Railway Exchange in the 80s it included a dock with elevator/tunnel connected to the basement. This might be better suited for those moving in/out of future apartments than accessing for parking
Another option is to raze the 1962 garage and start over with a modern garage, or perhaps just a new structure to go under Olive St into the building. Either would be very expensive.
I favor building the modern streetcar project that was floated a few years ago, it would run on 2-3 sides of the Railway Exchange. T
he ground floor of the Railway Exchange should be active habitable space — restaurants/retail– not parking. No garage access/curb cut should be permitted either. Already too many garage entries to negotiate as a pedestrian downtown.
A St. Louis city alderman was arrested in St. Louis County on Monday under suspicion of domestic abuse.
Alderman Chris Carter was taken into custody by St. Louis County police after a traffic stop, authorities confirmed.
Carter’s wife called police about 11:20 a.m. on April 30 to report that Carter had injured her during an argument at a home in the 4200 block of East Gulf Shore near Florissant. (Post-Dispatch)
The poll is open until 8pm, the answers are shown in random order. Please note: any organized effort to get a large number of votes, one way or another, is easy to see. If it happens the poll will be shut down and the last unaltered results will be final.
While most were cheering the “news”, I was digging into the record of this developer. From the NextSTL post:
“While the firm has completed several historic redevelopments, one stands as particularly analogous. Hudson purchased the 1M+ sf Huntington Building in downtown Cleveland for $22M last year and have planned a $280M renovation. The 21-story building was completed in 1924.”
So the analogous example is planned…not completed. What about their other projects? Let’s take a look, in the order listed on their website:
I didn’t find anything actually completed — other than some purchases. Do they have the right experience to get these complex projects done?
From January 2015:
Steven Michael once managed hedge funds and was a member of the Chicago Board of Trade.
Today he is focused on redeveloping historic and distressed properties, a passion he and his family have followed for some time.
In Delray Beach, he started real estate development firm Hudson Holdings with friend Andrew “Avi” Greenbaum, who also has a background in finance. The company is now managing the Sundy House hotel and restaurant and has a vision to renovate the surrounding area. Hudson also recently bought the Gulfstream Hotel in Lake Worth, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, and plans to redevelop that hotel, and add hotel rooms. (Wealth managers move into real estate development)
Their bios do indicate experience closing real estate financing deals. After my research, I have many reservations. I hope they’re successful.
One year ago yesterday, a ULI Technical Assistance Panel (TAP). gave a presentation on the top floor of the Railway Exchange:
First slide, click image view ULI page with link to full presentation
Boards from a Washington University project on ideas for the building, click image for article on their project
South view
Again, I want to see the Railway Exchange redeveloped, but we must not get so excited we fail at due diligence. Having worked in real estate for years I know that not every contract closes.
In the 1960s Urban Renewal was in full swing — remaking/destroying cities on a large scale. The majority of people approved — few protested. The powers that be had dismissed Jane Jacobs’ 1961 critique: The Death & Life of Great American Cities.
Forty city blocks of our original city had been vacant for a quarter century when Time magazine wrote the following on July 17, 1964:
In all, some $2 billion worth of major construction is under way or planned in the metropolitan area. A 454-acre midtown tract of slums called Mill Creek Valley, filled with slum housing that cried out for rebuilding in 1954, is now one of the largest urban-renewal areas in the U.S. A substantial section of it will be set aside for an expressway to link downtown with the major expressways leading out of the city. The long neglected riverfront has been cleared for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Park; scheduled for completion there next year is a soaring stainless-steel arch 630 ft. high, designed by the late Eero Saarinen as a monument to St. Louis as Gateway to the West. A seven-block pedestrian mall shaded by trees and flanked by lawns is abuilding. Ground has been broken for a 1,100-car parking garage, first step in construction of a downtown sports stadium, designed by Edward Stone, that will seat 50,000, cost $89 million.
The program has its critics. The Mill Creek slums were bulldozed in 1960, but redevelopment has been so slow that the area is locally dubbed “Hiroshima Flats.” The New York Times’s Ada Louise Huxtable charged that the rebuilders had razed “the heart and history” of the city by clearing the riverfront. Defenders point out that the storied waterfront had long deteriorated into a grimy morass of dilapidated warehouses, buildings and residences. Developers have been scrupulous in preserving the architectural monuments of the area—the old courthouse and the cathedral—and have stored the best examples of cast-iron storefronts to be put on display in the new Museum of Westward Expansion. (Time)
“But these areas were bad, they had to be razed,” you might say. That was the propaganda constantly sold the public. Another such bad area that needed to be razed? The Soulard neighborhood (see 1947 reconstruction plan). Basically if they wanted to remove something a campaign was waged to build public support. Often, there were racial motivations.
The neighborhood razed for Pruitt-Igoe was Irish. Mill Creek Valley was African-American. And what became Busch Memorial Stadium (1966-2006) had been our Chinatown since the 19th century:
The first recorded Chinese immigrant was a tea merchant named Alla Lee, who is reported to have arrived in 1857 from San Francisco. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Chinese community in St. Louis had grown to about three hundred. This community was physically centered in “Hop Alley,” a seemingly mysterious place that inspired tall tales to the contemporaries and is little known to the present St. Louisans. Along Seventh, Eighth, Market, and Walnut Streets, Chinese hand laundries, merchandise stores, grocery stores, restaurants, and tea shops were lined up to serve Chinese residents and the ethnically diverse larger community of St. Louis, the fourth largest city in the United States at the time.
Downtown businesses wanted the gleaming new modern downtown and Chinese-Americans doing laundry didn’t fit that image. They must go! But how? At this same time those who pushed wholesale razing of large areas knew cultural institutions were a good excuse to raze existing areas — forcing the inhabitants to be relocated. Working with Cardinals owner Anheuser-Busch, the process began to push Chinatown out of downtown. This would also put the team closer to the brewery.
Hop Alley looking north on Eighth Street between Walnut and Market Streets. Photograph by unknown, 1910 Missouri History Museum Archives. Swekosky-MHS Collection n34629
Busch Memorial Stadium under construction in 1965. Source: Wikipedia
In February 1968 New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote the following about downtown St. Louis:
Except for the arch and the old courthouse, which form some genuinely provocative urban views, downtown St. Louis is a monument to chamber of commerce planning and design. It is a businessman’s dream of redevelopment come true.
There are all the faceless, characterless, scaleless symbols of economic regeneration — luxury apartments, hotels, a 50,000 seat stadium and multiple parking garages for 7,400 cars. Sleek, new, prosperous, stolid and dull, well served by superhighways, the buildings are a collection of familiar profit formulas, uninspired in concept, unvarying in scale, unrelated by any standards, principals or subtleties of planning or urban design. They just stand there. They come round, rectangular, singly and in pairs. Pick your standard commercial cliche.
The new St. Louis is a success economically and a failure urbanistically. It has the impersonal gloss of a promotional brochure. A prime example of the modern landscape of urban alienation, it has gained a lot of real estate and lost a historic city. (“Hop Alley”: Myth and Reality of the St. Louis Chinatown, 1860s-1930s)
Much of downtown remains faceless, characterless, and scaleless. The area where baseball had been played since the 19th century suffered from the loss of jobs & activity. One institution resisted the trend to locate in a modern downtown building, the symphony instead restored an old movie palace. Ada Louise Huxtable again:
The success of Powell Symphony Hall in St. Louis is probably going to lead a lot of people to a lot of wrong conclusions. In a kind of architectural Gresham’s law, the right thing wrongly interpreted usually has more bad than good results.
The first wrong conclusion is that Powell Hall represents the triumph of traditional over modern architecture. False. The correct conclusion here is that a good old building is better than a bad new one. Powell Hall represents the triumph simply of suitable preservation. And, one might add, of rare good sense.
Very rare in St. Louis. We can’t change the past, so why keep harping on it? Because we’ve not learned from our past mistakes! We keep repeating, at least attempt, to repeat them.
Readers were split in the non-scientific Sunday Poll:
Q; Agree or disagree: Building the new baseball stadium downtown in 1966, instead of in a neighborhood, was a bad decision
Strongly agree 5 [11.63%]
Agree 6 [13.95%]
Somewhat agree 9 [20.93%]
Neither agree or disagree 3 [6.98%]
Somewhat disagree 4 [9.3%]
Disagree 9 [20.93%]
Strongly disagree 6 [13.95%]
Unsure/No Answer 1 [2.33%]
Those who agreed totaled 46.51%, while those who disagreed totaled 44.18%.
We can’t undo the past mistakes, but the disastrous Urban Renewal mindset is still alive in 2016 St. Louis.
Now sidewalks are generous, pedestrians feel protected from passing vehicles
The last two days I’ve shown you before & after photos of the Great Streets makeover/road diet of Natural Bridge Rd — a 1.7 mile stretch from Lucas & Hunt on the East end to Hanley Rd in the West end (map):
Many have said it now looks better, or is prettier. True, but it functions & feels better — at least for pedestrians in my experience. I’ve also driven the stretch both directions, before and after, but that was on weekends. It also felt better to me as a motorist.
One complaint I received last month is that driving it now can take quite a bit longer. Only two options — either it does take longer or the perception is that it takes longer. I have no method to determine which it is.
The number of traffic signals seems about the same as before, I didn’t tally the number, though that could be done via Google Street View. The major change was reducing the number of driving lanes per direction from two to one. This freed up a significant amount of the public right-of-way (PROW) for use by pedestrian amenities.
Where such road diets have been performed, the actual number of vehicles through the area, in a given period, remains the same as before. Are there times where it might take longer? No doubt. But any speed that was achieved during the prior decades was at the expense of other users of the PROW. Before this project vehicles traveled too fast. Two wide lanes per direction made drivers think it was OK.
Posted speed limits have little bearing on vehicle speed — motorists drive at speeds that feel comfortable to them. Give them only one narrow lane per direction and they’ll slow down. However, they can’t pass like they used to. To those who like to race to the next red light, it must be frustrating being behind someone going at or below the posted speed limit.
I plan to return during an afternoon rush hour to see if I can see backups at any of the lights, it’s possible the timing needs to be adjusted.
On the other hand, I received an email from someone who says his significant other walks from home to/from the MetroLink station weekdays — the project is a huge improvement.
While there are some issues I pointed out in the first two parts, the public right-of-way (PROW) is now well-balanced between vehicles & pedestrians. Designing streets that are great for those of us who are disabled also turns out to be great for every pedestrian. Hopefully in the new couple of decades we’ll see new urban infill in the various commercial areas along this stretch.
AARP Livibility Index
The Livability Index scores neighborhoods and communities across the U.S. for the services and amenities that impact your life the most
Built St. Louis
historic architecture of St. Louis, Missouri – mourning the losses, celebrating the survivors.
Geo St. Louis
a guide to geospatial data about the City of St. Louis
