Poll results on where readers live

The poll last week was simple and non-controversial but it got the highest vote count out of any poll I’ve done.  Four hundred twenty one of you voted. During the week the site had 2,910 unique visitors so that is nearly a 15% participation rate.  Here is the question and final results:

Q: Where do you currently live?

1. City of St. Louis 226 [54%]
2. St. Louis County (inside I-270) 78 [19%]
3. St. Louis County (outside I-270) 33 [8%]
4. Elsewhere in the United States 32 [8%]
5. Metro East (IL) 16 [4%]
6. St. Charles County, MO 8 [2%]
7. Chicago metro 6 [1%]
8. Kansas City metro 5 [1%]
9. Other answer… 5 [1%]
10. New York City metro 3 [1%]
11. Other Missouri 3 [1%]
12. UK 2 [0%]
13. Jefferson County, MO 2 [0%]
14. Country other than USA, CAN or UK 2 [0%]
15. Canada 0 [0%]

From the above I count 363 (86%) as being part of the St. Louis metro area.  I personally consider the “core” of the region to be the City of St. Louis and the part of St. Louis County inside I-270.  Actually the core is tighter than that but I-270 was a good reference line.  So 304 (72%) are part of the core as I just defined it. These numbers confirmed what I knew from my site statistics.

Finally impressed by new residential construction in the city

“You’ll love these townhouses,” real estate agent & friend Leigh Maibes recently said to me.  “Yeah, right,” I thought. She mentioned the location and at first I got it confused with another new construction development that I don’t like.  After I Googled the address I knew the location but I didn’t realize anything had been built there.   I was skeptical about liking the design, we’ve had lots of new residential construction in neighborhoods throughout the city over the last dozen years or so and the bulk has been boring and highly suburban in it’s relationship with the sidewalk and street.  I agreed to take a look the next time I was in the Hill/Southwest Garden area but my expectations were low.

Here are some suburban new construction in the blocks near the townhouses that have a poor relationship to the sidewalk, the norm if you will:

The original plans called for three units on the site above but it ended up being only two.

The garage door is the most prominent feature on this house.  The front door is so far from the sidewalk and the porch is just a decoration.

Any car parked on the above driveway would block the public sidewalk.

So wrong!  Bright white and you have to walk up the driveway to access the steps to the front porch.

Again, the walk to the front door connects not to the sidewalk but to the driveways. Nobody should be subjected to such houses and certainly not within the urban core of the region.

Where to begin? It just hurts to look at the above.  Hey, they could be worse:

The above site doesn’t have an alley but better options exist.  The best for this site would have been a shared garage with a single garage door.  New construction here should have been built closer to the street, roughly in line with the existing building to the right. Again, the bright white paint is what jumps off the picture.

So you can see why I was not optimistic about what I was about to see:

The development, Magnolia Heights, is at the SE corner of Macklind & Reber Place.  When finished four units will face Reber Place and six will face Macklind.  Above you see the first four units facing Macklind. What is great is how they filled in around the 1896 building on the corner.

I like the different brick colors with the old buff building in the red on the new construction.  Had the corner building been red I would not have liked the selected color but it works very well here. The black trim and windows on the new construction is classy and works well with the overall color scheme of the facade.

From the sidewalk we immediately see the differences with the other new construction shown earlier. The units are only slightly set back from the line established by the corner building. Steps exist but they are few in number. Hand railings on both sides of the steps would enable me to easily navigate them. This facade enriches the sidewalk experience rather than taking away from it as the other examples do.  Each townhouse has their own two-car garage accessed from a private rear drive off the public alley.

I hope to see more infill like this in the future!

– Steve Patterson

The Soulard voting riot of 1852

Voters in the region will go to the polls tomorrow.  In St. Louis County voters will be asked to approve Proposition A to help fund local public transit.

It was on this day in 1852 that voting led to a riot. From the book “St. Louis Day by Day” by Frances Hurd Stadler:

“This election day was filled with bloody rioting between recently enfranchised Germans and native-born Americans with the battlefield centered in the Soulard Market area. Early in the morning First Ward poll workers discouraged Whig voters from casting their ballots.  The discouragement increased until some would-be voters barely escaped with their lives. When the rumor spread that Germans had taken over the First Ward polls, a large group of Americans moved in.”

From the history of Soulard Market:

In St. Louis, the burgeoning German immigrant population sided fervently with the abolitionist North, while most of the Americans and French were Southern sympathizers. During mayoral election day in April 1852, some German men began preventing, by the threat of bodily harm, the presumed opposition from voting at the Soulard Market polling place.

Word quickly spread of this action, which enraged the American population. A mob of 5,000 Americans moved through the streets that afternoon toward the market. They were greeted by firsts, rocks, brickbats, and even gunshots, but 200 or so of the Americans broke through and seized the Soulard Market poll with shouts of “Free suffrage!”. The violence lasted into the night; persons were killed and a nearby tavern was set ablaze.

Voting tomorrow should be less dramatic!  If you are a registered voter in St. Louis County please support Prop A.

– Steve Patterson

Poll: what to do with Richard Serra’s ‘Twain’?

Citygarden, located in two blocks of the Gateway Mall, is an unquestionable hit with anyone who has seen the 2-block (8th, Market, 10th, Chestnut) sculpture & botanical garden.

But the block to across 10th Street to the West is a very different story!  ‘Twain’ by Richard Serra was installed in 1982, a decade earlier than the two blocks (now containing Citygarden) were razed.

Art is something you should love or hate and ‘Twain’ manages to make sure viewers have one of those reactions, no in the middle.

I have my feelings which I’ll share on Wednesday April 14, 2010 when I show the final results of this week’s poll: “Which best describes your thoughts on the Gateway Mall block w/Richard Serra’s ‘Twain’ sculpture?” I phrased the question the way I did to get at feelings on the block as a whole as well as the art itself.  The answers provided are:

• Love Twain, don’t change that block at all.
• Get rid of Twain ASAP.
• Like Twain and the minimal surroundings, just needs new sidewalks, etc
• Like Twain but the block is too bare, needs more art & activities.
• I don’t hate Twain but I’m not crazy about it either.
• Unsure/no opinion.

And you can make your own answer if you like. The poll software will randomize the answers so please read them before voting.  Share your thoughts below on why we should keep or remove Twain.

– Steve Patterson

A bike I can ride?

When I moved downtown in November 2007 I brought two bicycles with me: an urban hybrid and my beloved orange Kronan:

I rode this bike once that Winter before my stroke in February 2008, since then it has served as art in my loft.

In May of 2009 I rode a friend’s tricycle:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7NDCIQVWPs

The ride was very encouraging. I think I can balance a bike once again, but getting on  the trike required someone to help and involved tipping me over onto grass to get off the trike.  My orange bike is a one size fits all and the bar was always a challenge for me.  Sadly, I’ll never again ride that bike.  So I plan to sell it and my hybrid so I can buy this bike:

At first glance you might think this is a woman’s bike, but as more and more active adults seek ways to stay active bikes like this one from Biria’s EZ Boarding Series may help fill a void. Old ideas about what bikes men & women ride are going away.  I’d rather deal with snickers from a few rather than not be able to cycle. The nearest dealer is in Chicago so on my next visit I will take my helmet and schedule a test ride. Hopefully by this time next year you will see me tooling about downtown on this bike.

– Steve Patterson