Architects & Engineers should be required to have their name on their work

Earlier in the week I walked past the Eden Lofts at Chouteau & 18th. The name of the firm that designed the building was proudly carved into stone near the entry.  It is a beautiful building, I’m sure they were proud.

This practice should be mandatory.  You never see the firm name on a Wal-Mart or a Quik-Trip and given their lack of architectural character it is no wonder.  Highway interchanges should include the name of the responsible firm.  City intersections should tell you who is responsible for how they function.

My belief is that is more people had to put their name on their work we’d see much better work.  Before the anti-government folks get all upset I want to make it clear I don’t want laws passed requiring this.  It would just be nice if it was still a common practice.

– Steve Patterson

Harland Bartholomew negatively impacted many cities

Twenty Ten years ago today famed urban planner Harland Bartholomew died.  From his NY Times Obituary, Harland Bartholomew, 100, Dean of City Planners:

Harland Bartholomew, the dean of comprehensive city planning in the United States, died Saturday at his home in Clayton, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. He was 100 years old.

Mr. Bartholomew, a consulting engineer, was appointed to Federal planning committees by three Presidents, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In 1941 President Roosevelt appointed Mr. Bartholomew to a committee to recommend a limited system of national highways. He also helped plan the Metro subway system in Washington, and he represented the Rockefeller interests in the restoration of historic Williamsburg, Va.

President Eisenhower appointed Mr. Bartholomew chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission a position he held for seven years, A City Planner in Newark Mr. Bartholomew became the nation’s first full-time city planner in 1914, when he went to work for the city of Newark. Two years later he went to St. Louis as a city engineer, and he later opened a consulting firm, Harland Bartholomew & Associates, which now has its headquarters in Memphis. He retired in 1965. His firm prepared comprehensive plans for more than 500 cities and counties, including Bal Horbour, Fla., St. Croix, V.I., and Grand Bahama Island in the Bahamas. Mr. Bartholomew also prepared plans for the reconstruction of the resort community of Bar Harbor, Me., after two-thirds of it was destroyed by a forest fire in 1947.

His firm also assisted in the preparation of many zoning ordinances. including a statewide ordinance for Hawaii.

He was an early advocate of slum clearance and city planning, and served on the national Slum Clearance Advisory Committee. His ideas helped shape the Housing Act of 1937 and the Housing Act of 1949.

There is no doubting Bartholomew’s influence on both cities and the profession of urban planning. His considerable influence is why he had such a negative impact on cities. We are still dealing with problems created by his solutions to early 20th century problems.

In 1919 he founded Harland Bartholomew & Associates here in St. Louis. For decades the firm operated from offices in the Louderman Building at 11th & Locust (map). From 1916-1950 he was St. Louis’ planner.

Early writings showed he was concerned about suburban expansion — in the 1920s. He advocated widening streets to accommodate the automobile. In the above image the right-of-way of Franklin Ave from 3rd to 9th is getting widened from 50 feet to 80 feet – a 60% increase! Widened streets and numerous parking lots/garages made the decision to buy a car and move to a house beyond the streetcar line was a no brainier for many.

Soon the widened streets weren’t enough so highways were the next step. Each time steps were taken to make motoring life easier the further people moved from the core. Eventually families needed to have two cars. As a country we would have embraced the automobile anyway but he made it easier and faster. Highways cutting through cities also did much damage.

Bartholomew was a major pusher of Euclidean zoning — the rigid segregation of land uses. Overcoming this segregated view of cities today is a challenge. I’ve spent time in the basement of the Washington University archives library reading through comprehensive plans HBA prepared for hundreds of U.S. cities. Each one a repeat of the prior: widen streets, build a highway loop around downtown, build parking, require high parking standards for new construction, make the zoning even stricter.

Harland Bartholomew left his position with the City of St. Louis in 1950 and after 42 years, in 1961, he retired from the firm that bore his name. I can’t help but think our cities would be better off in the 21st century if this man born in the 19th century had become an accountant. I take some pleasure knowing the building where his office was located currently includes a mix of retail, office and residential uses.

– Steve Patterson

Sit anywhere on the bus

Fifty-four years ago today a 42 year old (my current age) woman refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama.   Of course the woman was Rosa Parks:

Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, December 1, 1955, triggered a wave of protest December 5, 1955 that reverberated throughout the United States. Her quiet courageous act changed America, its view of black people and redirected the course of history.  (source: rosaparks.org)

I am so grateful to her for refusing to give up her seat simply based on her race. But it wasn’t so simple:

Montgomery’s segregation laws were complex: blacks were required to pay their fare to the driver, then get off and reboard through the back door. Sometimes the bus would drive off before the paid-up customers made it to the back entrance. If the white section was full and another white customer entered, blacks were required to give up their seats and move farther to the back; a black person was not even allowed to sit across the aisle from whites. These humiliations were compounded by the fact that two-thirds of the bus riders in Montgomery were black.

Parks was not the first to be detained for this offense. Eight months earlier, Claudette Colvin, 15, refused to give up her seat and was arrested. Black activists met with this girl to determine if she would make a good test case — as secretary of the local N.A.A.C.P., Parks attended the meeting — but it was decided that a more “upstanding” candidate was necessary to withstand the scrutiny of the courts and the press. And then in October, a young woman named Mary Louise Smith was arrested; N.A.A.C.P. leaders rejected her too as their vehicle, looking for someone more able to withstand media scrutiny. Smith paid the fine and was released. (Source: TIME)

We have come a long way but we still have so far to travel. We all owe Parks (and so many others) for chipping away at the walls of hate that were commonplace at that time.

– Steve Patterson

Readers believe Post-Dispatch online editor Kurt Greenbaum should be fired

Kurt Greenbaum didn’t like the repeated anonymous comment from a reader on the website of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  He saw where the comment came from (a school) so he contacted them – a violation of a portion of their privacy policy:

We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information. In some cases, however, we may provide information to legal officials as described in “Compliance with Legal Process” below.

Compliance with Legal Process
We may disclose personal information if we or one of our affiliated companies is required by law to disclose personal information, or if we believe in good faith that such action is necessary to comply with a law or some legal process, to protect or defend our rights and property, to protect against misuse or unauthorized use of our web sites or to protect the personal safety or property of our users or the public.

He claims the person that submitted the comment resigned his job when confronted by his employer.  The alternative of putting the school’s IP address on a blacklist was ruled out by Greenbaum because he says it would prevent others at the same location from commenting on the website.  The truth is it means any comment submitted would have just been held until approved by him or someone else.

He either doesn’t know what he is talking about or lied to get the public to side with him on the issue.  Either way it was enough for me to vote in last week’s poll that he should be fired.

Q: Recently Kurt Greenbaum took action that allegedly caused a person to resign their job. Greenbaum should:

• be fired 78 (54%)
• resign 37 (26%)
• keep doing his job 21 (14%)
• unsure 9 (6%)

Total votes was 145 out of 2,463 visitors during the week.

Putting information out for public consumption and moderating comments is not an easy job.  I’ve been doing it here for over five years now.  It takes a lot to earn the trust of readers and Greenbaum made that more difficult for online readers of the Post-Dispatch’s website, stltoday.com.   Traditional print media needs to do all it can to cultivate online readership as fewer and fewer get their news in printed form.

– Steve Patterson

Crosswalk located within parallel travel lane

I started this month talking about how Lisi Bansen was struck by a car as she traveled on Delmar using her manual wheelchair (post).  There she had no sidewalk available. The city finally came through with sidewalks connecting accessible apartments and a store two blocks away – four years after she died.

At the intersection of Truman Parkway & Chouteau (map) the situation is both different and the same.

• Different: sidewalks, curb cuts, crosswalks and signals are all in place.
• Same: a person is likely to get hit by a car when using these facilities as designed and built.

Most of us understand that as pedestrians you cross a street parallel with vehicular traffic.  But the problem is, at this intersection, is the crosswalk in placed within the parallel travel lane. Who as the right-of-way? The motorist driving in the lane or the pedestrian within the crosswalk? Both can’t have the right to the same space.  I know who would lose in a conflict!

After seeing the situation from my car and grabbing images from Google’s Street View I knew I had to see if the situation was different than it appeared.  It is different than it first appears. Not any better, just different.

Driving Southbound on Truman Parkway I pulled over out of the way just before Chouteau to observe the signals.  Traffic on Truman Parkway got the green but the pedestrian signal never got the okay to cross signal.  Then I spotted a button for pedestrians to activate the crosswalk signal.  So a person activates the signal when needed.  Problem solved, right? Not quite!

I parked a block away and walked to the SW corner of the intersection to see how the signals functioned.  Approaching the corner I see the button on the signal post.

This is an old type button that a blind person wouldn’t know if it was working.  New buttons give you an audible feedback to to let you know they have been pressed.  Using the button you are facing away from the intersection.  But guess what?  The button doesn’t do anything!

In the above image is another button at the same corner.  The first is in the shadow line of this poll.  If you look you can see the don’t walk on the pedestrian signal across Chouteau.  This button does actually work, sorta.

Above I’m standing at the ramp — the place where you’d stand if you wanted to cross. The walk signal is activated in the above.  Don’t see it? Look behind the light poll and it is on for a few seconds.  Yes, the signal to walk is blocked by a pole.  The don’t walk begins to flash almost immediately.

I’d say 98% of the intersections in the city do not require a pedestrian to press a button to get the okay to walk signal.  The other crossings at the intersection to not require the pedestrian to activate the signal.  Why is this so different from others?

It goes back to that curb ramp.  After the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 the City of St. Louis was faced with thousands of intersections that needed curb ramps.  When designing from scratch each intersection would ideally get 8 ramps – two per corner to handle each direction of travel.  To save money and get more intersections in compliance the city opted for only four curb ramps per intersection.   This This meant that crossing either street you’d use the same ramp.  In your typical residential intersection this was a reasonable compromise.  Often it was the only physical way because of sewer drains or other infrastructure in the way.

The problem is that since those early days even when new intersections are created (such as the above), when curbs are replaced, the engineers seem to incorrectly think the compromise of a single curb cut per corner is adequate.  Because they only used a single curb ramp on the SW corner of this intersection they had to do the pedestrian activated signal. But the button is to far away from the point where you’d cross and as mentioned when you are at the crossing point you can’t see the signal!

On this corner there is nothing to prevent a curb ramp in a better location.  Rather than have the pedestrian activated signal that you can’t see it would have been cheaper and better to have a second ramp to pull the crosswalk out of the Southbound travel lane.

Engineers do a great job of planning for motorists but they do a lousy job for pedestrians.  Projects involving pedestrian routes should be reviewed while on paper.

– Steve Patterson