Sullivan Place Still Horribly Suburban/Disconnected

With details of Paul McKee’s NorthSide emerging there is concern he will bring suburban design to the city.  But developers have been doing that for years — often encouraged by elected officials that don’t get urbanity.  Three years ago I reported on one such suburban project — Sullivan Place.  I started the piece:

Pyramid, the company proposing a highly suburban McDonald’s for South Grand, has dumped an atrocious housing project on the city’s north side. Forget the high-profile loft projects downtown, Pyramid is making a name for themselves with suburban rubbish throughout our once urban neighborhoods.

Full post from March 18, 2006: Pyramid’s Sullivan Place Senior Housing An Anti-Urban Monstrosity.

Nothing much has changed except the fact that Pyramid collapsed in April 2008.   Oh yeah, the project can now be seen in satellite views via Google Maps:

Gee, can you figure out which structure is Sullivan Place?

Makes me cringe.   It borders 3 streets but doesn’t relate to any of them.  I’d love to see McKee’s project take this heep and restore the street grid.  The project gets its name from the street that was closed — Sullivan.  We are likely stuck with this place until it falls apart.  See my 20+ photos of Sullivan Place from March 2006 here.

Update 6/10/09 @ 9:10am — Headline alaborated.

Walkability Must Become a Priority for the St. Louis Region

I love multi-story buildings built up to the sidewalk.  If these buildings have clear windows and doors at the sidewalk level the are inherently more walkable  than others.  I recognize, however. this is not for everyone.  But that doesn’t mean walkability needs to be tossed aside.  Most drivers like the option of walking.  Development can be both non-urban and walkable.

This is the story of one part of suburban St. Louis County that was close to being minimally walkable, not ideal but minimally.  But it falls short of even being minimally walkable.

The area is around the Sam’s store at I-44 and Big Bend  (map link).  The Sam’s is obviously the big box in the bottom right corner in the above map image.   Out at Big Bend is a Hardee’s.  The other out parcel to the left of the drive is now occupied.  This is all in the City of Crestwood.  The left side of the image is in the City of Kirkwood.

As you can see a sidewalk runs along the edge of Big Bend Road.  Along one side of the drive into Sam’s the sidewalk extends into the development.  So far so good.  Except it doesn’t really work.  For sidewalks to be useful to the pedestrian they need to go door to door.

Say you live in the apartment complex on the left side of the above image and you want to get lunch at Hardee’s, then a few things at Sam’s? Would you walk or drive to each location?  Sadly this environment, because the sidewalks are mere decoration, is designed for driving only.

But let’s put  the destination closer.  You live in one of these apartments and work in the building on the other side of the fence.  It would be silly to drive.

Leaving your apartment complex your only option is the auto driveway — no sidewalk from your front door to the public sidewalk.

Once you’ve arrived at the top of the hill you can them step out of the auto drive and onto a public sidewalk.

Turning into the development you can see the entrance to your workplace but the grade difference and the fence block yuor direct route so you continue downhill.

Here you get to pretend, once again, that you are a car because you weren’t provided with a sidewalk to get you to the door. Now you decide to walk over to Sam’s on your lunch break.

Nice, you are just dumped in the parking lot.   By now you are thinking you should have driven.

You turn around and look back at your workplace.  You are in the middle of a Sam’s parking lot.  You, the pedestrian, have been treated like a car.  With the exception of a small part of the journey you don’t have your own space.  But of course you feel vulnerable compared to cars.   Tomorrow you decide to drive to work rather than walk.  Next time someone tells you that “nobody walks” in the suburbs this is part of the reason — it is not designed to accommodate walkers.  Sure, an employee that lives miles away is not going to walk.  But even the close proximities are hostile to the pedestrian.  The apartment developer in Kirkwood is partly to blame.  So is the commercial developer in Crestwood.    It is sad that we are supposed to be among the most advanced nations yet we can’t figure out how to create an environment where a person could go to work next door without driving.

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Sheraton Convention Hotel Was Too Close to Convention Center

When St. Louis opened the Cervantes Convention Center in 1977 it had an adjacent convention hotel, a Sheraton, at 7th & Cole.  Almost immediately talk of expanding the convention center was underway.  The city had two options — go east of 7th Street or South of Delmar (renamed Convention Plaza).  The convention center is now called America’s Center.

One problem with expanding the convention center to the East was the nearly new, 600+ room, Sheraton hotel that also opened in 1977.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from Thursday, March 10, 1988:

If St. Louis follows through on its offer to buy and demolish the Sheraton St. Louis Hotel just east of the Cervantes Convention Center, the convention center could be left with a marketing nightmare, hotel industry insiders say.  Razing the 614-room Sheraton to expand the convention center would leave the convention center, at least  temporarily, without a hotel on the site that is large enough to handle visitors.

The city offered Monday to buy the Sheraton and other land east and south of the convention center to make way for a 120,000-square-foot expansion. Officials declined to disclose the amount of the offers. Hotel and real estate sources estimate that the Sheraton could be worth anywhere from $25 million to $40 million, but city officials said those estimates were high.

By May 1988 the city looked toward the South rather than the East:

There are several good reasons for the city to have changed directions on the Convention Center expansion and go southward to Washington Avenue instead of eastward across Seventh Street. A Convention Center fronting on Washington would remove an eyesore and contribute significantly to the revitalization of the street. It  will thrust the center into downtown, whereas the eastward expansion would have left it on the periphery.  Finally, it solves the problem of the Sheraton Hotel, east of the center. Under one scheme, the center was to be  built around the hotel. Under another, the hotel was to be demolished. Neither approach was satisfactory.

The Convention Center is on Convention Plaza, better known as Delmar Boulevard, and is bounded by Seventh and Ninth streets. Under the latest expansion plan, Dillard’s parking garage and the Lennox Apartments would be spared but the other structures between Seventh and Ninth would go. The southward expansion would add 120,000 square feet, as would have the original plan. The cost, $72 million, will be about the same. The tourism industry is important to the economy of the region and the state. The expansion of the Convention Center will assure that the area will be able to attract large meetings that otherwise would go elsewhere  [Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch – Saturday, May 21, 1988]

The Sheraton hotel, just over a decade old, was spared demolition – for now at least.

Earlier in 1988 the football Cardinals announced plans to leave St. Louis for Arizona because St. Louis wouldn’t build them a stadium.  The Cardinals had played football in Busch Stadium since it was built in 1966.  I’m not sure where they played 1960-66.  The team wanted a football stadium, not a shared baseball stadium.   The new stadium debate had already gone on for a couple of years before the Cardinals left.  As soon as they announced they were packing their bags for Arizona the efforts to built a stadium and attract a new team gained speed.  Soon the idea of expanding the convention center to the South with the stadium going East emerged.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Friday, December 14, 1990:

The Sheraton St. Louis hotel downtown is scheduled to close the first week of January [1991], idling about 300 workers and leaving the city without a major convention headquarters.  Officials of the two unions that represent the employees were formally notified Thursday morning.  The hotel lies in the path of the eastern expansion of the Cervantes Convention Center, a $250 million project that includes a domed stadium. The hotel will be torn down, but no date has been set for the demolition. Management of the Sheraton had expected to operate the hotel until construction of the stadium began. Until the last few days, the hotel was accepting reservations through 1991.

Late in 1987, city officials first publicly discussed an eastern expansion of the convention center. From that moment on, hotel industry sources say, the Sheraton has seen an erosion of bookings. It has always depended on group business, which is usually arranged two to four years in advance.

The best way to ruin a business is to threaten to take it away.  Talk of razing a building a decade later.  Smart. Taking out your convention hotel to expand your convention center, even smarter.

P-D on Tuesday, July 14, 1992:

As politicians smiled and sweated in Monday morning’s 89-degree heat, ground was broken for the $260 million stadium expansion of Cervantes Convention Center.  The building, scheduled for completion by October 1995, will seat 70,000 for professional football. With 177,000  square feet of exhibit space on one level, it will accommodate events as large as national political conventions.  During the hour-long ceremonial groundbreaking at Seventh Street and Convention Plaza, demolition crews began swinging a giant ”headache ball” at the old Sheraton Hotel, one block north. Each swipe at the 13-year-old hotel, which sits near the 50-yard-line of the stadium expansion, brought cheers.  But the sturdily built hotel was slow to succumb to the headache ball.

It took a while to raze the nearly new structure.  I recently found a couple of photos I had taken:

The expansion & dome were completed. St. Louis was not awarded an expansion team.  Instead the Rams relocated from Los Angeles, California.  It was not until 2003, over a dozen years later, that the Renaissance Grand & Suites opened to replace the loss of the Sheraton. Conventions expected by the expansion didn’t come due to the lack of a convention hotel.  Brilliant!

Of course the Renaissance Grand convention hotel has had it’s own issues, from earlier this year:

Each decade the numbers get bigger and bigger.  We had a convention hotel, then we didn’t and then we did again.  The most jobs created through all this were for demolition companies and consultants.

Poll, Do You Care if the St. Louis Rams Leave St. Louis?

Chip Rosenbloom &  Lucia Rodrigue will be selling their 60% stake in the St. Louis Rams NFL team.  They inherited the controlling interest when their mom, Georgia Frontiere, passed away in January 2008.  The remaining 40% share is owned by Stan Kroenke, a Columbia Missouri native.

If a local/Missouri buyer is found the Rams are probably staying put for a while.  But if an out of town buyer takes a majority share it is likely they will seek to move the team when their lease in St. Louis expires.

My poll this week asks simply if you care.  You have only 3 choices:

• I don’t want them to leave.
• I do want them to leave.
• I don’t care if they stay or go.

Many factors may play into your decision.  You may enjoy the games or you may not like football but think our civic pride depends on having an NFL team.  Or you may think a football team is too costly to the community.  Or you may just not care.  The poll is located in the upper right of the main page.

I personally don’t care if they stay or go.  Although if they leave I’ll probably find the views of loss as highly irritating.  If the Rams stay, no doubt I’ll find the probably dome replacement equally irritating.  Either way I think in 5 years we will face questions as a community: can we live without an NFL team or will we be willing to fund a new stadium?  There is no place downtown for a new stadium so location would be debated.

Stay or leave I see the existing Edward Jones Dome as empty and hopefully razed.  The four city blocks occupied by the current dome are needed to reconnect downtown to the near-North neighborhood.

I see the area shaded above as being rebuilt and filled in with active streets.  If we can get rid of I-70. after the new Mississippi River bridge opens, we have a chance to reconnect an even bigger portion of our city.  See Reconnecting St Louis to the Mississippi; Don’t Cover the Highway, 86 It. Maybe in five years we can get rid of the convention center as well — that would be six more blocks to be reclaimed and rebuilt. 

St. Louis Neighborhood Mixed-Use Circa 1909

The term “mixed-use” is a relatively new term.  Before Euclidian zoning was universally adopted to keep uses (say residential & commercial) apart, St. Louis had buildings that freely mixed it up.  And they did so beautifully:

Many of you have probably seen the Oscar Schneider Studio on the 3300 block of California.  This 5,000+ square foot four-unit building sits on a lot that is just inches over 40 feet wide.

The Cherokee Street commercial district runs side to side in the above aerial image.   The building is marked “A.” As you can see it is closer to Utah on the North than to Cherokee.  Additional “mixed-use” storefront are on the corner at California & Utah.

The storefront facade is old, but not original.  The Vitrolite glass was not yet available, to my knowledge,  in 1909 when this building was constructed.  This was likely a 1930s or 1940s remodeling.

Photography was so different back then.  They used this stuff called film.  Photography was expensive so you made the most of it.  I found a great collection of images online taken by Oscar Scheider at this studio, they were restored from glass negatives.  View the collection here.

This property is within the Gravois-Jefferson Streetcar Suburb National Register Historic District.

Gravois–Jefferson Streetcar Suburb Historic District
(added 2005 – St. Louis County – #05000115)
Grovois and S. Jefferson, S. Jefferson and S. Broadway, Meramac, S. Gran and Gravois, St. Louis (Independent City)
(7180 acres, 4635 buildings)  [Source]

Yes this area was considered a streetcar suburb.  Mixed uses in the suburbs.   The single-family house to the South was built 5 years earlier.

Our ideas about mixing residential & commercial soon changed.  What used to be normal developmemt now requires numerous hearings & variances to get approved.  I can’t imagine the owners of a single-family home today accepting a four-unit building next door that contains three residential units and one commercial unit.

They had it right 100 years ago — build it compact, mix it up and have fixed-rail transit very nearby.