Slay Vetoes ‘CID’ for Lindell Market Place

Per Joe Whittington of the Post-Dispatch: Mayor Slay vetoed a bill passed by the board of Aldermen that would have created a “CID” (Community Improvement District) for the Lindell Market Place strip center which includes a Schnuck’s store.  The center is owned and managed by THF Realty.  THF is owned by heirs of the Walton family.

The article wasn’t clear on the reasons but Ald Terry Kennedy (D-18) asked the Mayor to veto his own bill.  Maybe he realized using increased sales taxes to fund a face lift on the center owned by a wealthy developer wasn’t good public policy?

From THF’s website:

THF Realty owns and operates a large portfolio of neighborhood and community shopping centers, as well as several office buildings. We manage 100 properties comprising more than 20 million square feet of leaseable area in 23 states.

Wealthy owners with massive real estate holdings and they need sales taxes to fund a face lift on their own property?  Please.

Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market Has Good Acess Route

Regular readers know I am not a fan of Wal-Mart. Over the last few years they’ve completely changed the grocery market in my original hometown of Oklahoma City by opening numerous “neighborhood markets” These stores are grocery and pharmacy only and are small in size relative to a new Schnuck’s or Dierberg’s store. The stores, however, are bigger than Aldi’s although just as basic.

One thing I have noticed is they actually have done a decent job connecting these stores to local sidewalks, where they exist. That is about as close to a compliment of Wal-Mart as you are going to get out of me.

Above is the accessible route from the public sidewalk to the entrance of one such neighborhood market in South Oklahoma City. The store is located on a major corner but only one of the two streets has any public sidewalk at all.

Heading out the door to the one street that does have a sidewalk we can see a clear path for the pedestrian — they are not forced to simply walk through the parking lot. Those people leaving the pharmacy drive-thru can clearly see the pedestrian crossing although part is missing.

Out at the intersection on the main corner we see the real problem — an incomplete sidewalk network. You can take the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street and then manage to cross but if you are in a wheelchair, as I am now, you are stuck in the street and in the path of cars. In some cases OKC has added ramps on these corners but the streets still lack sidewalks. This corner has a fairly new Taco Bell on it — perhaps they should have been required to include the public sidewalks in their build-out? Ot should that fall 100% on the municipality? Or are sidewalks in such a highly suburban area optional? You know my answer — we need a good public sidewalk network everywhere and each business abutting the sidewalk needs to connect to it with an ADA-compliant access route. Wal-Mart did their part in the above example but OKC is way behind the curve.
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A Quick Look at downtown Joplin, MO

This past Saturday a friend and I ventured West on I-44 over to Joplin to check out their downtown. I had driven through a decade or so ago but I couldn’t remember anything about it. Seeing it again it is no wonder I forgot it.

Above is pretty much it. The building on the left is quite handsome. Sadly they’ve likely razed much of their old building stock leaving too few buildings to give the feeling you are in a historic downtown. According to wiki, “in the sixties and seventies nearly 40 acres (160,000 m²) of the city’s downtown were razed in the name of urban renewal.” It shows.

Main Street is basically it these days. However, being a one-way Northbound street it feels more like a highway than a local street. On-street parking, however, helps offset this feeling. Changing Main and the street to the West to two-way traffic would be a huge improvement.

Main street has recently gotten a face lift with new curbs, sidewalks and such. They did the typical brick in the furnishing zone that seems to be all the rage these days. They also overlooked bike parking as an important function in an active downtown. By not having street signs or parking meters the cyclist has too few choices on where to secure a bicycle. New sidewalks alone will not revitalize a downtown, encouraging cyclists to bike to the area and hang out on sidewalk cafes will.

Of course downtown Joplin would not be complete without the horrible newer bank building. Rather than a pedestrian entrance at the corner we have a retaining wall. From this view it looks like a pedestrian would need to enter via the auto drive off the side street. Of course there was nothing going on so nobody was out walking.

The few traces that remain of the old downtown are quite nice — too bad they fell for the “renewal” madness of the past.

Boston’s City Hall and Plaza

Regular readers will recall that I was in Providence RI and Boston MA in January (see Commonwealth Mall and North End). Looking back over the photos I took, I realized I hadn’t yet written about Boston’s City Hall (wiki).

If the windows were narrower you might think it was a prison. The building is considered a prime example of the brutalist style. Brutal is correct.

Even more brutal is the wasteland known as Government Center (wiki), the plaza that connects city hall to adjacent state and federal office buildings. The master plan for this urban renewal disaster was done by the famed Chinese-born architect I.M. Pei.

Pei also gets credit for a destructive downtown master plan for my hometown, Oklahoma City. There an underground tunnel system originally known as The Concourse was created to connect downtown buildings.. Shops and restaurants that could at one time survive off of people on the street were also located in this underground maze. It is not all underground, however, as some includes skywalks. It does an excellent job of keeping people off the sidewalks. — I’m not sure of his involvement in the tunnel system but it was done around the same time frame in the 1970’s. Namely he advocated razing many small blocks and creating large superblocks (four small blocks would become one big unfriendly block). OK, back to Boston and the horrible public space he helped create there.

Skating is prohibited but that is really the best use of the open space.

Yes it was a cold day in January when I was in Boston but pedestrians were out and about all over the city — just not here in this horrible space.

In the 20th Century most architects and urban planners abandoned all that we knew about cities and they began to foist their experimental notions upon their clients at great financial cost to tax payers. People lost their homes so these men could try out their “bold visions.” Without waiting to see results city after city jumped on the wipe it all out urban renewal bandwagon. The only thing proven by this process was that you could erase traces of the past — both the people and the buildings that contained their lives. This section of Boston had theaters with burlesque shows — the area was certainly tired but in no way did it need to be completely erased. The erase it bare and start over mentality was simply that this new breed of architect & planner failed to see any value in the existing forms. Plus the existing was in the way of their large scale experiments. Our cities became their labs. They and the general public confused having new sanitized spaces with real city life. The consequences 40-60 years later were not realized at the time.

Boston’s Mayor has proposed selling city hall and the plaza to developers. The architecture and preservation community have both fought to designate them as landmarks. Oh they are a landmark — the poster child for bad urban design type of landmark. Bostonians hate their city hall — you cannot find a postcard of it anywhere.  We need to save those elements that contribute to a high quality urban life and disregard these failed urban renewal experiments.

UrbanReviewSTL named an Influential Missouri political blog

UrbanReviewSTL has been named by blognetnews.com the 20th most influential political blog in Missouri (see list). Not to shabby considering that was never a goal of mine. I simply want to make St. Louis a better place. But with big money, tax incentives and state involvement in projects like the razing of the historic Century building for a parking garage you can’t help but touch on the politics.
Pubdef.net, published by my friend Antonio French, moved up a notch from 5th to 4th – congrats. The Arch City Chronicle, now online only, slipped four slots from 12th to 16th as it falls from being relevant.

Once I am back in St. Louis I plan to begin looking into state house & senate races as well as state-wide races.  Late last year I met one-on-one with one candidate for state-wide office — I was trying to get some issues on the table for discussion and action.  Locally we will see party committeemen & committeewomen elected in each of the city’s 28 wards on August 5th.  To what extent I can, I hope to influence the issues being discussed with support going to those candidates that publicly hold views close to my own (pro mass transit, reduced dependence on cars, local production of food & goods, etc).  We are less than a year from odd-ward elections, the mayors race and a couple of other city-wide offices.  The next year will be interesting.