St. Louis Cardinals Unveil [Model] Ballpark Village

Today the St. Louis Cardinals, The Cordish Company (developer) and the City of St. Louis announced an “agreement in principal” on the much debated Ballpark Village project. The Ballpark Village site is to be located where the old Busch Stadium was located from 1966-2005, currently the mud hole you see at right. To be fair, the new stadium just opened this year with the north facade facing us in this view just getting finished very recently. Clearly, considerable attention and work has gone into the future of the now vacant site. OK, we’ve established they have not been sitting around. What have they been up to?

First, lets get oriented. The view at right is taken from the posh branch office of The Cordish Company located on the 17th floor of the Bank of America tower at the NW corner of 8th & Walnut. The street in the left of the image is Walnut and 8th street is in the right. Clark Street now runs along the north side of the new stadium (Note: I am not sure if this is a “public” street or privately controlled street). At the far side of the image is Broadway in front of the horrible parking garage structure. In the bottom of the image is the roof of the Bowling Hall of Fame. Curving in front of the hall of fame is 7th street with one-way traffic heading north. It should be noted, all the streets mentioned are one-way with the sole exception of Clark.

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Cardinals to hold Press Conference on Ballpark Village

The press released handed to Antonio French, sitting at my right at the Board of Aldermen meeting, says:

The City of St. Louis, The St. Louis Cardinals, and the Cordish Company cordially invite you to a special announcement this afternoon (Friday, October 27) at 1:00pm at The Cordish Company’s Ballpark Village office located in the Bank of America at 800 Market Street, 17th Floor, Suite 1750.

Any guesses on how much the Cardinals are going to ask from the tax payers?

How Does St. Louis Stack Up To Detroit

I’ve only been to Detroit once, this past July. Actually, it would be more accurate to say I’ve been through Detroit. I was returning to St. Louis from Toronto via Greyhound and had a brief pitstop in the U.S. Customs check point as well as the bus terminal. Neither, as you might expect, were impressive.

As the bus returned to the surface after going through the tunnel under the canal connecting two great lakes: St. Clair & Erie, I managed to snap the shot you see at right. The tall towers are Renaissance Place, home to General Motors and one of Detroit’s costly “urban renewal” attempts. The towers looked much better when viewed from across the canal from Windsor, Ontario.

Detroit has many things in common with St. Louis, besides being in the 2006 World Series. For starters, we both have a Fox Theatre. In fact, our Fox and their Fox are twins. The attractive similarities end there. Tragic similarities include massive highway projects that divided both cities, large scale urban renewal projects designed from an anti-city perspective and massive population losses. St. Louis has Delmar as a racial dividing line while Detroit has 8-Mile as the separator between city and county.

Detroit, at its peak in the 1950s, had around 1,850,000 in population for a density of 13,309 people per square mile. St. Louis, also peaking in the 1950s, had roughly 850,000 in our smaller 62 square miles for a population density of 13,709. Today, however, detroit is more densely populated than St. Louis. Per MayorSlay.com, Detroit has “approximately 950,000 residents” and is “approximately 139 square miles in area.” To refresh your memory, St. Louis has roughly 350,000 residents within 62 square miles. That works out to a density of 6,834 people per square mile in Detroit and only 5,645 people per square in St. Louis. To look at this another way, to equal Detroit’s recent population density we’d need a total of 423,708 residents — an increase of 73,708 people! That represents more than a 20% increase over our current population numbers, and that is just to get to their low number with respect to density. I want to see St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay bet Detroit’s mayor not on the outcome of the World Series but that we’ll match their population density in say 10 years.

I’ve posted a few more pictures, including a couple of Detroit as seen from Windsor, Ontario, on my Flickr account in group on Detroit. Not that Wiki is perfect but here are links to St. Louis and Detroit.

Well, time to stop writing and start rooting. It is top of the 7th in Game 4 of the World Series and we are down a run to Detroit.

French & Patterson on Public Radio Program: ‘Open Source with Christopher Lydon’

Yesterday the national radio program, Open Source with Christopher Lydon, focused on the Missouri Senate race. My friend and fellow blogger Antonio French of PubDef was among the guests during the hour-long program.

Open Source interviewed me in advance for a short edited bit on St. Louis. My piece, which closed out the show, is just over two minutes and starts at the 49 minute mark. Click here for the program’s website with a link to the MP3 file for your listening pleasure. Open Source airs Monday-Thursday on over 30 public radio stations across the country (including WGBH in Boston) and on XM Satellite.

How Many Pigs Can Your Scooter Carry?

You know, I’ve never tried carrying any pigs, eggs or construction materials on my scooter. But, it seems many are able to transport quite large objects without a gargantuan truck.

Friends of mine sent me the link to a fun website that is nothing but great images of people transporting goods or many people via bike or scooter. Click on the photo at right to see an additional 22 images, including a scooter hauling quite a few pigs to market.

Third world? Yes, but just maybe we can learn a few things from them about getting by with less, including making a smaller impact on the planet’s environment. As I begin to travel more I think I need to find some of these far away places where scooters can transport so much. Maybe I can become as well traveled as Matt Harding.

Who is Matt? Good question. But, the better question is, “Where the Hell is Matt?” Very hard to describe but basically this self-described “deadbeat” has traveled to nearly 40 countries and has put together a video of him dancing (poorly) in many places all over the world. It will bring a smile to your face. So, Where the Hell is Matt?