New Retail Garden Center Opens in CWE

Please do not buy plants at Home Depot. Preferably, don’t buy anything at Home Depot or the new Lowe’s when it opens in Loughborough Commons. I would be thrilled to see both of these big box chains close their St. Louis area stores due to everyone shopping at locally owned stores instead. But, I’m getting sidetracked on a big box rant. This is a positive post!

A very cool looking new garden center has just opened in the West End at 4605 Olive:

Bowood Farms has been growing quality plants since 1989, specializing in perennials, roses, ferns, groundcovers, grasses, shrubs and vines. We have an extensive line of missouri native plants as well. Now we are bringing these quality plants directly to you so please come check out our new St. Louis retail garden center when it opens this spring. Please call for hours and directions. We can also special grow native plants for you landscape projects, please call to inquire.

4605 Olive St.
St. Louis, MO 63108
Telephone: (314)454-6868

This company is making a huge investment in the area. They’ve done a great job with the buildings so far and they are planning more, including a cafe. From hellmuth+bicknese architects:

The project is being designed as a destination point featuring a central street side cafe with a terrace overlooking the plant displays. A high loggia surrounds the open-air displays with an upper gallery beneath a green roof. The cafe itself contains a bar and seating area with 14′ ceilings and views to the plant displays through a green screen archway. The inside seating area is around 860 SF with an outdoor terraced seating area of 1,200 SF.

The cafe are is still under construction but the retail garden center is open for business.

St. Louis City and County are dotted with other locally owned retail garden centers such as Bayer’s on Hampton. I’ve also bought plants at the place on the NE corner of Watson & Fyler (I always forget the name). I think the South Side Garden Center is still open on Cherokee at Compton. Even if you are not in the city you most likely have a locally owned nursery near you home. Some are small but others can be quite big and offer a larger selection than the big box places.

So back to Bowood.

The building is located on Olive just East of Euclid. But, if you are going there by car don’t take Euclid because you can’t get through. The streets in this area have been blockaded for years.

At one time these concrete barriers may have made sense but today they stand in the way of investment marching through areas where it is needed. A few places, like Bowood, have leapt over the barriers but the area still has the ‘wrong side of the tracks’ feel. Take them away, or at least move them a block or two every few years.

– Steve

Massive Demolition List Makes Me Question Decade

Once again actions in this city lead me to wonder what decade we are in. This coming Monday the City’s Preservation Board will consider an application to demolish some 30 buildings in the Forest Park Southeast/The Grove neighborhood.

Michael Allen & Claire Nowak-Boyd from The Ecology of Absence have written a great piece on the subject as well as photographed all the buildings:

Forest West is the real estate arm of the Washington University Medical Center Redevelopment Corporation and acquired these buildings from negligent landlords like Jack Kraus. After a year of ownership and silence to the neighborhood about their intent, Forest West now emerges with a plan for demolition that would severely impact the neighborhood and may stunt efforts to rehabilitate its valuable historic buildings.

Rehab is going on in the area and many of these buildings look like good candidates for rehab. Are we in some weird 1950s world where massive demolition is thought to be a good thing for a city? Do I need to buy copies of Jane Jacob’s 1964 classic, The Death & Life of Great American Cities, for every alderman?

The alderman for the area is Joe Roddy. You will recall that he is willing to do what BJC’s lawyers want with respect to Forest Park because BJC is the largest employer in the city. So now comes Washington University asking for demo permits so I’m sure he just signed whatever letter of support they placed in front of him.

The Preservation Board meeting begins at 4pm on Monday April 24, 2006 at 1015 Locust, 12th Floor. If you come be sure to look for public notices from the LCRA and other board of the St. Louis Development Corporation.

– Steve

Downtown Now! Absorbed By The Partnership?

From MayorSlay.com:

In certain quadrants of the blogosphere, this will be Big News: Downtown Now! has updated its website.

You have to give the mayor’s PR team recognition, they do have a sense of humor. They are referring to my posts about the organization such as this one from October 15, 2005,
Downtown Now! Looking a Bit Dated:

Prominent on their main page is a logo for Celebrate 2004 along with the text “What’s Happening in 2004?” Uh, last time I check it is October of 2005 and rapidly approaching 2006. Clicking on the link just gives me an access denied message. That isn’t going to do a good job revitalizing downtown.

So I eagerly clicked the link to see this new website from Downtown Now! I find a sub-page of the Downtown Partnership’s new site that I posted about on March 27, 2006.

And what is the content of the new Downtown Now! page? A really cool picture of Washington Avenue, a simple paragraph explaining who they are, and:

We now refer you to the Downtown St. Louis Partnership website (www.downtownstl.org) where you can learn more about the exciting happenings in the new downtown St. Louis! We thank you for all of your interest and support!

Just shut it down altogether. Keep the domain name around and direct it to the Partnership’s main page, nobody will know the difference. Since it was all the same people involved people often got the two confused.

The Downtown Now! organization was set up to be temporary so this is a natural closing process. But much work remains to be done. Washington Avenue is doing well but is being damaged by aggressive valet companies as they illegally “reserve” spaces all up and down the street. Gaslight Square was a happening place at one time and it imploded due to its own popularity. The Partnership and the Department of Streets seems unwilling to rectify the valet problems.

The balance of downtown and indeed the entire city is in need of serious planning work. Our zoning dates to 1947 when planners & architects hated cities and wanted everything to be suburbanized into separate use pods. Our zoning does things like encouraging more parking spaces rather than fewer and does not require buildings to abut the sidewalk. Our entire zoning code needs to be scrapped and replaced. Where is the leadership for this mountainous task?

It is nice the Mayor’s campaign staff has the leisure to give out nods to bloggers like myself but this city has some serious planning groundwork to be done and I just don’t see anyone making it happen.

– Steve

Appeal on Variance for Drive-Thru… Tabled.

After sitting through a four hour long meeting we are not any closer to an answer on residents’ appeal of the variance for a McDonald’s Drive-Thru.

The Board of Adjustment, based on their questions, was not impressed with the Florida/Pyramid/McDonald’s proposal. It seems this group is also caving from pressure for more urban design in the area.

Between testimony Jennifer Florida approached me indicating they were willing to build the building up to the street rather than set back as designed. While it helps it does not mitigate all the other valid concerns about noise, trash and traffic.

The Board of Adjustment will likely reopen the hearing after Pyramid/McDonald’s has submitted a new site plan showing the layout with a building up to the street. I think Florida indicated they’d build to the street in the hopes the Board of Adjustment would deny the appeal. This would leave room for them to say the plans that were approved were not up to the street.

If the city is going to continue to ignore sound planning by allowing a drive-thru at this location I’d rather it be built up to the street. But I want this to be perfectly clear, I believe the various fast food establishments in the area are undermining the true potential of the area. If the McDonald’s closed in October as Florida suggests would happen, I think that in the long term we’d be better off.

– Steve

Audio From First Drive-Thru Hearing Online

To help establish a record of the testimony from the first hearing on the McDonald’s Drive-Thru conditional use hearing I have posted a series of 15 MP3 files. These files are the complete recording from the hearing in the order in which it was held on February 16, 2006.

You can hear for yourself how Jennifer Florida describes the quite suburban McDonald’s as “urban-style” and how franchise owner James Proctor indicates the new location will be open from 5:30am to 11:00pm.

Due to the size of the files I have placed these on a separate server. Click here to visit the site and take a listen.

– Steve