The Blues Have Given the Lauries the Blues

When billionaire Wal-Mart heirs decide owning a major league team is too costly we have a problem. The problem is the City (and hence all of us tax paying residents) owns the Savvis Center where the Blues have a long term lease. Post-Dispatch columnist Bernie Miklasz argued yesterday

I’ll summarize his entire article for you. We gave tax breaks to the Rams & Cardinals so why not the Blues? We need sports, regardless of cost. It is cheaper to buy the Blues now rather than replace them if they move to another city.

i guess I’m just not as wise as some. We pay hundreds of millions of dollars for facilities to create tax revenue and jobs. Do these things ever pay off as planned? Add up how much was spent on building the Savvis Center and then look at current debt, taxes received and jobs created. Does it work? Got me. The Post-Dispatch is reporting:

Previous owners also put in millions of dollars to keep the team afloat financially. Suppose I owned a popular retail store in the city that had a good customer base but it failed to turn a profit year after year. Sales provided tax revenue to the city and the business created jobs. Would the city be willing to build a new facility for me that I’d lease from them in the hopes I’d keep my business open?

If someone can prove to me the fiscal benefits outweigh the costs and risks then I’ll concede that sports is a good thing. Until then I see the Cardinals, Rams and Blues as big annoying problems. I believe if we spent our public time and money building great urban neighborhoods (including a downtown neighborhood) with great mass transit to connect them that we’d reap far greater benefits per public dollar.

Kansas City, if you want the Blues for your new publicly funded stadium I say fine. Pay us the balance of the lease on the stadium and best of luck. To Father Bondi at St. Louis University: you can stop building your stadium a few miles to the West because I think space just freed up at Savvis.

– Steve

A Nearly Typical Walgreen’s in Springfield, MO

I’ve been on vacation of sorts since last Friday (June 10th). Over the weekend I was in Springfield MO for a bicycle class that I’ll share more about in a day or two. Biking to the class from my motel I spotted the Walgreen’s pictured at right. Please excuse the photo quality, it was 7am, cloudy and I’m using an $89 digital camera since my Canon died a week ago.

This Walgreen’s looked like one of their older designs but the corner thing at the street as well as the sidewalk appeared to be newer. Curious I decided to stop and get a few photos to review.

I like how the Walgreen’s has a clear sidewalk from the corner of the intersection to the front door. This is about the only way to make these small boxes tolerable. Of course, if you are coming from up the street from the Walgreen’s you’d never use this sidewalk.

The structure at least “held” the corner since the building certainly doesn’t. I’m not normally a fan of such corner monuments and especially those with advertising as this one. Yet, with this monument sign it would have been worse.

They did an OK job along the public sidewalk. Lamp posts and a few street trees offer protection from passing cars and a short brick wall (where a building should be) gives something of a building line to help enclose the walls of the public street. For a typical suburban-esce Walgreen’s these things certainly helped.

– Steve

An Outsiders Take on St. Louis

I found the following text as commentary on a biodiesel blog:

The discussion was simply about a biodiesel club in St. Louis and they guy found it necessary to comment. How insightful of this person that visited St. Louis and came to these conclusions. Let’s look at his points one by one.

Parking Garages & Street Level Retail:

Yep, downtown does indeed look too empty because the ground floor of most of our parking garages are blank. These need to be retrofitted soon. In fact, some of our oldest garages such as those on the North side of Kiener Plaza need to be razed and replaced with actual buildings. Note that I said buildings — plural. These banal garages occupy a block each which is just overwhelming. Each of those blocks needs to get broken up again with an alley and have multiple buildings per block. They don’t need massive towers — four to ten floors is good enough. The main floor is most critical.

Foot traffic is so important and many of our blocks offer nothing for the pedestrian so they keep going, and often don’t come back that direction. If a block isn’t “permeable” then it is a dead block. That is, if you as the general public cannot enter a store, coffee house or some other portion of the building(s) on a block then it is not contributing to the life of the sidewalk. In general, building lobby entrances don’t count either. The exception is when building windows are interesting enough to draw you into the main entrance. Such is the case on Washington Avenue with the AIA office.

Connection to the Arch

Plans have been discussed for years to put a lid over I-70 to reconnect our city with our riverfront. The highway, like all our highways, are more of a barrier than a connector. I have somewhat a different perspective on the riverfront. Follow me here.

I love the Arch — it is a stunning sculpture. The problem is the riverfront offers nothing other than the Arch. Who goes there besides tourists? Laclede’s Landing has more things to do but it is still mostly a tourist area. Basically, the civic leaders really messed up a hundred years ago when they got the bright idea to clear the area and build some grand project. They had no appreciation for the buildings and street grid that was there — the massing, the cast iron fronts, the small block grid weaving its way up from the river. This was a spectacular area that, had it not been razed, could today rival areas such as New Orleans’ French Quarter or even NYC’s SoHo and Chelsea neighborhoods. We’ve got a long history in St. Louis of “leaders” wanting to make their mark on the city by razing something great for something less pedestrian friendly. Will it ever stop?

But, those forty city blocks are long gone. We’ve got an exciting loft district happening that has nothing to do with the river. Washington Avenue is our most interesting street at this point (despite the lack of on-street parking East of Tucker). Two obstacles create a disconnect to the river from the loft area. The first is St. Louis Centre over Washington Avenue — that needs to go away before the current Busch stadium does. Second is the highway over Washington is very unfriendly. This is where St. Louisan’s walk — to get to their cars parked in the Arch garage. Burying the highway all the way North of the Landing is what is needed to reconnect these areas to the city. A green lid directly between the arch and the old courthouse are a good idea but we need so much more to reestablish our river connection.

As always I have more thoughts than time. More on this later…

MetroLink

I agree that our MetroLink light rail rocks. I’ve also been impressed with our bus service. I can’t help but think that street cars could reach more of the city and for less money than light rail. Where I live I will never have light rail. That is kind of a bummer. We’ve got the #40 Broadway bus line but I somehow think a #40 Broadway streetcar (like the one we used to have up to the 60s) would draw more riders and make the adjacent neighborhoods more appealing.

– Steve

Putting a Face on the Downtown Defense Fund

Organizers of the Downtown Defense Fund have added a great looking (and printable) flyer to their website. Click on the thumbnail image at right to see the full flyer.

– Steve

Public Hearings on Proposed Transit Rate Hikes Start Today

Metro’s Board of Commissioners approved a plan on May 20, 2005 to hold public hearings regarding proposed fare increases for FY06 and FY07. The proposed FY06 fare increase could possibly go into effect by August 23, 2005, while the second increase would not occur until sometime after July 1, 2006 which begins Metro’s FY07 fiscal year. The first hearing begins today: June 8, 2005.

Proposed Changes to Cash Fares are that a one-way MetroLink (rail) ticket would go from the current $1.50 to $1.75 in FYO6 and to $2.00 in FY07. The MetroBus rates would go from the current $1.50 to $1.60 in FYO6 to $1.75 in FY07.

Upcoming Public Hearings are as follows:

• June 8, 2005, 11am – 1pm
  
  
  
  • Met Center, 6347 Plymouth Ave., St. Louis, MO 63133
    
  
  

• June 9, 2005, 5pm – 7pm
  
  
  
  • East St. Louis City Hall, 301 EAst Riverpark Drive, E. St. Louis, IL 62201
    
  
  

• June 13, 2005, 4pm – 6pm
  
  
  
  • Urban League, 8960 Jennings Station Road, St. Louis, MO 63136
    
  
  

• June 14, 2005, 6pm – 8pm
  
  
  
  • East St. Louis Public Library, 5300 State Street, E. St. Louis, IL 62203
    
  
  

• June 15, 2005, 4pm – 6pm
  
  
  
  • St. Louis County Government, 41 S. Central, St. Louis, MO 63105
    
  
  

• June 16, 2005, 6pm – 8pm
  
  
  
  • Metro Board Room (Summary Hearing), 707 N. First, St. Louis, MO 63102
    
  
  

Great, just as I get used to riding the bus they are going to go and raise the fares on me. Sure the 4-6 times per month I ride the bus I can manage an extra quarter — it is not going to break me. But what about those that ride more often but not often enough to justify a monthly pass? They are going to be hit pretty hard. I need to determine if they are proposing increases in the monthly passes as well. I understand the agency has to stay solvent but the monetary imbalance between transit and private cars is too great.

We subsidize cars so much with low fuel taxes that don’t even begin to pay for the roads much less the destruction to the environment. Heaven forbid we put less money toward building out sprawl and providing urban mass transit.

– Steve