Gateway Mall Announcement in January ’08
Yesterday’s “town hall” meeting at the Downtown Partnership regarding management of the CID (Community Improvement District) produced little new information, other than the fact than the city will be unveiling the final Gateway Mall plan next month.
You will recall that earlier this year, prior to a meeting where citizens were asked to provide feedback on the draft, the city announced final plans for the two-block Sculpture Garden between 9th and 11th (see prior post). That leaves Kiener Plaza/May Amphitheatre, “Twain”, and the blocks from Tucker West to 20th.
Now living only a few blocks away, I can see the failure even stronger. Public space needs to feel like it is surrounded by a vibrant city. The South wall of the Gateway Mall, at 16th at least, is horribly bland. Union Station, down at 18th, is at least a stunning work of architecture. Sometimes, on my walks, I’ll take 16th street to Market —- of course 16th between Olive and Market hasn’t been a street in decades — it was closed long ago during urban renewal.
Our downtown is very linear, very East-West. The focus being Washington Ave. By the time you make it to the too-wide Olive Blvd the synergy has run out. I don’t know that anything can sustain interest in Gateway Mall without appearing too Disneyland. No matter what, the “walls” of this open space are largely lifeless and will remain as such.
Decades ago this area was cleared of the slummy properties that were viewed as unseemly by our elite and to provide some relief from the hustle & bustle of the city. The 500,000 residents we lost (pushed away?) in the last half century took the bustle with them. Will a new Gateway Mall plan bring the hustle back to this section of St. Louis?
The most critical issue for the StL region is personal mobility. Metro is a mess and soon the old farty will be closed. The answer to your simple question is NO.
A larger question is the shift from industrial and office uses downtown to more residential uses. Since residential uses (lofts, etc.) are inherently less dense than office uses, the daytime population of downtown is likely gradually declining while the evening and weekend populations are creeping up (and will be reflected in the 2010 census). This impacts how all of downtown is both used and perceived. The streets “thronging with shoppers and/or workers” are likely long gone, replaced by a residential community that values a certain level of activity along with a different type of personal recreational environment. My guess is this plan assumes, incorrectly and/or idealistically, that downtown is and will continue to be primarily an employment and entertainment destination for the region, and that we need to build on these assumptions. I would postulate that a more effective path would be to build public infrastructure aimed at nuturing a high-density residential community . . .
I had no idea there was a town hall meeting being held yesterday. Would have liked to have been there.
I feel like I need to mention that Taste of St. Louis has rocked the Gateway mall between 8th and 10th st for the past two years. Have you ever seen that space so alive? I was surprised and excited by the turnout and hope the creators of the new plans took notice.
John, Metro is down but we still have one of the most successful LRT systems in the country in terms of ridership, especially choice ridership. Bus coverage is good but service hit or miss.Traffic congestion is better than average and will be improved with the new I-64. I’d say we’re doing ok in personal mobility.
Aaron, I think the point is more to look at what we have sacraficed to the alter of personal mobility, and more specifically private internal combustion powered personal mobility. The car has become the dominat force in shaping our lanscape, from the billions being spent on 40/64 to the millions spent on the Garage-mahal to the billions not being spent on the vacant asphalt patches infecting our city.
So, to take the pessimistic view, it doesn’t matter what we plan in the city, ’cause in the end, all that really counts is the cars.
Anti-spam word: sprawl
Jane Jacobs says that Central Business Districts, in their purest form, are simply dead. That is because they are not mixed primary uses.
Critics of the Mall, like Edmund K. Faltenmeyer of Fortune Magazine or Walter L. Eschback of US Housing and Urban Development, were saying in the 1970s that we should have focused on residential. If we did this then we wouldn’t have such a banal Gateway Mall. There would be life on the streets as goods and services proliferated in order to serve those residents. Moreover, if Real Estate Row wasn’t demolished, but rehabbed for cheaper office space, we could also have a niche market targeted to small business.
Downtown had huge office space vacancies in the 1970s. We had around 2,000,000 square feet of unoccupied office space. The solution to this was to create newer office space and demolish old buildings. We also built a lot of parking in order to accommodate these free riding office workers who don’t live here. Pride of St. Louis Redevelopment Corporation and the Mayor believed this would attract business back Downtown and green space would do the same. In reality green space does nothing except act as a dead zone when there are no residents living nearby. The anti-urban design of the buildings which surround the Mall don’t help either.
St. Louis needs to abandon the Mall. We need to mostly redevelop the Mall as residential and mixed use. Once residents are living Downtown they will begin to actually use what green space is remaining. Examples of such spaces would be Keiner Plaza, Milles, Twain, Memorial Plaza, etc. But not until there are actually people Downtown should we consider redeveloping the Mall.
Even if we pull off something on the scope of Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion or Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, the impact won’t be as high without residents already in the immediate vicinity! The amount of use at Millennium and Grant Parks cannot be replicated in St. Louis because we don’t have enough people living Downtown. Planner Jan Gehl notes that people attract people, but when things are dead they stay inside. People must first reside and this will attract others. Things will by default be alive. Then we capitalize upon this already existing buzz by doing some project. But first there must be mixed use residential. Projects alone, as we see with history, do not work!
“Will a new Gateway Mall plan bring the hustle back to this section of St. Louis?”
Hard to see how it can when:
A. Chestnut will be closed between 14th and Tucker
B. A big mound of dirt will function as the “draw” to pull people from one end of the Mall to another.
Cities around the world have attracted throngs of shoppers, workers and residents to their streets by making them friendly and supportive to people instead of to cars. Ciclovia has transformed Bogota and now numerous other successful cities (Paris, NY, Chicago, Copehagen, London, Portland) want to emulate this positive celebration of people, healthy living, and city life.
In the StL region, false claims about malls, the success of Metro, highway projects, etc. dominate our discussions about attractions and personal mobility. No wonder we can’t find the right answer, the best options are excluded from the debate.
The city needs to stop focusing on the mall and focus on the area around the mall. Uses around the perimeter of the mall will cause people to come to the mall and use the mall. These uses should be varied – working, shopping, living, entertainment, etc. Having these uses accessible via transit, walking and biking will create more foot traffic and more use of the mall as well. Pretty open space will continue to be dead space in a dead downtown. Downtown may be coming back, but it isn’t alive yet. Money spent on redesigning the mall will be wasted money at this time.
Doug wrote “Jane Jacobs says that Central Business Districts, in their purest form, are simply dead. That is because they are not mixed primary uses.†Midtown Manhattan is the central business district of New York. Go there and tell me if you think it’s dead.
Of course, back then Jacobs was talking about a more pure central business district, Lower Manhattan. I was there recently and, as it turns out, Lower Manhattan is still very much dead at certain times of day. There isn’t enough “diversity of use†to consistently keep people on the streets.
However, 40 years after Death and Life, Lower Manhattan remains the economic engine for the United States and most of the world. It may be boring compared to other parts of New York, but it works. It’s still one of the largest central business districts in the United States. As another example, downtown Boston lacks the foot traffic of Newbury Street and Beacon Hill, but it serves the region well. And I walked several blocks of the Chicago’s Loop on a Sunday and I saw four or five people on the street. It was dead.
Some have criticized Jacobs for the assumption that we want to turn every corner of our city into Greenwich Village. I don’t think Jacobs ever went that far. Cities need their different parts. They need their rail yards, industrial sections, and they (still) need their pure central business districts. On a macro level, they need their diversity of uses.
shit, in terms of the general trends, downtown St. Louis should be dead, dead, dead. St. Louis has done everything wrong–its white working class fled their neighborhoods when prompted by lenders, real estate agents and city planners, private developers have hacked chunks out of the region’s best historic assets, and our city leaders have largely stood by and cheered.
except, a funny thing happened.. some parts of the city survived and thrived and some of those with money flocked to them to be a part of the “renaissance.”
the abstraction of the “diversity of uses” or the functionalist interpretations of how form dictates use is largely a 20th century concept. In the 21st century it is more about the symbolic uses and meanings of places, a function that can often transcend the geographically-based meanings of the past.
This is why empty nesters and young yuppies alike can flock to clearly inferior living spaces in old, drafty, formerly manufacturing buildings and still think that they are on the groundswell of the next greatest thing.
In agreement with Kara, I wait for the day when the switch is thrown to blow out the monstrous waste of urban real estate that is most of the parking garages that surround the Gateway Mall. fuck, I would be willing to throw the switch; however, I am sure it will be all the usual players. Until that point, selling the shit is pretty much all there is.
Certainly the whole of downtown needs a new vision. Unfortunately whatever is proposed will probably be an extension of the lame planning that seems to occur. You hear pronouncements about a world class city, only there is no one in power who apparently knows how to achieve such a lofty status.
What is worse, like the sculpture park in the mall, the citizens are left out of the process. It as if the city is a province for the few and everyone else are merely serfs. The lack of courage and ability to involve citizens is reflected in the continually mediocre urban solutions that are presented as great urban planning (such as the sculpture park).
While Steve notes the many deficiencies that currently exist, (Who really uses the mall anywhere along its length?) the problem of restoring vibrancy depends upon the coming together of many elements.
The most important being participation by the citizens. In lieu of international architectural competitions (similar to the one that gave birth to the Arch), vigorous local debate is necessary and the most productive way to achieve higher standards of urban planning.
Instead, the arrogance of power, the attitude that “we know better” reflects a decline of democracy and public participation, not only in St. Louis, but all over America.
As a result we have mismanagement of cities, transit, highways, foreign policy, wars, energy usage, global warming; in short the collapse of America becomes a real possibility due to special interests and the arrogance of power.
The Gateway Mall reflects all of these failures. It is business as usual. Nero fiddles while Rome burns.
Steve, I suspect you’re vision for downtown closely resembles Tijuana’s avenue de Revolucion including the donkey “bimbo” with it’s hair bleached to match a Zebra’s that you can get a polaroid with. I will say it is bustling and vibrant though. That SW corner of the mall, the vacant courts building out to Union Station, is a lot of void to overcome. It doesn’t need a rigorous debate to figure that out. I guess your take is to go ahead and build on it to try to get some density and forfeit the green space. To me worst case scenario is paving over the whole mall and merging Chestnut and Market into one mega street where the width would dwarf that of Olive’s on the principle that it help would bring people into the city easier.
Stuffynose, did someone else write that second paragraph for you? It doesn’t match the rest of your post.
Otto, I disagree on your Manhattan zoning. Midtown, has a lot of office space sure, but the traditional CBD on that island, is south of Canal.
Dude, Lower Manhattan was traditionally the CBD, but for decades Midtown Manhattan has been dominating. It dwarfs Lower Manhattan in terms of office space and number of businesses. Lower Manhattan is the fourth or fifth largest CBD in the US, with Midtown Manhattan number one and the Chicago Loop a distant second.
One observation, as a relative newbie, is that downtown St. Louis seems to mix blocks with moderate density with blocks that are relatively lifeless. Combine that with a downtown that is relatively spread out, and it seems like there are pockets of activity and vibrancy, but no real synergy driving an overall feeling of “wow”. Washington has a few really “good” blocks, but go a block north or a couple of blocks south, and it’s simply “not there”. Laclede’s Landing and Union Station are both isolated pockets of forced activity, but don’t seem connected to a larger whole. Developers are building lofts in many of the old industrial buildings, but many of the newer projects really aren’t within walking distance of either the office core or the entertainment areas of downtown. And the office core seems to have little street activity at all – the retail that survives projects a struggling and dated vibe.
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The challenge lies more in the private sector than the public. The biggest thing that can turn around downtown is convincing businesses to locate and expand there. A certain number of employees will choose to live in lofts close to where they work, and “deals” like convincing Centene to move into BPV will bring thousands of new wallets downtown every day. The reality is that money drives the success of every cool, dense CBD. And there is no one right answer – every business has different drivers on why they (re)locate where they do. Surprisingly, where the CEO lives plays a bigger role than most want to admit – see the growth that’s happening out west. So doing something with the Mall might help, but so would expanding Metro, getting done with the 64 rebuild, synchronizing traffic lights, energizing (and revisiting) the one-way streets and creating a downtown circulator. There are many parts and pieces already in place (“good bones”) and there are many thaings that can and should be done. Creating synergy may be a trite statement, but it truly is what needs to happen – Manhattan, the Loop/Michigan Avenue and the Vegas strip are all vibrant simply because a lot of people WANT to be there. The challenge here is creating the same level of desire here . . .
“The challenge lies more in the private sector than the public. The biggest thing that can turn around downtown is convincing businesses to locate and expand there.”
What?! Business leaders couldn’t even convince themselves to stay!
We tried that by demolishing Real Estate Row. Pride of St. Louis Redevelopment Corporation was headed by the big business elites of that time. They had complete control and fucked it all up. They couldn’t even get office space built west of Gateway One. Why? The market couldn’t support more office space. Meanwhile Don Lipton had plans to rehab those buildings but he was categorically ignored because, according to a Post Dispatch Article from the early 1970’s, “Without doubt, people want to be where there are new and modern buildings.” George Hellmuth of HOK even said “The Buder, Title Guaranty, and International Buildings are the three ugliest buildings in town.” I wonder why people didn’t ignore him considering he worked on Pruitt Igoe?
The best way to get good planning, thus life on the Mall and Downtown, is as GMichaud says public debate. All of the crap gets filtered out this way through many policy filters. Citizen experts won’t stand for bad planning and they are organized. But given there is absolutely no debate, most of what we see is simply horrible. As with Real Estate Row, low quality occurs because public officials, when partnered with the private sector alone absent of an active electorate, have the tendency to produce horrible, cheap design. The private sector is motivated by the bottom line whereas the official is motivated by the election cycle. It is a bad partnership. The best current example is Grand Center.
Critiques on the mall often focus on the buildings immediately surrounding it, but it also helps to take a look at this entire area of the city. The mall is cut off from the rest of the city to the south by railyards/I-64, to the west by AGE/SLU campuses, and is bordered on the east by a largely single use CBD. The area to the north is the only one that offers any kind vibrant urban tissue to supply life to the mall, so I think we’re not looking closely enough when we concentrate only on the institutional buildings that border the mall itself.
I actually like the designers’ idea of dividing the mall up into sections, but each section needs to be developed in a different manner. Perhaps the area east of Tucker remains largely open/ceremonial; and the area west, say to 18th, gets mid-rise condos, with the area west of Aloe being redeveloped as part of the re-done 22nd st. interchange.