Visiting St. Louis for the 2009 All-Star Game? Welcome to St. Louis.
Whether this is your first visit to our city or you’ve been here often I want to share a few things with you. We’ve been busy sprucing up downtown for weeks & months. Actually we’ve been working on downtown for decades. Efforts over the years have been a mixed bag — some positive and others destructive.
Next month marks my 19th year in St. Louis. For me it is a love-hate relationship. This city is worth fighting for so I stick around.
The most recent in the positive category is Citygarden between 8th & 10th on North Market St — a couple blocks North of Busch Stadium.
As you walk around downtown spending money (thank you) you will notice a couple of things. First, not all intersections have pedestrian crossing signals.
Looking South along 9th at Market St.
Please be careful crossing streets — look at other signals to see who has the right of way. In the above example if you are leaving Citygarden heading south on 9th you get no clue as to when it is safe to cross Market St. It would be nice to get some stimulus money to make sure we get pedestrian signals at all intersections.
Normally I’d also warn you about cabs on the sidewalk in front of our convention center but they have been displaced by vehicles related to the Fan Fest.
We have a long way to go but we’ve come a long way in the nearly two decades I’ve lived here. So please enjoy your visit and spend money so we will have funds to address our shortcomings.
Last week two blocks of St. Louis’ Gateway Mall were rededicated as Citygarden, a 2.9 acre garden sculpture park in downtown St. Louis. The blocks, bounded by Chestnut, 8th, Market, and 10th, are part of the Gateway Mall project. The Gateway Mall was declared done in 1993 when these two blocks got grass. Yawn. They are now far from boring.
Landscape Architect Warren Byrd of Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects of Charlottesville, VA speaks at the opening.
I’m very impressed by the transformation of these two city blocks. Of course, given that the Gateway Foundation spent $25-$30 million on the project not including the sculptures you’d expect it to be nice. It is, in fact, nearly perfect. As regular readers might expect, I do have a few criticisms of the design. Before I get into the few flaws I need to offer more well-deserved praise.
It is nearly impossible to take a bad picture of the place. Just point & shoot and you’ve got a stunning image. On numerous visits I’ve seen people taking photo after photo. I’d bet more pictures have been taken in these two blocks during the last week than the 15 years prior. I saw people taking overall pictures, snapshots of friends, and of the many sculptures. People were spotted holding hands and even kissing. Intimacy in a public space is a sign of success. Citygarden is an instant hit with the public.
The space is highly accessible. My visits have all been in my wheelchair and I had no problem getting to all the various levels and spots within the space.
There was even a spot where I could go through this “spray plaza” on my wheelchair. At no point did I feel left out because I was in a wheelchair. The able-bodied probably won’t notice but to me it was important. There are steps in places but the ramps are just as interesting a route as those with steps — not an afterthought to comply with the ADA.
The spray fountain, above, will be popular day & night.
The lighting, by Randy Burkett Lighting Design of Webster Groves MO, is beautiful. This is a good spot to mention the arrangement. The land and improvements are owned by the City of St. Louis, the sculptures are the property of the Gateway Foundation. The city pays for water & electric while the foundation pays for the rest of the maintenance costs. The electric bill will be huge but so are the benefits.
The two blocks are well organized into many different spaces that invite exploration and numerous visits. The walkway above runs east-west connecting the spaces. More on this later when I get to the flaws.
The Terrace View Cafe, in the NE corner, should open soon. The cafe building was design by Studio Durham Architects of St. Louis. The modern design is very appropriate given the context of garden & art. The cafe will be open 7am to 7pm Monday-Thursday and open until 10pm Friday & Saturday. Unfortunately, it will be closed on Sundays. I could see the cafe becoming the hot Sunday brunch destination. As a downtown resident it is often the weekends when I’m out with friends enjoying good food and the city. But I understand how places need one day off. Jurors will now have a great new place to enjoy their lunch breaks.
As I indicated earlier the park is two city blocks with just under 3 acres in total area. Yet they only have 3 bike racks and those are all contained in one small area kinda hidden from view (off Chestnut).   With two blocks you have 8 edges total. I’d expect one rack per edge — placed at each edge so bike riders arriving from all directions will see a rack as they arrive. In the middle they could get away with a single rack on one side of 9th Street for a total of 7 racks. The racks used are a good design — both attractive and functional. Their location is not in the same block as the cafe. So someone biking over for a quick breakfast or lunch is probably going to use a parking meter on 8th rather than these racks. If we want to be a bike friendly city we must have bike parking distributed everywhere — not pushed off into a hidden corner.
The name is wrong too — Citygarden. I like City & Garden being pushed together without a space but it should be CityGarden with a capital G rather than lowercase g.
The gardens fall into the praise category. The trees are very mature and the plantings are varied. I may like the plantings more than the sculpture.
9th Street was narrowed to two lanes at Market & Chestnut. In the center they have room to drop off passengers. The gardens where the street was narrowed collects rain water from the street and other non-pervious surfaces. The cafe is said to have a green roof.
Detail of rain garden.
I try to get into the flaw mode and positives keep popping up. Let’s return to the central walkway. As the Gateway Mall concept was extended east of Tucker there were several concepts. The winning plan was to have four buildings on the north half of four blocks. People mistakenly think the blocks were going to be cleared, free of all structures, and somehow Gateway One got built between 7th & 8th. Wrong, Gateway One was part of the plan. But part of the idea was to walk down the center of these blocks.  Crossing 9th Street the designers did a great job at making this vision a reality by providing ADA ramps and special paving at the crosswalk. But what about going east or west?
This is where the design fails in the biggest way — It doesn’t do anything to connect with adjacent blocks. The block to the west contains Twain by Richard Serra. Ideally 10th Street should have been narrowed as 9th was. Granted, that could have only been done on the east side of the street at this point. But once the Serra block is redone we’d need to remake the west edge of Citygarden. Mid-block crossings at 8th & 10th would have gone a long way toward finally integrating these blocks.
The north side of the Terrace View Cafe facing Chestnut is the least appealing. As you would expect, the building focuses inward on the garden. This sidewalk is stark. On-street parking is prohibited on this side of Chestnut in this block only.   I can see a no-parking section to allow access to the trash container and to facilitate deliveries but banning on-street parking on for the entire block is excessive. At this point none of the on-street parking around these two blocks are market as disabled only. I’ll work with city officials to get a few designated as such. As with bike parking, these should be distributed rather than concentrated.
The absence of greenery along the 800 block of Chestnut is very noticeable as well. Street trees would have done wonders to make this sidewalk more pleasant for pedestrians.
In a city with so many blocks of dead open space it is refreshing to have two that are lively and intriguing. Much work remains to fix the other blocks of the Gateway Mall (Broadway to 21st).
Check out the 11-minute time lapse video of the construction of Citygarden here.
Soon we will see crews doing to St. Louis’ North 14th Street what I saw yesterday in the town of Rockford Illinois: ripping out a tired pedestrian mall (Map).
Crews began ripping out the two remaining blocks last month.
There were 48 retailers, restaurants and salons on the mall when it opened in 1975. Today only two of those 48 are still there. Five years later, in 1980, retail establishments on those four blocks were already being decimated as shoppers flocked to shopping centers and the CherryVale Mall that opened in 1973. Â (source)
The same story can be told in places where the mall was seen as the way to lure shoppers away from new open-air & enclosed malls in the suburbs. Rockford appears to have been on the cutting edge with efforts to revitalize their downtown. Cutting edge planning has been destructive to cities and their downtowns. Revitalization efforts today are often simply to undo past mistakes. Rockford’s retail area is now firmly embeded in the think ring of sprawl. The 21st century version will be different than it was 75 years ago but also different than it has been over the last 30 years.
I had lunch inside the restaurant you see pictured with the outdoor seating. I asked my waitress what she thought of the mall going away. She didn’t want to see it go. I should not the mall was older than she was.
She was skeptical of the plans for having traffic on the street. “I hope it works out,” she said. Indeed, I plan to return after the Main Stret reopens.
The new Citygarden, a 2-block sculpture garden in downtown St. Louis, is a wonderful space. The surrounding buildings are not so wonderful. For the long-term viability of the area we need to improve the urban edge around Citygarden.
Across Market Street to the South is the first place I’d start, the Bank of America tower. A horrible Urban Renewal era building with no relationship to the sidewalk. The building is mostly in the 800 block of Market St but the base of the tower extends over 9th St with part of the building in the 900 block.
Above is looking West from Market St at 8th. The raised terrace is the main disconnect between the sidewalk and building. In a walkable environment you want minimal separation between the pedestrian on the sidewalk and entrances to interior spaces. Each city block needs 4-6 distinct entries to make the journey interesting for the pedestrian. Razing the building and starting over would work but it would be wasteful and is not necessary.
Plants can do wonders. If they replaced the boring ivy with something that would drape over the wall that would do wonders. Lose the button down collar look in the planter. Replace serious with fun. The first block of the Citygarden is to the right, across Market St.
Above: we are approaching 9th Street. The sign up on the terrace is for a restaurant space for lease. Yeah, good luck with that. To make it work you’d need a sign & menu board down at the sidewalk level. Some potted plants on the steps (away from the rails) would soften these stairs and make it more inviting. The brass handrails are like shoulder pads on the show Dynasty: classy at the time but oh so dated now.
Above: At 9th looking back East at the opposite view of the steps. A step down planter on this end attempts to mask the huge change in height above the sidewalk but the plantings are too wimpy for the massive space. Like the retaining wall earlier the plantings should hang over the wall and vary in height. Some color would be nice too.
Above: 9th Street looking South. Just horrible. I can see guests of the hotel 2 blocks South using this route to get to Citygarden.  Removing the section over the street is ideal but not likely. So I look for alternatives to improve this street.
Four lanes? Four! Insanity. Thankfully Citygarden cuts this down to two after crossing Market Street. Ideally I’d put on-street parking on the two outer lanes. But I’m guessing they don’t want vehicles parking under the building here. Fine, but we still only need two travel lanes. The sidewalks should be widened so that only two lanes remain. The section of the building between 9th & 10th at grade is the drive thru. A blank wall faces Market St & 10th concealing the drive-thru. That is both good & bad. Good because we don’t want to see a drive-thru in a city but bad because blank walls are no better.
Above: Continuing along Market St we see the blank wall along the side of KSDK channel 5. To the left we see open space. Yes, the trees are nice and the grass is green but this space, across Market St from the 2nd block of Citygarden is screaming out for a building(s).
At 10am this morning (Tuesday 6/30/09) Mayor Slay will dedicate Citygarden, the new 2-block long sculpture garden downtown. Before I get into the garden I want to talk about what existed on these two blocks previously.
The two blocks (bounded by Market St on the South, 10th on the West, Chestnut on the North and 8th on the East) were the last two blocks to have their historic long-standing structures razed for a grand vision of a Gateway Mall — a vision of a long green spine that dates back to the early 20th Century (map). The city was vastly different then — it was populated, dirty (coal was still burned for heat) and anything but uniform. Early planners sought to clear away a section of the city to offer some relief and to bring some order to a bustling chaotic city.
The problem is city leaders over the decade became addicted to demolition as a solution. That new order would invigorate the city, they thought. But it was the unplanned chaos that gave the city life.
In 1993 two city blocks remained to complete this ordered new vision.
Last days of the Western Union Building in 1993
Stunning huh? But in a city with more open green space than people to occupy what we had it was decided we should create more.
What we got was two more passive (boring) city blocks. I argued with the city’s head architect at the time but it did no good:
Unlike some older mall blocks, particularly ones west of Tucker Boulevard, Royse said, the new ones “will be inviting and attractive . . . and people should use the mall more.†(Post-Dispatch of July 16, 1993)
Royse, now retired in Seattle, was in town recently. I saw him last Thursday at the Loop Trolley forum. He had not yet seen how his two blocks of the mall, the last two, had been altered.
January 28, 2008
But the two blocks were not inviting, unless you wanted to be alone with nothing to do. The buildings surrounding these two blocks have been uninviting since new. Blank walls, raised entrances, parking garage entries. The stuff that sucks life out of a city.
And now, these two blocks are once again recreated. They are the opposite of the 1993-2008 blocks — a good thing as Martha Stewart would say.
Artist rendering of City Garden. Source: citygardenstl.org
From what I’ve seen from Citygarden so far it is interesting, complex (requiring exploration), colorful, and a delight to the senses. With a permanent cafe on the Eastern block you can stay and enjoy the space. There is seating throughout. We shouldn’t have razed the old buildings but once they were gone we should have created dynamic space. Instead we got 16 years of dead passive space added to the many acres of additional dead passive space we’ve had for decades longer.
While I like the Citygarden I don’t like the process that led to today. I wrote the following just over 2 years ago (see post):
In a classic St. Louis move, the city’s “leadership†is already moving forward with a plan the public has yet to see. Mayor Slay, Aldermanic President, Alderman Phyllis Young, and Downtown Parnership’s Jim Cloar last week talked of the newest concept as a done deal even though we the public have not seen anything yet. Typical.
The public open house is scheduled for this evening, Monday June 11, 2007 at 6:30pm in the rotunda at City Hall. This is one of those meetings designed to give the appearance of public participation without any actual participation. The usual round of types — officials, business executives, etc… — have already approved of the plan on our behalf. How big of them to do so. I assume tonight will also be a chance for all these folks to congratulate each other on a job well done. I’ll be there simply because I need to see what sort of disastrous plan the city has drafted this time. Any comment forms will likely be a waste of paper.
Hopefully these two blocks will serve as an example of the level of excitement necessary as we look at the remaining blocks of the Gateway Mall. I’ve got a good relationship with Patricia Roland-Hamilton, the person in charge of The Gateway Mall Project. We’ve had ongoing conversations about the qualities needed along the mall.
Once inside I’ll do a full review of Citygarden. Again, I like it already. But I have noticed a few details I would like to have seen done differently. These can now serve as lessons for when the remaining blocks are addressed.
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