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?

Congress Wake Up & Let Farmers Grow Industrial Hemp!

One of the most green products in the world, able to be fabricated into many diverse products, is banned in only one industrial nation — the United States. Sure, we can import product made from Hemp such as all manner of clothing, bedding, ropes, paper, and so on, but our farmers cannot grow this product as the feds fear the farmers or others might grow its hallucinogenic cousin, pot.

Both industrial hemp and pot are members of the cannabis family, although the latter has a mind-altering impact when injested that the former does not. Under this logic we need to ban gardeners from planning the lovely poppy plant and stop the sale of poppy-seed bagels at St. Louis Bread Co because some folks use a cousin of those to manufacture heroin. Unlike a pretty flower or a damn fine bagel variety, industrial hemp has so many uses in society. Similarly, pot and heroin are not even in the same league.

I’ve smoked pot all of one time — and yes I inhaled (see post). It still smells funny to me. So while I have little desire to run out and buy pot I think we need to let up. I say we just legalize it — that will certainly remove allure to do something illegal. It will also remove the stigma of getting caught as well as pull the rug out from under the street value. But, this post is not about pot, it is about industrial hemp.

More so than a quick toke I want to buy clothing made from hemp. It’s available, but boy is it pricey. How does $40 for a t-shirt sound? Some of it is borderline reasonable but a far cry from being affordable. If the US were growing industrial hemp the raw materials would be much more affordable — manufacturers could continue to pay their workers decent wages and still sell at a profit, even when the retail price drops. Basic supply and demand at work. The problem is the demand is there but the feds have forced a market shortage on the supply side.

Recently farmers in North Dakota sued the federal government for the right to grow industrial hemp.  The judge, however, said they need to take it up with congress.  From a Reuters story:

“Obviously we are disappointed with the decision,” says Eric Steenstra, President of Vote Hemp, a grassroots group working to bring industrial hemp farming back to the U.S. “The Court’s decision shows it understands that the established and growing market for industrial hemp would be beneficial for North Dakota farmers to supply. Yet the decision overlooks Congress’s original intent – and the fact that farmers continued to grow hemp in the U.S.for twenty years after marijuana was banned. If the plaintiffs decide to appeal the case, we would wholeheartedly support that effort. We are not giving up and will take this decision to Washington, DC to prompt action by Congress on HR 1009, the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2007, which would clarify a state’s right to grow the crop,” adds Steenstra.

If you share my concerns, contact your U.S. Representative, and your U.S. Senators, to ask them to support industrial hemp farming.  All those candidates for President and all the state-level folks need to be asked about positions on industrial hemp as well.  It is about time we once again grew one of the products that helped get this country through WWII.

The Latest Green Energy-Saving Device, The Humble (and Controversial) Clothesline

One of my tasks, as a child, was to help my mom with hanging out the laundry to dry. Sure, we had a dryer and it got used often but so did our clothesline. Growing up in the 70s, in a 1960s subdivision, you didn’t see too many clotheslines. Older homes had fixed poles and lines, like many you see around neighborhoods in and around St. Louis. We had a handy little device, a clothesline that would wind itself up into a coil so it was not seen when not in use. Attached to the back of the house, I’d grab the end and stretch it out to the fence post. Ah, nothing like sleeping on sheets that had been sun dried — something no dryer sheet can compete with. When done, let the line wind itself back up.

Like so many good old fashioned ways of doing things, hanging out clothes to dry fell out of popularity and finally, in many places, outright banned. One in five Americans now live in some sort of community association, such as a co-op, a condo or a subdivision of single family detached homes (per the Community Associations Institute). Many of these ban the drying of clothes in a visible manner. Some municipalities ban outdoor drying of clothing altogether, saving individual associations from having to do so. This age old practice of hanging out clothing to dry is apparently a symbol of poverty and considered a factor in lowering property values.

Now we have groups advocating for “Right to Dry” legislation. Yes, advocates now must seek legislation to protect their right to hang clothing out to dry. Is this a case of sound planning to protect the community from the offenses of drying clothing or police power taken too far?

To me, banning clotheslines is going too far — attempting to sanitize and regulate our lives while consuming more energy.  For half a century now various entities have been attempting to strip life from cities — from over zealous sign ordinances to mandates for uniform awnings in commercial districts to bans on hanging the undies out to dry.  Despite some give and take in an urban context, I’ll take the messy city life over the sanitized version any day.  Just keep the sidewalks passable.

I checked my condo bylaws — they don’t specifically ban the hanging of clothing off the balcony or out the window.  Not that I plan to do so, I just wanted to check.  I’ve actually been hanging my clothing to dry in the laundry room.  A minute in the dryer on a no heat fluff setting once dry gives them a nice bounce.  Still, I long for clotheslines strung across the way to the next building from balcony to balcony.

From a recent Wall Street Journal article in September:

Ten states, including Nevada and Wisconsin, limit homeowners associations’ ability to restrict the installation of solar-energy systems, or assign that power to local authorities, says Erik J.A. Swenson, a Washington, D.C.-based partner at law firm King & Spalding LLP, who has written about the policies. He says it’s unclear in most of these states whether clotheslines qualify as “solar” devices. Only the laws in Florida and Utah expressly include clotheslines. 

I still don’t know where Missouri falls, most likely associations and municipalities are free to ban clotheslines. Anyone know?
From an August 07 article in the Christian Science Monitor:

At last count, in 2005, there were 88 million dryers in the US, according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers. Annually, these dryers consume 1,079 kilowatt hours of energy per household, creating 2,224 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions.

Wow, that is a lot of energy and emissions.  Hanging laundry is one of the simpler ways the public can make a difference with respect to global climate change.  We need to maintain rights to hang out laundry to dry.  For more information see Project Laundry List.

Phone Books Heading Right for Recycling/Landfill? (UPDATED)

It is nearly 2008, does anyone still use the phone book?

Last month I received two bags of new phone books at my old address. And so our big phone book doesn’t get lonely in the plastic bag it now has a little companion.

Then the other day a ton of new phone books were delivered to our loft building. They delivered, you guessed it, more phone books than we have units in the building. Many residents don’t even have a land line — most of us just use our cell.

This past weekend I was with a friend dropping off recycling in Soulard and a woman asked us if we knew where a phone book recycling place was — she had the new books in bag ready for recycling.

What a waste.

In my old place I have a stack of books from the last several years awaiting recycling. The phone book recycling spots, when you can find one, usually states they don’t take the current year. I see a lot of resources being expenses for something most of us don’t want. Like junk mail and the free newspaper, this is litter in my estimation. Litter that I’m now responsible to deal with. Next year this thing needs to be something people can request, not something forced upon us. Recycling locations here.

UPDATE 12/4/2007 @ 8:30am:

I admit it, I fell for it. The recycling link above is for Yellowbook — not AT&T’s Yellow Pages. How many companies get to use that same symbol of fingers thumbing through a book? The phone books being passed out now are from AT&T.

This past April you may recall the excitement about not losing the Yellow Pages HQ to another city, such as Atlanta. Yes, AT&T’s Yellow Pages division is based right here in St. Louis with 655 downtown jobs.

So, wanting to be correct about it, I decided to use yellowpages.com to find a recycling center to get rid of these just delivered books. You will love this, the city in which the division is based doesn’t have a recycling partner!!!

Amazing, you can’t recycle the phone book in the town where the phone book company is based!  I can think of one good place to dump all these phone books — the big open (and mostly wasted) plaza in front of AT&T’s main building downtown.  They dump these things in our yards all the time.  My condo association now has a big stack of these things that we will have to collectively pay to remove.

People will just pitch them, adding to our municipal disposal costs and filling up shrinking landfill space.  AT&T needs to understand that we don’t really care how much advertising they sold and what sort of promises they made to these advertisers.  Make deals with grocery stores to leave stacks in their lobby’s or some place where those who want a new phone book can pick one up.

Food Waste; Disposal, Trash, Backyard Composting or Feeding Worms

Ever give much thought to your food scraps? All those potato peelings, bits of onion or excess from a head of cabbage? Most people just scrape the food off into the trash can or flip the switch and the disposal grinds it all up. Now is the first time in nearly 20 years that I’ve had a garbage disposal, all my post-parents places have lacked a disposal. With the exception of six months living in an 8th floor studio apartment on Lindell, I’ve had a yard for these past two decades. And in having a yard, I managed to compost nearly all my food waste — be that scraps from preparing a meal to the usual table scraps.

Now I am back in an urban setting in a multi-family building lacking a yard to compost in. Composting is great, allowing earth’s worms to come up and help out the process of breaking down matter. So what do you do in a situation where you lack the yard and earth worms? Well, you bring the worms into the home for a process known as vermicomposting. But before I get into looking at the process I plan to undertake, let’s look at the environmental implications to more conventional disposal methods — the garbage disposal to grind and send it all to the sewage treatment plant and just dumping it in the garbage for shipment off to a land fill.

The disposal is about as convenient as they come, using it to rid ourselves of meal prep scraps as well as those un-eaten bits post-dinner. Dump, turn on the water and flip the switch. Like magic it is gone. Ever think about where it goes?

The ground-up waste does NOT go back to nature’s water supply to be gobbled up by fish and other life forms. It must first pass through the sewage-treatment plant (or your septic system). This not only increases the load on our already overburdened sewage-treatment facilities, the process also removes any food value the waste might have had further down the line. (source: Grinning Planet)

So food that might help out your own garden is flushed into the sewer system, our very old and fragile sewer system, that MSD is spending Billions (yes, Billions with a B) to upgrade. MSD covers all of the city and the bulk of St. Louis County. Other parts of our 16-county region are covered under other sewer systems or are on septic. While I couldn’t find what to flush and not flush on MSD’s website I did see in other cities them asking that you not use your disposal, that food waste be placed in the trash. Which brings us to land fills.

Have you seen the massive pile of trash over in Illinois? In the news lately has been the proposed trash transfer center in South County that the Fred Weber company wants to build. Fred Weber wants to take their old quarry site to bring in trash trucks so the trash can be collected and then loaded onto larger trucks for removal. Neighbors are understandably upset. However, I wonder how many of those that are so upset bother to recycle their trash? Or to look for items with reduced packaging? Their objections would have more impact if they didn’t help contribute to the problem of trash collection and removal to a landfill.

Oh yeah, the landfill. I’ve read that responsible landfills are supposed to allow food waste to decompose but I can’t imagine how — locked up tight in the hefty bag with all the other garbage it doesn’t get any air. The reality is that what we throw away stays in a landfill basically forever. Where, we don’t exactly know. Sadly, most really don’t care.

The only green alternative for food waste is backyard composting. Layer by layer you are slowly building a wonderful fertilizer to use in your vegetable or flower garden. But say you are like me, now lacking a yard, you are not out of luck. Why? Worms can be house broken. In a well-prepared plastic or wood container in the home they can eat through your garbage — it is what they do.

Today I purchased a $5 container at Family Dollar, I’ve shredded up old paper used to pack dishes and I’m ready to start drilling holes for air circulation (proper air circulation eliminates odor you might get otherwise). I’m not going to attempt to explain the ins and outs of vermicomposting to you — I’ll leave that to the experts. Here is a fun “how to” video with a master composter:

[Note: embedded video seemed to only work well on the Mac so I have deleted it. Use the link provided to watch the video.]

This video can be found here. Barb can also be seen in two Freshtopia videos located here and here. You can get more information on vermicomposting at Wiki. The Fed’s even support the idea with their own page on the EPA website! I’ll keep you posted on the progress and any issues I may encounter along the way.

Next time you toss out the core of that organic apple that you bought at Whole Foods, after driving there in your Prius hybrid, think about how green your lifestyle really is and if you can go further.

UPDATE 11/29/07 @ 8:20pm — Ryanne and Jay managed to kill their worms after five months.  Check out updates here and here.  I’ve yet to start my bin yet but I am very close — still researching just the right container.