VA Hospital Should Expand East To Grand Boulevard

Yesterday I explained that John Cochran Veterans Hospital Wants To Expand South Into Grand Center, Raze Historic Palladium Music Hall. This would involve taking an active union hall, a popular restaurant that just rebuilt its building, and the historic Palladium. It would also require the city to vacate a public street: Enright.

It would also leave John Cochran Hospital set far back from Grand, in stark contrast to urban buildings to the north and south along Grand Blvd. My solution then, is to look at expanding the hospital out toward Grand Blvd, rather than to the South.

Of course, after the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the front would need to be a blast-resitant design. They’d need less room for surface parking and valet service if they actually embraced public transit.

Directions to the hospital takes you to the driving directions page.  If you look for it you’ll see the on public transportation page which says:

Public transportation is available at both divisions. The Grand Boulevard bus will take you to the John Cochran Divsion [sic]. The Jefferson Barracks Division may be reached by using either the Broadway or Lindbergh bus. For more information on public transportation for the bus lines or for Metrolink rail service please contact Metro St. Louis at (314) 231-2345 or visit their web site at *Metro St. Louis.

* Link will take you outside of the Department of Veterans Affairs Website. VA does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of the linked websites. The link will open in a new window.

The above should be written as something like:

Both divisions can be reached via public transportation. The John Cochran Division is served by the the following routes:

• #70 Grand*
• #97 Delmar* (1 block south)
• #94 Page* (3 blocks north)
• #10 Gravois-Lindell* (5 blocks south)
• MetroLink light rail (Exit Grand Station, transfer to the northbound #70 Grand MetroBus)

The Jefferson Barracks Division may be reached by using either the #40 Broadway or #48 Lindbergh MetroBus routes.

For more information on public transportation for the bus lines or for Metrolink rail service please contact Metro St. Louis at (314) 231-2345 or visit their web site at *Metro St. Louis.

* Link will take you outside of the Department of Veterans Affairs Website. VA does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of the linked websites. The link will open in a new window.

That little bit of extra information might convince someone to use transit rather than drive.veer

Back to expansion, there might be legitimate reasons why adding to the south makes a lot of sense in terms of internal flow, but it is also possible they never considered adding out front rather than to the side.

— Steve Patterson

John Cochran Veterans Hospital Wants To Expand South Into Grand Center, Raze Historic Palladium Music Hall

The Veterans Administration operates two facilities in the St. Louis area:

The VA St. Louis Health Care System provides inpatient and ambulatory care in medicine, surgery, psychiatry, neurology, and rehabilitation, and many other subspecialty areas. It is a two-division facility that serves veterans and their families in east central Missouri and southwestern Illinois.

The John Cochran Division, named after the late Missouri congressman, is located in midtown St. Louis and has all of the medical center’s operative surgical capabilities, the ambulatory care unit, intensive care units, outpatient psychiatry clinics, and expanded laboratory.

The Jefferson Barracks Division is a multi-building complex overlooking the Mississippi River in south St. Louis County. It provides psychiatric treatment, spinal cord injury treatment, a nursing home care unit, geriatric health care, rehabilitation services, and a rehabilitation domiciliary program for homeless veterans. (source)

The John Cochran facility, located in midtown, was built in the 1950s, on the site of the once-opulant Vandeventer Place private street:

Founder, Peter Lewis Vandeventer, came to St. Louis in the 1860s with brothers William and Henry Barnum Vandeventer. Peter Lewis Vandeventer and Henry Barnum Vandeventer were Wall Street stockbrokers with a firm located at 6 Wall St., New York City. They made their money from selling stocks and took the train west to St. Louis to invest it in land.

Peter Lewis Vandeventer died in 1879, during the development of Vandeventer Place, a gated, luxurious private place in the neighborhood with stately mansions and a beautiful fountain as its centerpiece. His Missouri estate was managed by several corrupt lawyers, who stole much of the money from the sale of the lots at Vandeventer Place. His family remained in St. Louis for some time after his death, living in Vandeventer Place in a large mansion.

Vandeventer Place met with its demise in 1947, when the eastern half was demolished for the Veterans’ Administration’s new hospital. The western portion was demolished about ten years later, when the City acquired it as the site for a children’s detention home. The fountain and east gates survive in Forest Park. (Wikipedia)

The formerly secluded street on the western edge of the city had fallen out of favor among the wealthy, they sought to buy or build mansions even further west in the city or into St. Louis County.  John Cochran Hospital has always remained within its original 11+ acre site of Grand on the East, Enright (formerly Morgan) on the South, Spring on the West, and Bell on the North. Granted, the VA has various surface parking lots beyond this.

Now the VA is looking to expand , funding for a new tower was included in a 2009 spending bill:

A $44 million appropriation included in a new $447 billion spending bill approved by Congress this week will provide seed money for a 262,000-square-foot hospital tower for the midtown facility.

[snip]

The proposed VA medical center expansion will feature a larger emergency room, wings for spinal cord injury and mental health patients needing immediate medical treatment, more private bedrooms and better room structures for medical equipment and records. (stltoday.com)

Why hasn’t this moved forward in the last four years? If you’ll recall, John Cochran VA soon had some very bad PR issues:

• June 2010: VA hospital may have infected 1,800 veterans with HIV
• February 2011: Surgeries are suspended at Cochran center
• April 2012: Issues go unsolved at St. Louis VA medical center

Then in June 2012 an expansion story ran once again:

An expansion is planned for the John Cochran VA Medical Center, but it could affect a new, widely popular soul food restaurant. The expansion would increase the facility by 60 percent. The “Sweetie Pies Upper Crust Eatery” sits on land that is being looked at for the expansion project. (Fox2: Could VA Hospital Expansion Force Sweetie Pies Upper Crust Out?)

So they want to expand South to Delmar, closing Enright and razing some buildings. What impact would this have on Grand Center? What buildings would need to be razed? Is there a better option for expansion?

Only four buildings are on the thin block bounded by Enright, Grand, Delmar, and Spring:

1. a vacant former gas station already owned by the VA,
2. Laborer’ Local 42 union hall,
3. Sweetie Pie’s Upper Crust,
4. Vacant former HHV Thrift Plus (aka The Palladium, Club Plantation)

Here’s a look at these four:

Interesting, 66 years ago the VA wanted a hotel and a club razed or they wouldn’t build and “the VA itself is prohibited by law from buying the block because it is not contiguous to its hospital site.” Not sure when the hotel was razed, but the club remains — for now.

So we have a newly built & popular restaurant that faces Delmar, a 1970s union hall and a historic 1912-13 musical hall facing Enright, all in the path of the Veterans Administration.  The VA owns the tiny 1950 gas station, the other three are privately owned.

Tomorrow I’ll suggest how to expand the VA hospital while also improving, not hurting, Grand Center.

— Steve Patterson

Potential Development Sites Along Proposed Streetcar Line, Part 6: Compton to Vandeventer

As I’ve done for the last month, this is another post on potential development sites along the proposed initial route of the St. Louis Streetcar.  The sections already reviewed are as follows:

1. Olive 15th-16th
2. Olive 16th-18th
3. 14th & Olive To North Florissant & St. Louis Ave.
4. Olive 18th to Jefferson
5. Jefferson to Compton
   

This post will cover the section from Olive & Compton to Lindell & Vandeventer (map). For those unfamiliar with the area, Olive splits off to the north but to motorists Olive becomes Lindell (pronounced Lindle). The entire south side of this stretch of Olive/Lindell is the campus of Saint Louis University (SLU). The north is a mix of SLU, private, and institutional properties.

We’ll start at Compton and head west.

The buildings & land on the other side of Lindell from SLU’s Compton Garage are ripe for development, I’m just lacking images of them.

The corner of Lindell & Grand should get major new buildings. There are already substantial buildings in the area, especially to the north & west. These two corners were land banked by SLU so the streetcar is the perfect time to withdraw them and put them to good use activating the intersection.

An interesting paragraph from the 1978 midtown nomination:

Unfortunately, Midtown is still perceived by many as a dangerous area riddled with street crime and all manner of urban ills, the most prominent of which is the current “black sploitation” fare served at the Fabulous Fox. In spite of this onus, a 1977 walking tour sponsored by the St. Louis Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and New Town/St. Louis, Inc. drew hundreds of curious and concerned

St. Louisans to Midtown. The solution for the revitalization of existing structures and the continuing education of the general public will not be easy, but to abandon Midtown is to dismiss one of the strongest concentrations of architecturally significant buildings in St. Louis.

There is more developable area north of Lindell and  west of Spring, both vacant buildings and vacant land.

— Steve Patterson

Potential Development Sites Along Proposed Streetcar Line, Part 5: Jefferson to Compton

This is the fifth post in a series looking at potential development sites along the proposed initial route of the St. Louis Streetcar.  The first four parts were:

1. Olive 15th-16th
2. Olive 16th-18th
3. 14th & Olive To North Florissant & St. Louis Ave.
4. Olive 18th to Jefferson

This post will cover the 0.6 mile stretch of Olive from Jefferson to Compton (map). Let’s start with the North side of Olive at Jefferson:

Some existing buildings aren’t as tall as would be nice but their age/height will be a nice contrast to the new construction we should see go up over the twenty years. In short, lots of opportunities for new construction on vacant land.

OK, let’s cross Olive at Compton and return east to Jefferson. It would be impossible to look at this section of the proposed route without discussing the urban renewal clearance of Mill Creek Valley:

By World War II, Mill Creek’s tenements and faded town houses were home to nearly 20,000 people, many of them poor blacks who had migrated north from the cotton fields. More than half the dwellings lacked running water, and 80 percent didn’t have interior bathrooms.

Tucker proposed knocking over nearly everything and starting over. In 1955, city voters overwhelmingly approved a $10 million bond issue for demolition, on the promise that the federal government would reimburse most of it. The local NAACP endorsed the idea. Work began on Feb. 16, 1959, at 3518 Laclede Avenue, where a headache ball smashed a house that dated to the 1870s.

The bulldozers swiftly transformed the city’s “No. 1 Eyesore” into an area derided as “Hiroshima Flats.” Among the few buildings spared was the old Vashon High School, now part of Harris-Stowe State University. When work began in 1961 on University Heights Village apartments, only 20 original families still called Mill Creek home. (stltoday.com – A look back • Clearing of Mill Creek Valley changed the face of the city)

The area from Union Station to Grand was cleared. This area got new construction like the A.G. Edwards HQ, now Wells Fargo Advisors, LaClede Town (razed), Heritage House senior apartments, and the “flying saucer” gas station on Grand at Forest Park, now a Starbucks. n

I’m excited about the possibly having a modern streetcar line a block away from my loft, but the redevelopment potential in midtown is phenomenal. I’ve been losing sleep for the past week as I picture what this could look like at full build out.  The vision must come before the bricks and mortar.

— Steve Patterson

Readers Pick Urban Chestnut As Favorite St. Louis Brew Pub

The votes are in and Urban Chestnut is the favorite St. Louis brew pub among UrbanReviewSTL readers, with a comfortable lead over 2nd place Tap Room. Results at end.

Congratulations to everyone at Urban Chestnut!

Here are the results/links:

1. Urban Chestnut 73 [20.86%]
2. Tap Room 55 [15.71%]
3. Civil Life 50 [14.29%]
4. 4 Hands 31 [8.86%]
5. Square One 29 [8.29%]
6. Bottleworks 24 [6.86%]
7. Six Row 24 [6.86%]
8. Perennial 20 [5.71%]
9. Morgan Street 10 [2.86%]
10. Trailhead Brewing 7 [2%]
11. Ferguson Brewing 6 [1.71%]
12. Kirkwood Station 5 [1.43%]
13. Augusta Brewing 5 [1.43%]
14. Buffalo Brewing 3 [0.86%]
15. Cathedral Square 3 [0.86%]
16. Other: 3 [0.86%]
17. Alpha Brewing 2 [0.57%]

I was glad to see the newly opened Alpha Brewing received some votes, I was afraid it wouldn’t since it’s so new.  I’ve been to too few of the brew pubs on this list so I need to get out more.

Here are the three “other” answers supplied by those taking the poll:

1. i dont drink
2. Anheuser-Busch Brewery Tour!
3. AB

One doesn’t have to drink to enjoy a brew pub, I’ve been to the Tap Room many times without drinking. Sorry, Anheuser-Busch is not a brew pub.

— Steve Patterson