Thoughts on NGA West’s Upcoming $10 Million Dollar Landscaping Project

The new NGA West campus , Jefferson & Cass, has been under construction for a few years now.

Next NGA West is a large-scale construction project that will build a new facility for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in St. Louis, Missouri.

This $1.7B project is managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and executed by McCarthy HITT Joint Venture, with oversight by NGA and the U.S. Air Force. The 97-acre project site is located in the historic St. Louis Place neighborhood at the intersection of Jefferson and Cass avenues.

When complete, the campus will include a 700,000-square-foot office building, two parking garages, a visitor center, a delivery inspection facility and secure entrance/exit points. The staff of 3,150 will move from their current Soulard, St. Louis, location to the Next NGA West in 2026.

NGA

The primary structures on the site (main, two parking garages, visitors center) are now clearly visible from outside the perimeter. For security reasons the main building is in the very center of the site, far away from the fence on each side. This is a military facility with security you’d expect at any military base.

One of the four remaining contracts on this project is for landscaping, here’s the summary:

More than $10,000,000 — Anticipated award Fall 2023

As one of the set-aside projects to the large NGA N2W design-build (D-B) project, this design-bid-build (D-B-B) project will provide site-wide landscaping, including site plantings, site furnishings, landscape lighting, and irrigation. There is no demarcation zone established for landscaping as it encompasses the entire site. The main D-B contractor will provide a master plan and concept landscape design; this project will use this information to develop the planting, irrigation, landscape lighting, and site furnishings design for procurement and installation.

Approved for Public Release #20-749

NGA West Business Opportunities

Don’t expect this to look like a Chesterfield office park, there won’t be large swaths of perfectly manicured turf grass with stripes. Thankfully they’re going for a more sustainable landscape, with natives instead of useless turf grass.

The NGA site plan includes a walking path around the main building, so the landscape should create a nice environment for NGA’s employees. It should also attract pollinators while not making the urban heat island effect any worse — perhaps even reducing.

The security fence is set back from the three adjacent roads (Cass, Jefferson/Parnell, and 22nd Street) so there will street trees, tree lawns and such. Plus the corner of Jefferson & Cass includes a small green space outside the secured area. Hopefully these areas along streets won’t be filled with turf grass due to its high maintenance.

Landscape maintenance will be one of many future service contracts at NGA West. Unfortunately, most/all of our existing landscape maintenance firms are set up for large areas of turf grass, edged & mowed with noisy high pollution equipment.

Experts say lawn and garden equipment represents about 85% of all SOREs [small off road engines] in operation today nationally, and those engines are typically manufactured without the pollution controls used on cars.

Virtually all small engines are two-stroke, which burn a dirtier fuel mix than vehicles do. Advocates say that in addition to the climate-changing emissions released by the engines, workers are exposed directly to their exhaust and rarely wear filters to protect their lungs.

Other people complain about the noise they make, especially when so many suburban residents now work from home.

USA Today: “Gas leaf blowers and lawn mowers are shockingly bad for the planet. Bans are beginning to spread.”

I personally love the idea of banning gas lawn equipment, but it would be nice to see professional landscape maintenance companies move in that direction voluntarily. I can see a firm that uses all electric equipment (including electric trucks) getting the lucrative maintenance contract ar NGA West. Better for NGA’s employees and those doing the actual landscape maintenance work!

Interested? One place to start:

Our mission is to transition landscape maintenance to low noise, zero emissions practices with positive solutions to protect the health of workers, children, the public, and the environment. We provide research, education, outreach, and solutions, working collaboratively with communities, businesses, schools, and government agencies.

Quiet Communities: Quiet Landcare

Manicured turf grass lawns are great in few places, such as ballfields. Otherwise, not so much. Traditional lawn care equipment is very noisy — every week at our apartment you’ve got the edger, mower, and leaf blower. It’s expensive, dirty, and noisy.

— Steve
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St. Louis urban planning, policy, and politics @ UrbanReviewSTL since October 31, 2004. For additional content please consider following on Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, and/or X (Twitter).

Racially Restrictive Covenants Ruled Unenforceable 75 Years Ago Today

At the beginning of the 20th century racism was thriving, though it took different forms in different places. The south had harsh ”Jim Crow” laws, lynchings, etc. Cities like St. Louis were less overt, but were still very racially segregated.

In 1916, St. Louisans voted on a “reform” ordinance that would prevent anyone from buying a home in a neighborhood more than 75 percent occupied by another race. Civic leaders opposed the initiative, but it passed with a two-thirds majority and became the first referendum in the nation to impose racial segregation on housing. After a U.S. Supreme Court decision, Buchanan v. Warley, made the ordinance illegal the following year, some St. Louisans reverted to racial covenants, asking every family on a block or in a subdivision to sign a legal document promising to never sell to an African-American. Not until 1948 were such covenants made illegal, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Shelley v. Kraemer, a case originating in St. Louis.

— St. Louis Magazine

Here’s a summary of the two cases the U.S. Supreme Court consolidated, the namesake is from St. Louis.

In 1945, an African-American family by the name of Shelley purchased a house in St. Louis, Missouri. At the time of purchase, they were unaware that a restrictive covenant had been in place on the property since 1911. The restrictive covenant prevented “people of the Negro or Mongolian Race” from occupying the property. Louis Kraemer, who lived ten blocks away, sued to prevent the Shelleys from gaining possession of the property. The Supreme Court of Missouri held that the covenant was enforceable against the purchasers because the covenant was a purely private agreement between its original parties. As such, it “ran with the land” and was enforceable against subsequent owners. Moreover, since it ran in favor of an estate rather than merely a person, it could be enforced against a third party. A similar scenario occurred in the companion case McGhee v. Sipes from Detroit, Michigan, where the McGhees purchased property that was subject to a similar restrictive covenant. In that case, the Supreme Court of Michigan also held the covenants enforceable.

— Wikipedia

Interesting the state courts in both Missouri & Michigan found the covenants enforceable. The local civil court ruled against the neighbors…on a technically. Not enough property owners had signed on to enact it.

On October 9, 1945, respondents, as owners of other property subject to the terms of the restrictive covenant, brought suit in the Circuit Court of the city of St. Louis praying that petitioners Shelley be restrained from taking possession of the property and that judgment be entered divesting title out of petitioners Shelley and revesting title in the immediate grantor or in such other person as the court should direct. The trial court denied the requested relief on the ground that the restrictive agreement, upon which respondents based their action, had never become final and complete because it was the intention of the parties to that agreement that it was not to become effective until signed by all property owners in the district, and signatures of all the owners had never been obtained.

Justia

With this 1948 decision many whites decided to leave north city for north county.

— Steve
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St. Louis urban planning, policy, and politics @ UrbanReviewSTL since October 31, 2004. For additional content please consider following on Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and/or Twitter.

St. Louis Roots: Andy Cohen

This Friday, May 5th 2023, St. Louis native Andy Cohen will get a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame:

The late-night TV talk show host and executive producer will be inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame at 5 p.m. Friday, May 5. A live ragtime band will begin performing at 4:30 p.m. 

The ceremony is free to the public and will take place in front of the Moonrise Hotel at 6177 Delmar in The Loop.

Cohen was born and raised in St. Louis and graduated from Clayton High School in 1986. He is best known as the host and executive producer of Bravo TV’s “Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen.” He was also an executive producer for “The Real Housewives” franchise and hosted numerous specials. 

KSDK

Cohen’s roots in St. Louis go back a very long time, as detailed in January 2021 on PBS’ program Finding Your Roots (Against all Odds, S7E2). NPR’s Nina Totenburg was the other guest.

If you missed this episode, or want to watch it again, it will be shown again tonight on Finding Your Roots, 9.1 7pm CST in St. Louis.

In the above clip Cohen reads about a paternal great great grandfather, Russian peddler Simon Kruvant, injured in a horse/carriage accident in 1889 at South Broadway & Koeln Avenue. We also learned Kruvant and his wife lived at 1122 N. 7th Street.

Given that Kruvant was a peddler a commercial space with room for goods, cart, and horse makes sense. This wasn’t in the Post-Dispatch archives so it must’ve been another newspaper.

To see this map page in detail click here.

This area was known as Near North for a long time, but officially it is part of Columbus Square. Before Neighborhoods Gardens and Cochran Gardens were built the neighborhood contained the highest concentration of tenements in the city.

This neighborhood welcomed the poorest immigrants, including: Irish, Jewish, Italian, and blacks escaping the Jim Crow south.

See Andy Cohen tonight on Finding Your Roots and receiving his star Friday in front of the Moonrise Hotel.

— Steve
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St. Louis urban planning, policy, and politics @ UrbanReviewSTL since October 31, 2004. For additional content please consider following on Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and/or Twitter.

19th Annual Look at the State of St. Louis’ Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive Pt 2: Kingshighway to City Limits

This post continues looking at Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in St. Louis, west of Kingshighsway. For east of Kingshighway see Part 1.

From east to west MLK Dr passes through the following wards: 14, 11, and 12. It’s a boundary for the 10th ward.

North St. Louis is the least populated part of the city, so each ward is physically larger than other wards. The bad news is this means lots of problems, poverty, etc. On the plus side the solutions that should be implemented are largely big picture, not micro neighborhood by neighborhood. The latter is how we end up with nice urban infill around a renovated historic building…across the street from a gas station/convenience store (see Arlington Grove vs Mobile in Street View.

Hopefully new aldermen will be more open to urbanist planning rather than continuing the failed suburbanization of the city. I’m not optimistic.

— Steve
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St. Louis urban planning, policy, and politics @ UrbanReviewSTL since October 31, 2004. For additional content please consider following on Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, and/or X (Twitter).

Former St. Liborius Church Complex Fits Beautifully in the Street Grid

A major reason why I decided to make St. Louis my home back in August 1990 was the complex street grid and the buildings that neatly fit into it. One of the finest examples of fitting into our decidedly non-orthogonal street grid is the former St. Liborius Church complex, bounded by Hogan, North Market & 18th streets. This is where two different grids collided (View in Google Maps).  When two grids of different orientations met the result was often awkward — this created very interesting buildings on non-rectangular sites. The views looking down streets as they bend into another grid alignment can be spectacular.

St. Liborius was a catholic parish founded by German immigrants on October 21, 1856 – 166 years ago today. In the 1850 census St. Louis had a population of 77,860 — that was a 372.8% increase over the 1840 census. By 1880 the population was 350,5218.

In March 1888 work on the foundation was underway, their existing church & school were a few blocks to the west. In June of that year it was reported the cost was $100,000 and “much of it was on hand.” In 2022 money that’s like $3.124 million!

“The church was completed in 1889. The rectory was built the following year and the convent was built in 1905. The School Sisters of Notre Dame taught in the parish school from 1859 to 1969. The parish buildings were declared a City Landmark in 1975 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.” (Wikipedia)

The year after the church opened the 1890 census showed the St. Louis population had grown to 451,770.

Let’s take a look at the church and surroundings in 1909.

The 1910 population was 687,029. By this point the parish was more than half a century old, the sanctuary more than two decades. In late August I finally got up close to the buildings, and saw inside the sanctuary.

In my 32+ years in St. Louis I’ve seen too many great 19th century buildings fall apart due to neglect & abandonment. I’ve feared the loss of these. But the former convent is owned by Karen House, a catholic worker house. The sanctuary & rectory are owned by SK8 Liborius — a skate park.

The other use for an old sanctuary I’d like to see would be as a vertical hydroponics farm.

— Steve Patterson