Downtown Views

More Benton Park

Benton Park

Pruitt-Igoe Nature Preserve

Wow, the old Pruitt-Igoe site is looking really lush this time of year! I can't wait to see what exciting new development will be occurring on the site soon!

Tower Grove East Summer Nights

Benton Park Mansard Roofs

Invented, or at least popularized by the great 17th Century French architect François Mansart, the mansard roofs of inner neighborhoods represent some of the oldest remaining houses in the city.

Benton Park Restaurants

Benton Park is anchored by its neighborhood restaurants, some of which can be seen here. Niche, above, has garnered national attention for its food and location.Sidney Street Cafe continues to operate in the neighborhood, long a symbol of its revitalization.Frazier's Brown Bag is another great restaurant across the highway from the brewery.I've never been to Yemanja or Benton Park Cafe, but I've heard they're good as well.

14th Street Mall, Old North St. Louis

Now that the street is in, I went back to the 14th Street Mall, now gone and renamed Crown Square. It looks sharp.The best part is I noticed buildings I had never seen before, and buildings I've remembered for a long time with their last ten coats of paint removed.This building below always reminds me of something that should be along a boardwalk on the East Coast or something.I have absolutely no recollection of this building, though its stream-lined design in vitrolite (?) is very cool.

A Few Glimpses Around Old North

Over My Dead Body

The Tallest Building In Chesterfield?

There Are Too Many Gas Stations in the World

And there especially too many at busy intersections that make accessing said gas stations next to impossible. This station, at the infamous intersection of Clarkson and Manchester, was only accessible from southbound Clarkson, and one small, impossible to enter entrance from westbound Manchester. Not surprisingly, it went out of business, in an area with numerous other gas stations. On average, when I get gas, I'm one of maybe two other people at any given station. Do we really need so many wasteful slabs of concrete?

Cumae, Campania, Italy

"Excisum Euboicae latus ingens rupis in antrum,
quo lati ducunt aditus centum, ostia centum,
unde ruunt totidem uoces, responsa Sibyllae."

1,000th Post: Sprawl and the Continuing Threat to Our Natural Environment

For my 1000th post at Saint Louis Patina, I considered having a "greatest hits" or featuring my favorite St. Louis buildings and neighborhoods. Then I realized I had already done that back on my third anniversary, which was only a couple of months ago in May. I realized I needed to focus on something else, and my idea was hatched last Sunday when my parents and I went out to see the destruction firsthand in the new right-of-way for the expanded 141. Several of my mother's teacher co-workers had commented on their dismay at the loss of so many trees at the intersection of 141 and Ladue Road so we decided to see for ourselves. As we came over the hill on eastbound Ladue towards the intersection, a collective gasp escaped all of our mouths.Due to stimulus money becoming available, the State of Missouri is proceeding with the final leg of the expansion of 141, or Woods Mill Road as it's called up this way. It's a process that has taken at least the last twenty years, when the first section, through Valley Park was completed. 141 has been choked with traffic for at least the last thirty years, if not longer, so one could argue that expanding the highway is merely accepting the reality of the situation--there are far too many cars on far too narrow of a road.Certainly no one would disagree that the intersection of 141 and Ladue didn't need some sort of improvement; the flooding that occurred because of the nearby creek has claimed far too many lives over the years. I fully support a new bridge and intersection that doesn't flood when it rains.But I can't help but express sadness at the destruction of so many trees, in what was once a rural, agricultural area of the county.Perhaps the State's rebuilding of 141 to Olive was inevitable; the traffic volumes at present seem to have demanded a solution. But I must admit that the whole 141 expansion has left me wanting. What was intended to be an alternative to 270 is a series of short sections of freeway punctured with stop lights, and arbitrarily low speed limits set not for safety but for revenue in the suburbs the road passes through (Yeah, I'm talking about you, Manchester). If so much had to be destroyed to build the road, at least the road should have been as well-built as possible.What I cannot fathom is the decision by St. Louis County to continue 141 north of Olive to connect with the Maryland Heights Expressway. There has never been a road there, and there doesn't need to be. The real reason is Maryland Heights' desire to develop the Howard Bend area, one of the last agricultural flood plains in the county. As Westport Plaza empties out, the suburb has decided to build its replacement in the floodplain, instead of taking the time to renovate and refurbish the aging Westport, which is still an architecturally interesting example of a mixed-use early 1980's development. What it comes down to is sprawl, and the Balkanization of St. Louis County that forces the tiny principalities--er, municipalities--of the region to fight over a finite number of tax dollars.We cannot continue to spread out our population at a greater rate than the population growth of our region. The metropolitan region is at least 17 times large geographically today than it was in 1950, but it is only 2.5 times larger in actual population.We cannot continue to waste our resources on expanding a region that cannot support the infrastructure required to get people from sixty miles outside of St. Louis to their jobs in downtown. We just can't support that. Everyone complains about road conditions, and chalk it up to "government waste" as the reason, but the reality is that there is no money to fix roads with such a small, dispersed tax base. We must begin to design our region to be more manageable fiscally. The continued march of the suburbs into our nation's food producing agricultural heartland is foolhardy, and will ultimately result in the decline of our country as America becomes reliant on foreign imports of food--something America has never had to do until now.

Yes, yes, I know, you don't want to live around those people, but your wasteful way of life is killing America. Houses are not McDonald's wrappers; we have to start taking better care of what we already have, and we cannot simply abandon neighborhoods when the houses get "too old." We must return to the City, and reuse the land that is currently sitting dormant. Thousands of acres in the heart of the City sit ready for new houses and businesses, but yet we continue to destroy our natural environment on our edges instead. How much more wasteful will America get?See the official websites for the two halves of the project here: for the 141 extension from Ladue to Olive, click here; for the "Page Olive Connector" project, click here.

Historic Chesterfield, Part #2

The Mertz Cabin above is an early example of a log cabin the Chesterfield area; while log cabins may seem primitive, in reality they required a fair amount of ingenuity.Above is the Davis House, where my parents' good friend Laurain David lived for many years until she passed away at the age of 90 several years ago. She told my parents tales of when all the roads in West County were gravel, a surprisingly short amount of time ago. Her house dates from the 1840's and was moved from across Olive Street Road to the park. Laurain never like the color the park had painted it; it was always white when she lived in it. The sunflowers below are not nearly as tall as mine, but they have bigger blooms. Everyone loves barns, and the Sellenriek and Schlueter Barns are great examples of the all-important structure in agriculture.I still find the occasional barn scattered here and there throughout West County, and they are increasingly becoming a rare commodity as they succumb to old age and disrepair.