Cupples Warehouses and the Future

There has been all sorts of beautiful renovations downtown south of Market Street, but the area continues to lack something that will make it a truly vibrant neighborhood. Here are some of my suggestions.

First of all, while they should not necessarily be eliminated, the entrance and exit ramps onto the elevated lanes of Highway 40 are intrusive, ugly, rapidly deteriorating and most importantly, they waste space. When the rebuilding of these structures occur, they should be reconfigured to fit in more hospitably with the street grid.

Likewise, there are huge swaths of "greenspace" that waste valuable real estate, often times for the sake of safety. I've been told that the government didn't want buildings across the street from the federal courthouse for safety reasons, but that is totally illogical since you can drive right by the courthouse anyway. After living in Washington, DC in the post-9-11 world, I watched as security barriers went up all around that city, despite many of the measures merely ruining public space as opposed to protecting anyone. For example, the federal courthouse in St. Louis has Jersey barriers up around the courthouse; they make the place look secure, but in reality would only stop a truck bomb from getting a grand total of another ten or so feet closer to the building. Certainly they make the area look bad, at minimal benefit to safety.

Also, work to make Walnut Street and actually appealing street to walk down; as can be seen below, the builders of City Hall clearly intended Walnut to be the grand vista upon which to approach City Hall. It is marred by a bridge from the jail to the courthouse. While I know it would cost large amounts of money, perhaps the bridge could be turned into a tunnel under the street.

Finally, embrace the juxtaposition between new and old; the area south of Market has lost much of its original character, but that does not mean that a neighborhood with its own character can't rise in its place.

Let's be honest, the whole area is dominated by courthouses, which in general are places people don't want to be unless they work inside. My experience is that many courthouse areas tend to take on a similar pallor as the courthouses around them. Likewise, government office buildings seem to have the same effect on creating drab neighborhoods. Consequently, the area should have a strong mix of all different types of businesses and housing to create a strong community in the Cupples Warehouse District.

Wrong Way, Cupples Warehouses

You're right, this is the wrong way to make a downtown thrive: crashing interstates and absurdly designed entrance and exist ramps through once vibrant neighborhoods and historic structures that are so prized today.

I-55

I wish I could go back in time and tell the mayor of St. Louis that he was making the biggest mistake of his life by building the interstates through the heart of the city. Sixty years later, our nation is addicted to a product that can only be procured through great expense or from nations who use the revenue to oppress their own people, or even attack us. And more importantly, the interstates eviscerated the city, robbing it of cohesion, thousands of houses, and customers who would have added millions in tax dollars every year.

Council Plaza and Grand Center Part 4: Accessability and Social Justice

I couldn't help but notice what a horrible pedestrian environment Grand Boulevard provides south of Laclede to Chouteau. Perhaps the most galling problem is the double-decker interstate that cuts right through the middle of the area.
Imagine being in a wheelchair, or even maybe a little less mobile than the average person, and walking through this mess of broken cement and weeds at the corner of Forest Park Avenue and Grand. For the residents of Council Plaza, the majority elderly or wheelchair-bound, this is not a theoretical exercise, it is reality.Then, after you somehow manage to cross over the broken pavement, you're faced with the overpass over the traffic sewer that Forest Park Avenue is at Grand. Pedestrians hate the roar of traffic, and avoid areas where they're subjected to it.Do you remember when Highway 40 only went under Grand? Already, in the 1960's, streets were being designed to move cars, not people.Nowadays, you are faced with the double-decker interstate at the same spot, with the claustrophobic east-bounds lanes above you...
...and the east-bound lanes roaring by below you. It's not surprising that the Fox Theater doesn't recommend its patrons take Metrolink, located south of the interstate to evening shows. A little known fact: Highway 40 follows the path of the old Manchester Avenue through this area. If you look closely at some of the buildings through the area, you can see storefronts facing the highway.When I visited Council Plaza, while gazing at the buildings, I couldn't help but notice all of the people sitting around inside the complex, almost like they were prisoners. I don't blames them; take a walk up Grand from the interstate sometime and imagine doing it in a wheelchair, or with a walker.I think it is a social crime that American society has gotten to the point where its elderly and disabled are warehoused away in an isolated apartment complex, removed from everyday society and the benefits social interactions provide to the psyche.A first step would be to fill in the underpass for Forest Park Avenue under Grand; the bridge is deteriorating and will need to be replaced soon. Why not fill it in and create a humane, pedestrian-friendly intersection? I frequently use Forest Park Avenue, and I would be fine with having my trip extended by 30 seconds at a traffic light at Grand, just so this intersection could reflect the energy so long suppressed in this area.

They Don't Build Them Like They Used To #3: The Poplar Street Bridge

The Poplar Street Bridge was the last of the four great bridges over the Mississippi in downtown St. Louis, and the sixth to cross the river in the city limits. Like all of the bridges, it has its own distinct character, one that is perhaps not as aesthetically pleasing as the famous Eads Bridge, or as intimidating as the massiveness of the MacArthur and its leviathan superstructure.Built simultaneously with the construction of the Gateway Arch, the bridge has come to represent for many the antithesis of the design ideals embodied in its more famous neighbor to the north.Upon examining the bridge up close from below, I realized that the bridge is actually two separate bridge decks, sitting on the same piers as they cross the river. For some reason, people “hang out” in the shadow of the bridge along Leonor K. Sullivan Blvd; on the day I was there, the roar of drills up on the deck of the bridge was overwhelming.I was a little mystified by the orange paint showing through, but then I realized it must be a method of showing where the gray top coat has flaked off. There was a lot of orange paint showing.It is truly an ugly and depressing bridge, and a worthy addition to the "They Don't Build Them Like They Used To" club.
The approaches to the bridge on the St. Louis side are depressing, to say the least. I sometimes imagine all of the teaming life and industry that once occurred on what is now essentially, dead, useless and fallow space.The whole area is just flat out ugly, with nothing but stained flood walls and railroad trestles crossing each other and the interstate above.Seriously, they want to put an RV parking lot under the bridge approaches? Do they realize how loud it is? I admit that I don't own an RV, and therefore don't know how good the insulation is, but I can't imagine it would drown out the roar of traffic up above.I see little hope of the space under the Poplar Street Bridge being "activated" by any proposal, short of tearing the bridge down, which is not going to happen anytime soon anyway.

A Little Bit of Dutchtown, Part 4

I love the variety of housing stock in the largest neighborhood in South St. Louis, Dutchtown. It is a huge area, and seems to have developed over a long period of time. Most of the building stock is intact, even if it is partially abandoned.I've always been fascinated by how close I-55 comes to the street grid; newer interstates seem to cut a much wider swath of right-of-way.Dutchtown has great things going on it, and not so great things as well. Will time only tell which direction this neighborhood goes?

Hyde Park in the Snow

Southwest Freeway, Washington, DC

The Southwest Freeway was one of the few legs of what would have been a giant, destructive double loop of interstates planned for Washington, DC. Thankfully, the interstates were stopped before any more damage could be done.Sadly, it was too late to salvage the connectivity of Southwest to the rest of the city; the area remains isolated and largely out of the public consciousness of the city.See its and its mate, the Southeast Freeway, from the air here.

Highway 40: The Emperor Has No Clothes

So I'm confused, how is the new I-64 better than the old one? All the old curves are still there, the road is still three lanes through the most congested portion around I-170, and traffic is actually worse than it was two years ago. My parents told me they ended up in stopped traffic going westbound on Sunday, and I encountered much, much heavier traffic west and east of the road closure on the same day. I suspect we are seeing what Robert Moses discovered decades before, and our highway engineers should have expected: you build more lanes, and you get more traffic. Why? Because people see a new interstate, and everyone immediately starts driving on it. Big surprise. And the accordion effect of going for three to four to three and then back to four lanes again compresses and slows down traffic. Driving over Hampton, I could see traffic backing up westbound around Clayton Avenue--the same place it began to back up ten years ago when I was an intern at the Art Museum. When is this collective fog going to lift and everyone realizes that the new interstate, while technically safer, solved none of our traffic woes?

Left Merge, Southwest Freeway, Washington, DC

A Drive Down the Jones Falls

My friends Rachel, Mike and Nancy and I hit the road from Bolton Hill to Canton, two neighborhoods in Baltimore. We decided to take the lower portion of the Jones Falls Expressway to get there, as it is the fastest route and we were pressed for time. Also, it affords views of many different parts of the city. We got on at North Avenue, where the massive interstate viaduct precludes any chance of a walkable environment. The intersection is famous for the sale of bean pies by people who walk down the median dressed to the nines in 1940's fashion, complete with bowler hats some days. Later that evening, Rachel and I saw a swarm of children on motorbikes and four wheelers flying by the same point--without adult supervision, of course. Only in Baltimore: I remarked later that I had literally seen anarchy at the point. There was no one in control of North Avenue at that moment other than the criminals. But I digress; this post is really about an interstate and its relation, and future relation, to the city through which it cuts.Soon after getting on the Jones Falls, as locals call it, you reach what I heard referred to as Dead Man's Curve: two 45 degree turns in the interstate as it followed the Jones Falls River Valley. You can see one of the turns from this aerial photo from an earlier post. Penn Station is viewable to the left. True to its notorious reputation, coming home later Saturday we saw the remnants of a horrible car crash right at the first northbound turn. Now that I think about it, some of the worst late night crashes I have come upon are on this interstate. Now, we switch to a video following the expressway as it turns into a surface street, President Avenue. See another aerial view of Dead Man's Curve here and a view of where the interstate ends here.
The remaining pictures show the northbound view of the Jones Falls, demonstrating all of the asinine amount of concrete that covers over what must have once been a spectacular valley.Straight ahead is an infamous three story interchange, which rises one hundred feet above the valley floor, destroying any sense of what was once here.Druid Hill Park is scraped on the eastern edge by the Jones Falls as well. Tomorrow, we will see more of the industry that thrived for over one hundred years on the rapids of the Jones Falls.