Valentine Street: gone, like much of the rest of downtown

In an 1868 map of the city of St. Louis, an inconspicuous five blocks along the St. Louis riverfront bore the name of Almond Street.

At some unknown point, Almond became Valentine Street, named after St. Louis's first resident Catholic priest.

HABS has a photo of one of the buildings that used to line the street:



The intimate interaction with the street is, of course, unrivaled today. This photo was taken in 1936. Valentine, an east-west street that ran just between Spruce and Poplar and ended at Broadway, was erased for the Arch Grounds.

It's easy to pick out these HABS photos and note the mass devastation to the St. Louis built environment the clearance for the Arch project caused. But perhaps the piecemeal destruction of downtown post-Arch is worse--the Gateway Mall's replacement of Real Estate Row, the Mercantile (now US) Bank building's destruction of the Ambassador, the senseless loss of the Century Building to petty and shortsighted politics, and all stories of corporate boxes replacing real urbanism downtown.

Will we ever see a downtown St. Louis with lively blocks, human scale architecture, pedestrian friendliness at the expense of interstates, corporate boxes, etc.?