40 Broadway 8:19 PM

In my absence from posting, my St. Louis excursions to blog about kept piling up to the point where the heap became incredibly intimidating. While they continue to accumulate, I thought I'd take a night off and post about one of the more recent ones--my trip to Badenfest, in North City, via the #40 Broadway bus.

St. Louis has plenty of amazing bus lines--ones that casually weave through our city's storied urban fabric and allow a passenger a finer look into our city than if he is driving himself. Take the #73 Carondelet, for instance, which offers glimpses into Lafayette Square, Benton Park, Dutchtown, and, of course, Carondelet.

Besides a short a jaunt over to the Anheuser Busch tourist center, the #40 is not a bus I'd recommend a visitor to our city hop aboard for some sight-seeing. It mostly sticks to Broadway itself, which, north of downtown, can be less than visually stellar. Even so, this is St. Louis, and even the most forlorn and neglected parts of town have an amazing backstory. While Rob Powers can show you each and every surviving house left in this now-mostly industrial district, I can only offer you what's visible from the bus.

Here are a few captures from my bus ride from downtown to the Baden neighborhood in North City.

Now arriving in Baden:

The Baden business district, seen above, is one of the city's most intact and attractive commercial corridors. The wide street made crowds seem a bit sparse at Badenfest this past Saturday, but the mood was lively and the smells wafting from barbecue pits were irresistible.

If you're ever hankering for an adventure on a Saturday or Sunday morning, there's really no better way to do it than to hop on a bus that you don't know very well (or at all!) and see where it takes you. See something interesting? Pull the chord and stop there!

Just as an FYI to all current and potential transit users: Metro is restoring yet more service on August 30. So before I send you to bus schedules, be forewarned that they're nearly all about to change. For more information on Restoration 2010, Round Two, click here. Soon, you'll have less of an excuse not to hop a more frequent bus to exotic parts of our city and region.

May Preservation Board Meeting Update 2:49 PM

You can breathe a sigh of temporary relief: two proposed demolitions of North Side commercial buildings (one on North Grand across from Lindell Park and one on North Broadway in the Baden Business District) were not considered at the May 27, 2009 Preservation Board meeting since the applicants did not show.

In addition, two North Side alley structures--one in Hyde Park and one in North St. Louis, the latter a free-standing flounder--were denied their demolition permits yet again.

This is great news overall, though I expect another appeal down the road for the two contested commercial buildings. Let us hope the Board continues to deny these permits as these historic commercial buildings are truly neighborhood anchors and future investment opportunities.

Pictures of all of the reprieved buildings are below, courtesy of the Cultural Resources Office staff report:

3501 North Grand

From Preservation Board

7944 North Broadway

From Preservation Board

3424 (rear) North 14th Street

From Preservation Board

3015 (rear) North 19th Street

From Preservation Board

Commercial buildings and alley houses are increasingly threatened property types, especially in north St. Louis. We need to keep a special eye on these types and develop two separate Multiple Property Submissions to the National Register for both St. Louis classic commercial buildings and the much rarer and even more vernacular alley house.

May Preservation Board Agenda Includes Four Proposed Demolitions 10:25 AM

This month's agenda includes four demolitions--two preliminary reviews and two appeals of staff denial.

The first of the two preliminary reviews is located at 7944-48 North Broadway.

View Larger Map

This building in the Baden Business District is classic red brick St. Louis commercial architecture. The city says it was built in 1900, though it looks to be from an earlier era. Regardless, it's attractive and looks in good shape from the Google Streetview window (circa 2007). This Business District has a good portion of its DNA left to inspire a Main Street revival. The loss of this building (for what?) will definitely set things back considerably. See Toby Weiss's recent post on the Baden Triangle for a view of the architectural diversity and the potential of the area.

The second of the preliminary reviews is 3501-09 North Grand.


View Larger Map

I see a pattern here. Commercial buildings have seemingly been the first to go in any struggling neighborhood. When they go, a sense of a neighborhood's center fades and soon the residential component disappears too. This 3-story commercial building used to have similar in scale yet uniquely ornamented neighbors that lined the street for miles, unbroken. This building faces the intact and attractive Lindell Park neighborhood within Jeff Vanderlou. It would be most unfortunate for North Grand, which barely clings to a sense of urbanism from nearly its entire span north of Delmar, to lose yet another attractive historic commercial building.

The first of the two appealed denials is 3424 N. 14th Street in Hyde Park. If you click the link, the building in question is the multi-family building third from the left on the east blockface of North 14th.

The second of the two appealed denials is 3015 N. 19th Street. I can't seem to find this one in city records or on Google/Microsoft Live. Yet there are two important observations: it's located in the sensitive Murphy-Blair National Register District (part of Old North St. Louis) and the applicant is a church. This happens all too often.

It looks like May will be an important Preservation Board meeting. With a full scale attack on the North Side's architectural legacy, often-vacant commercial buildings and sometimes troublesome multi-family buildings are the most threatened.

More to come.

Neighborhood Banners and Logos: Part I 12:48 PM

Since when is the Chain of Rocks Bridge in Baden? If you follow its city-defined boundaries, Baden has no coast line at all--it ends at Hall Street on the east.



The old Bevo 2001 symbol. Bevo actually has other neighborhood banners, most of which are now tattered. But those green banners are nice because they display the block numbers and run the entire length of the neighborhood along Gravois and Morganford. Still, some new ones are in order. The Mill and German symbolism should share space with the Bosnian immigrants that have so changed the neighborhood.



This logo is all part of the "re-branding" of McRee Town. It's shameful when we as citizens and when our policy makers can't overcome stigma to assist a downtrodden neighborhood in reshaping itself, rather than forcefully from the outside. At the very least, the overhauled neighborhood should have still sported the historical name McRee Town, in my opinion. But I know why they opted for "Botanical Heights"--free advertising for the Garden that helped take the neighborhood down. Plus, and excuse the pun, it's much more flowery.



To my knowledge, this sign was either vandalized or lost in one of the 2006 summer storms. It was a nice little entry marker to a little known neighborhood (though, with the mayor moving here, it may just be on the St. Louis City map soon!).



I really like these crests that hang on banners all over Carondelet. They memorialize that this was once an independent city, a little French and Spanish Creole settlement that retains its uniqueness despite its absorption by the city.