Pirated St. Louis Bricks: Exhibit A 5:25 PM

A long time ago, I wrote a piece on stumbling across some bricks with "ST. LOUIS" on them. They were located in the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans. At the time, I was camera-less.

Well, I snapped a photograph of one of the bricks. It dawns on me now, of course, that this might simply be a legitimate brickmaker and not evidence of pirated bricks after all. But, a promise is a promise, so here's the offending (?) brick:

From Miscellaneous Items

Happy Mardi Gras? 4:45 PM

This is from an STL Today.com commenter (yes, I know, not usually the source of any quotable wisdom) re: the St. Louis Mardi Gras:

As a veteran of 25 New Orleans Mardi Gras I was appalled and disgusted by the cheap and poorly run event I saw here last Saturday.

In New Orleans corporate sponsorship of a parade or float is not allowed. This parade was a gross commercial for everything.

It was horrible. What a joke!

The crowd was young and dumb and the area I was was a river of urine because there was nowhere near enough toilets. Disgusting.

The only police I saw were inept and more worried about getting their shoes dirty with urine than policing the event.

The bands were horrible (a Prince cover band? Who is booking this schlock?)

Mardi Gras Inc. is a total failure and every business owner hates them and thinks they are a joke.

This is classic St. Louis. Take a great idea, #####ize and constrict it in to an utter failure.

I guess my only defense is that the Soulard Mardi Gras isn't a two-hundred year old tradition as it is in New Orleans. Plus, tourism isn't as integral and such an obvious component of the St. Louis economy as it is in New Orleans. Thus, many residents of Soulard offer a cold reception to the revelers. Soulard is much more of a residential neighborhood in character (even though the smaller, denser French Quarter is home to about 4,000 residents; Soulard, about 3,100 as of 2000). And it seems to me that the St. Louis Mardi Gras has been outsourced to Mardi Gras, Inc. and is no longer a true neighborhood event anyway.

I have to strongly agree with the corporate ownership criticism. If the event can't make money without corporate sponsorship, then there is a disease of civic malaise in St. Louis--or simply no will to carry on the Mardi Gras tradition.

St. Louis is a French and Spanish Creole-founded city like New Orleans. Soulard's pint-sized square blocks and Creole architecture link it physically and culturally to New Orleans. I've always been proud to claim that St. Louis has reclaimed its New Orleans heritage with this large event, inflating the celebration to the second largest in the country after N.O. itself.

But Mardi Gras as it is should likely be retooled. It should be stripped of all corporate sponsorship and made into a more authentic event. I would love to see St. Louisans get into the culture of Mardi Gras as much as New Orleans--that is, having residents from across the metro planning floats, organizing balls, designing costumes, plotting new krewes and parades almost as soon as Ash Wednesday hits. If that's not possible, then maybe the event could just fizzle. Of course, it is a big economic boom to St. Louis. I just wish we could step it up and handle it without the help of Lumiere Place and Beggin' Strips.

Here's to hoping the rumored renegade non-corporate Mardi Gras does start up and does provide something of an alternative to a bloated block party with beads.

[Note of caution: living in New Orleans makes you something of a Mardi Gras snob, as evidenced by the comments of the STL Today.com commenter at the beginning of the post].

EDIT: Must have missed this! The unofficial Mardi Gras, complete with non-corporate parade, will roll through Carondelet tonight! How fitting--St. Louis's other prominent French/Spanish Creole neighborhood.

New Orleans' ongoing Master Planning process may recommend decommissioning its main interstate, I-10. 12:18 PM

This Times-Picayune article sums up some of the Master Plan's visions and goals. Here is a snippet on transportation:

Encouraging rapid-transit bus routes to eastern New Orleans, the West Bank and other underserved areas, adding hundreds of miles of bike routes and supporting efforts to replace the limited-access expressway that cuts through the heart of the city with a normal street or boulevard. Interstate 10 traffic traveling through the city would use I-610. Dixon said eliminating the expressway would provide a disincentive to living in the suburbs and emphasize that preserving the city's neighborhoods is more important than shorter commute times.

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Essentially, the entire Interstate 10 Loop would be demolished, reconnecting long cut-off neighborhoods.


Can you imagine St. Louis outlining such a goal in a Master Plan? Or even participating in a Master Plan process to begin with? Or voting to give that Master Plan the force of law (which voters did in November of 2008 in Orleans Parish)?


Interstate 55 in St. Louis could be rebuilt as an at-grade boulevard, with three driving lanes on each side, and a central median for the North-South Metro expansion. The leftover former right-of-way could be given over to Transit Oriented Development and to reconnect the portions of South St. Louis bisected by the insensitive, meandering course of I-55.


St. Louisans should start imagining more often.

Notes from St. Louis 9:31 AM

You know the drill. Every time I return, I offer my random months-removed observations of the city I love.

(By the way, it appears New Orleans was spared the worst of Gustav. Still, the city will not let residents return until later in the week, so I'm here for a good clip, it turns out).

First, certain parts of the city seem overly messy and litter-strewn. Bevo, for one, is not looking its best. That was a little disheartening.

Cafe Ventana is a great addition to SLU-Midtown/east Central West End. Though it seemed a little wrong to be eating beignets (a New Orleans specialty, for those who didn't know)on the eve of Gustav's landfall, it nevertheless was a comfy and enjoyable space. I especially love the bike rack. If you're going to have front and rear parking, adding the "bike lane" and large rack is a great way of urbanizing the building. A lot of money went into this space, and I think the results are definitely good.

I wanted to check out the Piccadilly at Manhattan restaurant over in Ellendale just about on top of the city limits (near Maplewood). It's truly the perfect urban establishment. It's at that undeniably intimate neighborhood scale--the corner storefront. I am going to make it a point to eat there today.

Still, I could not help but be distracted by this, right across the street:




It's a development called Ellendale Heights on Piccadilly and Ellendale boulevards. The picture, actually, does the structure more justice than it deserves. It and its eight or so neighbors look like live-in garages. This was not a good way to urbanize a suburban, front-facing garage on a squat lot. The result was literally laughable, especially seeing them all in a row. The garage covers 80 percent of the facade of the structure. It's simply unbelievable. In fact, every time I passed by on McCausland/Ellendale, I thought those facing Ellendale itself were actually the rear garages of a new development I never had time to check out on that opposite street. Nope. They're homes with a cancerous garage-growth. Yuck.

What else?

I found that Sundays and Mondays are not good days to grab something to eat. Almost every place I wanted to hit up was closed on both days. This includes the Piccadilly, mentioned above, and Mattingly Brewery on South Jefferson. And the Pitted Olive on Hampton (which, it turns out, is closed until this Friday due to a Labor Day vacation anyway).

More observations to come later.

Streetview comes to New Orleans! 5:58 PM

No longer do I need to lift someone else's photos when I speak of New Orleans on this blog.

You can look forward to more detailed posts comparing New Orleans and St. Louis now!

In the meantime, here is my French Quarter abode:


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Notice the wonderful median/neutral ground in the center of the street.

This is pedestrian paradise, folks.

Since we deleted our French Colonial heritage, try Ste. Genevieve! 5:59 PM

If you've been to New Orleans, and are a bit of a history nut, and are a St. Louis resident, you are likely very depressed and disappointed that very little of St. Louis's French Colonial Heritage still exists.

Sure, Soulard is evocative of old St. Louis's Frenchtown (even though it was heavily German-influenced by the turn of the 20th Century). But none of it's from the Colonial period.

The founder of St. Louis, Pierre Laclede, for whom "the Landing" was named, was a New Orleanian Creole businessowner sent to the the Upper Louisiana Territory to carve a trading post out of the wilderness in 1764. Had the territory east of the Mississippi River not suddenly transferred to British hands, St. Louis would have likely been a hamlet of a trading village. Instead, Laclede thought it wise to establish a settlement, so that the new French town could defend itself.

St. Genevieve--the only existing French settlement so far north along the Mississippi--quite nearly became such a trading post. If it had abutted the river, it would have been today's "St. Louis". Because the village was two miles inland, Laclede passed it up.

The original French city of St. Louis--with street names like Rue d'Eglise (Church Street) and La Grande Rue (Main Street)--is totally lost. Not a single colonial structure remains.

But visions of it, that Creole St. Louis, controlled by famous names such as the Chouteaus, remain in Ste. Genevieve, the city that could have been us.

See them below, compliments of Ste. Genevieve's website:

These homes--many open to the public--were constructed between 1770 and 1820.

The Best News in a Long Time! 2:33 PM

This is late in coming, but reading this Post-Dispatch article almost brought a tear of joy to my planner's eye:

Crowds flock to Metro's trains, buses

Best of all is this quote:

Metro has reported serving nearly 5.5 million passenger trips in May — believed to be the highest one-month tally since the early 1980s.

With any luck, St. Louis County will pass a proposed sales tax to support Metro, which is the least publicly subsidized transit agency in the country.

New Orleans' Regional Transit Authority (RTA)'s bus and streetcar fare is $1.25--much cheaper than St. Louis's $1.75.

Fare increases should not be an option if Metro wants to assist residents in ditching their cars.

Does St. Louis need more corners? 3:29 PM

I live in New Orleans.

If you thought St. Louis had an iron street grid, come to this city. We are talking endless rows of neat squares--not rectangles--throughout most of the 19th Century and early 20th Century city.

In comparison, St. Louis has superblocks. When I was back in town a few weeks ago, I drove through some North Side neighborhoods that troubled me for reasons other than their relative decay. The blocks are far, far too long in many parts of the city, I noticed.

What are the advantages of the short block? Late urban planning guru (inventor?) Jane Jacobs sums it up best.

• Short blocks provide more corners. More corners means, or can mean, more opportunities for retail and mixed-use structures. More activity on corners means more eyes on the street. More eyes on the street means a safer and more vibrant community--with services (a dentist? a small grocer? you name it) right down the block!
  
• Short blocks are less forbidding to the pedestrian or cyclist. When you live on a looooong block, you're much less likely to desire to disembark from your house and make the trek down the same block every day. We're humans. We like things that are visually, aurually, olfactorily(?) interesting and exciting. Yes, many of us prefer routine as well. But that's the beauty of the short block. Your commute to, say, the commercial main street two blocks away from your shorter block, means: 1) you will pass more corners, which may divert your trip and 2) you have choices in your journey! Shorter blocks means you can take any number of rational routes to get to your destination. With large blocks, we feel entrapped and restricted. The best way to deal with entrapment, it seems, has been the presence of an escape pod--an automobile.
  

I come to you not without visual aids.

Take a look at Kingsway West, a neighborhood about as far out from the original core as New Orleans' Uptown (Kingsway is actually a bit closer to its respective downtown!).

Kingsway West:

and Uptown New Orleans:

Absolutely NO cross streets between Kingshighway and Union? That's too long, especially since we're talking a series of blocks. Let's measure.

Walking west on Northland Ave. from Kingshighway to Union: 0.36 miles.

Walking west on Loyola from Napoleon to Jena in Uptown New Orleans: 0.06 miles.

That means, out of this one sample block, both of which are representative of their immediate surroundings, St. Louis's block is 6 times longer--6 New Orleans blocks!

When my mother came down to visit, she was forced to walk a lot. She would often ask me how far our destination was, since traveling on foot is not her preferred transit system. I found myself saying "2 St. Louis blocks" when it was 4 or more New Orleans ones.

Only Soulard seems to have blocks close to New Orleans' size--which makes sense. It was laid out by a French Creole.

Now, this is not the largest problem you can have. And there are very stable South Side blocks that are extremely long. Check out all of the Southampton neighborhood's residential streets for examples.

But the North Side got me thinking. Why not take advantage of vacant lots and create new through streets? It would help redensify the neighborhoods, add some commercial or office space, and make the North Side more pedestrian friendly in the process.

St. Louis, in my opinion, needs shorter blocks wherever it can get them. Ballpark Village, Pruitt Igoe site, the N. 22nd St. Urban Prairie--listen up! No superblocks!