St. Louis - No Great Neighborhoods, Streets, or Public Spaces 9:51 AM

The American Planning Association (APA) has released its list of America's Great Neighborhoods, Great Streets, and Great Public Spaces, selecting ten in each category.

While the inaugural year for the Great Places netted the Delmar Loop a "Great Streets" designation (2007), St. Louis has received no other distinctions since.

Check out the list here. Honorees include a neighborhood dear to my heart, Faubourg Marigny in New Orleans, located just downriver from the French Quarter. This is certainly a great neighborhood by almost any metric--with the majority of patrons to several popular bars and coffee shops arriving by bicycle or foot. And the architecture is quaint, charming, and a burst of life on every block.

But back to St. Louis.

Says the APA of its Great Places:

APA's flagship program celebrates places of exemplary character, quality, and planning. Places are selected annually and represent the gold standard in terms of having a true sense of place, cultural and historical interest, community involvement, and a vision for tomorrow.

APA Great Places offer better choices for where and how people work and live. They are enjoyable, safe, and desirable. They are places where people want to be — not only to visit, but to live and work every day. America's truly great streets, neighborhoods and public spaces are defined by many criteria, including architectural features, accessibility, functionality, and community involvement.

Where in St. Louis do you believe should be honored next? If you'd like to view the characteristics of a Great Neighborhood, Street, or Public Space, click each individual word for the qualifications. Yes, you can nominate a place yourself, which I suggest you do on St. Louis's behalf for the 2010 awards!


For neighborhoods, I would recommend Old North St. Louis. It is truly one of the country's best stories of revitalization. Though it would not yet fit the "typical" profile of a "Great Neighborhood", it's a historic neighborhood literally awaking from its death bed and confounding all who only knew the neighborhood for Crown Candy Kitchen. The renovated 14th Street Mall (now, I think, St. Louis's most attractive "Main Street" setting); the new non-profit coffee shop Urban Studio Cafe; the grocery store co-op coming online next year; the increasing number of DIY-rehabbers rescuing St. Louis's earliest built heritage from the clutches of the Land Reutilization Authority; and yes, Crown Candy itself--all combine to make this neighborhood a uniquely "St. Louis" story that is great for very unconventional reasons. And it's upward bound, too--as the t-shirts sold by the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group proudly proclaim, "The Future is North"!


As far as streets, I would again go a controversial route and suggest Cherokee Street (the Euclid corridor in the Central West End would be the safer route). It's definitely St. Louis's most lively and varied corridor.


Public spaces would have yielded little for St. Louis prior to Citygarden. Now I think St. Louis has a national player on the public space scene.


What would you choose for each category?

The Key to CityGarden's Success? 4:27 PM

The Riverfront Times has reported that Jim Fiala, of Liluma/Acero fame, will manage the restaurant at the new CityGarden in the Gateway Mall between 8th and 10th Streets on the east and west, Market and Chestnut on the south and north. The restaurant will be called "Terrace View" and will offer indoor and outdoor seating, taking advantage of Garden views.

If I'm not mistaken, the restaurant will flank the northeast corner of the site (Chestnut and 8th). There are some pictures of the in-progress garden courtesy of Toby Weiss's B.E.L.T., but none specifically of the restaurant space.

Regardless, what I've seen I like. The restaurant, depending upon hours, will infuse a rather dead space with a good degree of life and activity. Short of reconstructing the north block face of Chestnut Street a couple blocks down where the parking garages face Kiener Plaza with high rise residential/offices--this is a great way to bring an active edge to the newly programmed CityGarden.

But it shouldn't stop there. The block where the Serra Sculpture (AKA the Twain) rests could fit some light construction as well. One could see a really small bar, a la the Log Cabin Inn at the City Museum, becoming a new entryway to the Serra Sculpture space.

Another bolder proposal would be to close the westbound lanes of Market Street and build a new streetwall of buildings on this newly acquired land, possibly all the way from Tucker to Broadway. The portion fronting the Gateway Mall/City Garden could provide that needed human scale street wall combined with pockets of activity that will keep the space alive throughout most of the day (and night?). I might try to render some of this in Google Sketchup. Don't hold me to it.

New Orleans' Harrison Avenue is a good model for parking in suburban business districts 1:00 PM

[NOTE: I'm having trouble with my pictures lately. Those shown below are a bit too large for this narrow blog layout. Please click on each picture to see its full extent, for now.]

Harrison Avenue is located in a section of New Orleans known as Lakeview. Lakeview was one of the most inundated neighborhoods following Hurricane Katrina. Always a middle class, semi-suburban area, the neighborhood has bounced back significantly and continue to rebuild.

Harrison Avenue is a five-block long business district that has a somewhat peculiar parking arrangement. New Orleans' famous wide medians are hollowed out and used for parking in this district. This might sound ugly, but I do think it accomplished a lot of things. For one, it is useful in districts where plentiful parking is expected and needed, and it mostly avoids the need to place front-facing surface lots to the street. Secondly, it screens the parking from both the automobile occupant and the pedestrian. Third, the narrow strip of parking functions almost as a calm "street within a street", very likely reducing traffic accidents.

Let's take a look at some pictures of the area and the parking set-up.



This is a look down one of the rows of in-median parking. As you can see, the median provides quite a few parking spaces--along with greenery--to the business district. The street is approximately 120 feet wide, with 55 feet taken up by the median.



This is a view from the median to the business district. If the street did not sport the median, this stretch would look like an interstate. Many of the buildings are early suburban commercial buildings. These retained urban street frontage, even as squat, one story commercial structures.



This is a photograph of a more suburban-formatted shopping center along the road. Since this was an area built up primarily post-1930, these structures truly have a context. That doesn't necessarily mean that this business district couldn't use a little reformatting to take advantage of the added parking spaces in this central median. Front lots such as this one are likely unnecessary when combining on-street parking with the median.



The view down the median is impressive. It almost looks like some rural parkway with all of the pines.



The mature trees in the median-area are a welcome feature of the median.



This is a great way to both take attention off of the cars in the parking area as well as filter the emissions that automobiles bring with them.



Here's a bonus--an excellent Miami Deco/Moderne bank in the business district.



Finally, here's a shot of one of the entrances into the parking median.

I would like to see such a median placed on Hampton Avenue in St. Louis. It has a somewhat similar profile to Harrison. There are a lot of squat commercial buildings close to the sidewalk, but also mid-century retail buildings pushed back from the street with front-facing parking.


View Larger Map

Imagine the same type of median on this stretch of Hampton. The traffic here is not heavy, but does move rather quickly. The amount of roadway surrendered to the median would invariably reduce driving lines and therefore speed as well. In short, it makes for a much friendlier pedestrian environment where driving passers-by will more likely see the businesses along the street--and have convenient parking too. To me, it's a true win-win in districts of this late urban/semi-suburban profile.

Hampton is much narrower than Harrison (about 60 feet across, from curb to curb) in its southern reaches. Still, a one-lane version of Harrison Avenue's parking median could work (thereby halving the size) from Loughborough on the south up to Nottingham on the north.