Tucker Boulevard should be, could be an urban street... 9:43 PM

..if not for things like this:



That's the rendering for the new parking garage at Tucker and Clark. Even the announcement that the garage will feature LED lighting (changed periodically for sports and civic events) is simply not enough to distract from the simple fact that downtown needs no new parking provisions at all.

It should be clear enough by now that the more "convenient" (read: plentiful, cheap) parking is in an urban area, the less urban that area becomes. Visitors to and even residents of downtown may find it easier to drive everywhere and walk the least amount possible. All of the potential points between point A and point B are missed, leading to squandered opportunities for urbanism.

I saw the pared down plans for the Tucker facade of Park Pacific on Downtown St. Louis Business, and I am not impressed either. Another parking garage to front Tucker?

Already, the two bare minimalist high rises on Tucker just north of Chestnut and Pine are perhaps the most hideous high profile buildings anywhere--this coming from a supporter of mid-century modernism, mind you.

Tucker is so wide it appears to spar with Market Street for the title of preeminent downtown boulevard. It is tempting to say that the parking garage is better than the surface lot, but the surface lot is much more likely to be turned into offices, residential, clean industry, shops, or all of the above in the farther future.

We do not need two extra parking garages on this nearly (urbanistically speaking) dead street. It has the potential to be a real showcase street--a moniker New Orleans' similarly wide Canal Street is fighting valiantly to attain once more.

Honda Metropolitan Owner! 12:39 AM

My household now has access to a Honda Metropolitan 49cc scooter. Dealing with New Orleans's Regional Transit Authority is doable, but not ideal.

The scooter goes about 38 m.p.h. max. Ours is a clean green.

But you already know about this scooter from Steve Patterson's Urban Review.

Here it is:

Former Peabody/Darst Webbe Neighborhood now "Near Southside" 12:52 AM

Just a nerdy update: on the City of St. Louis CIN Neighborhood page, it appears that the neighborhood formerly known as Peabody/Darst Webbe is now officially called the Near Southside Neighborhood.

Once upon a time, this was Bohemian Hill.

Mayor's Chief of Staff indirectly reveals that Blairmont has "major plans" 11:19 PM

"This is the first guy who's gone up there with major plans in fifty years."

That is KMOX's Charlie Brennan quoting Mayor Slay's chief of staff Jeff Rainford, defending McKee's activities on the near North Side.

The broadcast is a couple days old, so this isn't news per se, but the quote bears repeating.

This is the first official (albeit secondhand) announcement that McKee actually has plans for the area. Now, we all expected the same. And they are apparently, as we also imagined, "major". But is it not the worst smack in the face to hear that the Mayor indeed has known McKee's plans for some time but has not said so much as a sentence to ease the minds of his worried constituents?

This is poor, conservative leadership in a city that needs bolder change.

Simply applying for whatever awards come up for "redeveloping cities" and aggressively campaigning for these PR opportunities is not enough, Mayor Slay. The citizens of St. Louis deserve to know what McKee's plans are and to be included. Our built environment should never have been so intentionally chipped away at.

Ironically, the whole to-do over the World Leadership Forum's award to St. Louis for "urban renewal" was predicated on rehabilitation of historic buildings. Former lead St. Louis Planner Rollin Stanley entitled the presentation "From Vacancy to Vibrancy". Both Slay and Stanley seemed to suggest their leadership brought about all the new rehabber activity in the city of St. Louis. It wasn't mentioned that the Mayor had nothing to do with the writing of the historic tax credit act in the late 1990s (pre-Slay) that is the actual reason for the newfound "vibrancy". It was also not mentioned that Slay and/or the Board of Aldermen not only presided over but had a major role in the dismantling of Gaslight Square, McRee Town, Bohemian Hill, the Century Building, and now the Blairmont neighborhoods.

That's a lot of neighborhoods to have joined the lengthy list of demolished neighborhoods in the relatively short span of Slay's two terms. And yet, he's at it again, promoting St. Louis's being named a finalist in the 2008 All-America City Award (dubbed the "'Oscar' of Community Recognition"). Interestingly, the "St. Louis Region" is up for an award typically given to cities, and occasionally to counties. Still, Slay is willing to accept credit for regional innovations such as the Great River Ring.

All I can say is I am happy I kept my voter registration in Missouri!

Valentine Street: gone, like much of the rest of downtown 9:32 PM

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.?

Preservation Directory has published my post on Paul McKee and the Blairmont scheme! 11:37 PM

Hopefully this will give the story a bit more national exposure! Check it out at Preservation Directory's preservation blog, listed under "Endangered History".

Here is my earlier post with an excerpt.

Awesome! I wish they had accepted my later edited version though. Oh well.

[Oops, by the way. I fudged on the beginning of McKee's buying spree--saying 2006 rather than 2003. And McKee owned more than 500 parcels even on April 25, 2008, at the time of my writing. Ah well, hopefully it stirs someone up nonetheless!)

Can our north side borrow this mural from Cincy? 10:19 PM

Thanks go to the Skyscraper Page forum's grasscat.