Is it "Sprawl with Lipstick" (wink, wink) or something truly new? 2:42 PM

It's the New Town at St. Charles!

What do you think? Have you been?

What's its future?

Bestill my heart! A shot of bygone Gaslight Square. 7:47 PM

Real urbanism squandered.

And to think the current Gaslight Square infill project is among the city's best.

The CVS Mess 10:47 PM

It's been confirmed recently that pharmacy giant CVS is entering the St. Louis market. One of their first stores will subsume a vacant parcel in the otherwise tidy Boulevard Heights neighborhood. The property, formerly a gas station, has been a blight on the neighborhood for years. The gas station abandoned the property in the late '90s or early 2000s, if my memory serves me correctly.

This sounds great, right? Here's the site:


View Larger Map

Of course, there's a Walgreens adjacent to this site (spin the Google Streetview Map around to see it)--not to mention the Schnucks, which carries pharmaceutical goods, right across the street.

But never mind the oversaturation of pharmacies for a moment. They're taking five homes to build this store too! God help me if they're getting any sort of incentives from the city to do so!

Look: I want competition for Walgreens. Their rampant expansion has blighted several neighborhood corners with a highly successful, but generic store that only hurts already scarce local retailers and pharmacy. See the Martin Luther King shopping center on North Grand as an example. They knock out a turn of the century commercial building (or two, or three, or four) to put up a cinderblock store with front parking--a forgettable addition to a neighborhood that needs bold change. On the south side, they built another atrocious store on the corner of Kingshighway and Chippewa--despite pleas of neighborhood residents for that corner to be reserved for architecturally interesting and urban construction after the failed K-Mart proposal in the late 1990s.


The last time I was in town, I tried to convert my parents to using local pharmacies. Guess what--they're the same price (if you have insurance) and they deliver!

Try Keller Apothecary on Brannon and Chippewa, or Lindenwood Drug at Lansdowne and Jamieson.

My point is: I have no qualms about threatening Walgreens' near monopoly on drugs and junk-peddling retail. I just don't want it to be CVS to do it! Especially not in a city like St. Louis that has shown a consistent failure to support urban storefronts and sound design. If we keep building like a suburb, we will never host walkable, urban neighborhoods. The line between suburban St. Louis and urban St. Louis will further blur until the once-grand city becomes merely a tired-looking caricature of Sunbelt Sprawl. Proper zoning (and leadership) would ensure that CVS would build urban and attractive. And it would most likely not allow the loss of homes in a stable neighborhood for such gratuitous duplication of services.

This is a Maps.Live view of at least two of the homes to be demolished. These are along Austria Avenue.

They may not be gems, but they shouldn't be torn down for a suburban-style pharmacy. That's a story St. Louis knows too well.

Luckily, to my knowledge, there are no renderings yet, and we can perhaps voice our concern that this project will clog an already busy street and should therefore be made as pedestrian-friendly as possible (not to mention well-designed aesthetically). Oh yeah...pssst...it's right across the street from a transit station...

Join me in contacting 12th Ward Alderman Fred Heitert to pass along these concerns.

Attorneys sack downtown St. Louis 5:31 PM

Historic law firm Thompson Coburn LLP has decided to stay downtown, according to Mayor Slay. But not without $700,000 in incentives and a new parking garage! Really? A new garage? And atop the former Ambassador?

Now, Armstrong Teasdale is leaving, headed to Clayton as part of the new Centene deal (itself playing the incentives game to get more from Clayton?). A 21-story tower will now replace the modernist landmark, the former Library Limited building at Forsyth and Hanley.

What has our area gained?

A new parking garage.

A new twenty-one story building.

What have we lost?

Valuable space downtown that could have been developed as an office/residential building in the future.

Downtown viability, as fewer people will be "forced" to walk the streets of downtown to get to Thompson Coburn's offices.

Another modernist landmark--the region's first suburban Scruggs, Vandervoort and Barney department store.

History does repeat itself.

The Library Ltd. Building, from Vanishing STL:

Oakland Avenue: a mini-case study for a more walkable city? 5:20 PM

So, while back in St. Louis, I saw that a median was being installed from the 4900 to 5100 blocks of Oakland Avenue in the Kings Oak neighborhood.

Thanks to a completely on-the-ball 17th Ward website, there's more information for those of us outside the ward (and the city).

With institutions such as St. Louis University High School, the St. Louis Science Center, and the severed sliver of Forest Park south of Highway 40, this is a smart choice. This will slow down the traffic on Oakland and beautify the street all at once. That makes for happier pedestrians. One of the best parts? SLUH and the SLSC are helping foot part of the bill!

I will say that median-makers in this city need to stop by Reber Place in Southwest Garden, or Lewis Place in north city, or Federer/Holly Hills in the Holly Hills neighborhood, or Sublette in the Kingshighway Hills/Northampton neighborhood. They need to take notes. These wide, spacious medians are also not too full and not overly landscaped. They shade the street with their tree canopies and encourage residents to take advantage of the space.

If it were up to me, these medians would be actual usable spaces--perfect trails for walking yourself, walking a dog, plopping down for a picnic or a book (watch the dog doo-doo, though!), or starting an unoffical community garden.

The one going up on Oakland is a good start, but, from the early looks of it, it won't meet the standards I have listed above. Of course, the ones I mentioned are all residential streets with the exception of Sublette, which has some commercial/institutional uses. Even so, medians need to be wider in this city and follow that residential precedent to provide maximum utility and community benefit.

Despite all of that, I am happy to see Oakland's makeover. Let's hope there will be more throughout the city.

The St. Louis new/proposed construction report and questionnaire 11:09 AM

SI'll start this post off by commenting on a recently completed new building that I have come to really enjoy--Park East Tower in the Central West End. I finally "get" this building now. It's not as if its contemporary take on Art Deco truly escaped me. It's just that I saw it as cheesy before. Viewed from one of the skybridges at the Washington University Medical Center, the building was striking to me. The southern approach looks great. The street level, though, could use some reconfiguring.

Along with the Park East Tower, the Park East Lofts seem to me an excellent addition to the streetscape (and might resolve some of the issues with the Tower's street level presence). It's hard to assess how the actual build-out will look, since they've only got the steel beams up right now, but renderings are promising (see below).



Let's stay within the Central West End. The new mixed-use building on Lindell between Sarah and Vandeventer (dubbed Villas of St. Louis) is the perfect scale for the street. I don't think it's any paragon of design in and of itself. But it's not offensive, in my opinion. And it might set a proper, urban precedent for massing along that de-urbanized stretch of Lindell Boulevard. Here's a picture from Steve Patterson's flickr page:



Moving out of the CWE, what's that huge, LEED-certified warehouse along Chouteau just east of Compton? I'm glad that it's billed itself as energy-efficient, but did it have to offer its window-less face to such a huge swath of Chouteau? It's so bulky and lifeless. I guess I'm disappointed because this was a great opportunity to spruce up Chouteau and maybe, someday see it as a true, urban boulevard.

Also, there's a sign up for new construction in the Gate District--near Compton and Eads. I couldn't stop (grandparents were driving at the time), but it looked like there was a name and rendering for the development. This seems significant because it's on the west side of Compton--the side that St. Louis University's medical campus has systematically dismantled. Even if the rest of Gate District construction isn't top notch by any measure, I would breathe a sigh of relief to see houses constructed on this unlikely urban prairie. Anyone have any more information on this development?

Okay. South Grand now. The new building at S. Grand and Winnebago (formerly Pyramid's senior homes, now Dominion's) is progressing nicely. While this is a much less appealing building than Villas of St. Louis, I do have to once again admire the scale and the mixed-use nature of the project in a city that practically mandates suburban design through its outdated zoning code.

Here is an earlier view of the building from the St. Louis Business Journal:



I think Vivienne on Lafayette is a great development--a wonderful adaptation of a St. Louis vernacular style. I hope they shake up the formula a bit and build more.

The down-the-street-neighbor Union Club, though, is disappointing. The inability to imitate the (oxymoronic) graceful ruddiness of Richardsonian Romanesque in the angles of the bay curvature and the brick color renders this building as odd-looking in my book.

Let's shoot up to Grand Center. Last night, I went to the reception for the Light Project. The Light Project is four installments, but, of course, the one that will grab the most attention is the burnt out church on N. Spring--its onetime roof now bedecked in lamps and lampshades of every color. It's truly a magnificent sight. It was also amazing to see people strolling casually around Grand Center in such numbers. All of this temporary urbanism made me long for some permanence. The large signs advertising the ArtHouse development made me feel a little more confident that St. Louis's "arts district" may truly materialize someday.

One last site to discuss: the new recreation center in Carondelet Park.

Here is a rendering:




I had no idea they were going to completely isolate this suburban-style building in the middle of Carondelet Park. Why not add to street life? Why remove the old-growth trees? Why take up park space? Why does this center need to be within a park? I can think of dozens of other sensible places. Why not fill in a gap along the Patch's South Broadway stretch? Or somewhere along Gravois (the overly large parking lot behind the Bevo Mill, for example)?

I am disappointed that I voted for the proposition to allow for this construction. Shouldn't residents of south St. Louis have been consulted with the placement and design of this facility?

Your thoughts?

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.