I wouldn't overstate the pessimism of previous decades. (Unless you're saying it all begins with the '90's). I found this article in the New York Times by the famous architecture critic, Paul Goldberger. The headline especially is a real attention-grabber.
Copyright 1985 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
December 26, 1985, Thursday, Late City Final Edition
SECTION: Section A; Page 18, Column 1; National Desk
LENGTH: 1305 words
HEADLINE: A CROWDED DOWNTOWN MARKS ST. LOUIS REVIVAL
BYLINE: By PAUL GOLDBERGER, Special to the New York Times
DATELINE: ST. LOUIS
BODY:
Five years ago, this was among the emptiest of American downtowns.
Not only was the central business district devoid of people, but it had so many parking lots that it seemed almost devoid of buildings.
This was true even though St. Louis has two of America's most celebrated structures, Louis Sullivan's exquisite Wainwright Building, the first truly great high-rise, and Eero Saarinen's 630-foot-tall arch, one of the greatest monumental works of the 20th century.
By the beginning of this decade, what energy and prosperity there was to St. Louis seemed to have moved almost entirely to the city's edge, into the outlying districts and suburbs. Even optimistic urbanists doubted that it would be possible to turn around the central core of this old Middle Western industrial city.
So much for urban experts. Downtown St. Louis is now booming. Several new skyscrapers are nearing completion, and others are in the planning stages. Numerous old buildings have been restored and converted to new uses, and two major downtown shopping malls are thronged.
It is the crowds, not the new buildings themselves, that are most startling in St. Louis. For it is the emptiness that was always so bizarre here, the sense that downtown was no more than a place in which a few thousand office workers gathered for a few hours each day, and not where people walked, lingered, shopped, ate and did any of the other things that people ordinarily do in functioning cities.
History of Architecture
The centerpiece of the St. Louis revival is the restoration of one of the city's greatest landmarks, the 91-year-old Union Station, once the nation's largest single train terminal. This extravagant structure at the edge of downtown, completed in 1894 to the designs of Theodore Link, is a virtual history of 19th-century American architecture. It has a huge Romanesque Revival main building, elaborate interiors in styles ranging from Gothic to that of the great modernist Louis Sullivan, and at the rear, a spectacular, arching train shed covering 11 acres.
There have been no trains in the station since 1978. By then the building was so decayed that it was more a symbol of St. Louis's troubles as of its strength. The roof, full of holes, was literally falling to pieces. ''It was a combat zone,'' said an architect at Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, which designed the renovation.
The renovation does not, sad to say, bring the trains back, but it does the next best thing: it has brought the people back. The station has been turned into a combination hotel and shopping and restaurant complex, similar in some ways to the large food and retail marketplaces that have sprung up in numerous cities. The Rouse Corporation, creator of the South Street Seaport in New York and Harborplace in Baltimore, operates the complex here.
But what makes St. Louis Union Station, as the project is called, rise above the cliched quality of these other projects is the raw material the architects were working with. This urban marketplace is set inside one of the most exuberant pieces of 19th-century American architecture ever created.
Hotel Built in Train Shed
The work has been part restoration, part new construction, and the architects have done well with both. The new sections are the most unusual: most of the new, 546-room Omni International Hotel consists of a six-story structure built inside the old train shed. And there is enough room left over under the metal trusses to contain a one-acre artificial lake, several hundred parking spaces, and the bulk of the retail and restaurant space.
But if the new portions are a spirited version of the kind of urban mall that is becoming increasingly common around the country, the old, restored sections of the train station are a place in which visitors now wallow in a truly sumptuous piece of elegance. The station's architectural highlight is the Great Hall, a huge, barrel-vaulted room in green and gold heavily influenced by the architecture of Louis Sullivan.
This room is now the main lobby of the hotel, and it has been lovingly and respectfully restored. Not since the day in which the Palm Court of the Plaza was the favored meeting spot in New York has there been so architecturally pleasing a centerpiece for a city's social activity as this room.
Every detail is not precisely as it was originally; the lighting, for example, is different, but just right for this room. The great stanchions with glass globes could have been in Theodore Link's original design, even though they were not.
Tax Break for Builder
Off the great hall is a pleasing promenade in the Gothic style, the handsomely restored dining room, and a series of hotel and meeting rooms set in a section of the old station that was once the station's own hotel. Not surprisingly, these are the best rooms in the hotel; the new wing, while decent on the outside, cannot come close to echoing the character of the older sections.
One reason design quality was high is that the project was financed in part through special Federal income tax credits for restoration of historic properties. Union Station is a national historic landmark, and any work on it that was deemed to meet the Federal Government's guidelines for restoration of historic architecture could qualify for a 25 percent tax credit. The Federal guidelines were interpreted to include new construction within the shell of the original building; thus the entire cost of the project, $140 million, eventually qualified for tax benefits.
The complex, developed by Oppenheimer Properties, ended up as the most expensive single historic preservation project in the country to qualify under these special tax incentives. But its success leaves little doubt that the expense was worth it. The result is stunning, a truly grand hotel and a veritable town square for a city that has been in desperate need of both. #2d Center Is Linked to Outside The other shopping center, St. Louis Centre, is right in the center of downtown, and it is somewhat more conventional. Designed by RTKL Associates for the Melvin Simon, a developer, it links two major downtown department stores with four levels of shopping in a glass-enclosed, atrium-filled arcade.
It is not remarkable as a piece of architecture, as St. Louis Union Station is. What is striking is that such a huge mall is there at all, in the midst of a retail district that seemed a few years ago to be grinding to a halt. On the inside, the design calls to mind the Eaton Centre in Toronto. The St. Louis center's best features are the vaulted roofs of glass and the considerable degree of glass fronting onto the street, tying the activity within the mall to the outside and avoiding the street-deadening affect of so many interior malls.
The spate of new construction has yet to yield a really distinguished skyscraper in St. Louis, although there is more interest in trying to connect with current trends in high-rise design than there was a few years ago. Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, St. Louis's pre-eminent architectural firm and, with a thousand employees, one of the nation's largest, has designed many of the new buildings. Its very recent work shows a considerable eagerness to jump on the post-modern bandwagon.
Indeed, after years of producing sleek, cool, modern skyscrapers, the firm's latest design is for a 41-story tower, Metropolitan Square, that will be a mix of golden-colored granite and golden-colored glass, a columned base, bay windows and a pitched copper roof culminating in a series of glass-enclosed pinnacles. With all that gold it does not look as if it will be a particularly refined building, but it has a certain vulgar energy to it, and it will assure that St. Louis finally has something besides the great arch to give shape to its skyline.
