urbanSTL

Couple questions for the thread. First, does anyone know when the new dental clinic/school is set to break ground? Is it in 2014? It would be great if they expand upon their plans. Second, does anyone know if developers have actively started planning/designing infill now that Field Foods is open along with the Walgreens. As a few have posted, some well planned infill will go a long ways. I have to belief that additional residential/mix use will succeed and nicely tie Soulard and Lafayette Square together.

^ I heard they were coming to "Lafayette Square" so I was kind of worried exactly where... good to see it here as it's the best place in the area for them with a drive-thru.

Cortex, DT, and now Laf. Square: I like the local Timmy Ho's franchisee's approach.

STLrainbow wrote:^ I heard they were coming to "Lafayette Square" so I was kind of worried exactly where... good to see it here as it's the best place in the area for them with a drive-thru.

It really is the best location for them. You have everybody getting off interstate 55 and 44 right there heading downtown. They'll get plenty of business there

^ There is one inside the Reliant Bank on Lindbergh in T&C... not been in, but I believe it is more or less full service.

I'd be inclined to call anything west of Lindbergh west county. By your definition West County Center isn't in west county, which seems . . . counterintuitive. The name never felt ironic to me. Seemed reasonable. Honestly, I don't recall "Central" being a thing when I was a kid. I have vague memories of Clayton being west county. And it even might have made sense when things hadn't sprawled so far. Calling Clayton and U-City Central seems to have cropped up since Clayton started to grow a skyline. (It was already common when I worked for St. Louis Couty DoH in the early 90s as a sort of official, in house, division of responsibilities reference. But I don't recall it in civilian use so widely then. I actually had to explain it to some people. I don't recall for sure, but Lindbergh makes sense for where we drew our division. And I think Manchester and Olive. Long time since I worked there, though.) But this is a little off topic. Sorry. Back to . . . Tim Horton's?

I claim no expertise on County nomenclature; heck, I just learned yesterday where Warson Woods is.... had no idea it was along Manchester.

STLrainbow wrote:I claim no expertise on County nomenclature; heck, I just learned yesterday where Warson Woods is.... had no idea it was along Manchester.

It's our little secret.

At some point you think this immediate area would be ripe for some more infill or multi units housing/apartment project. Farm Field seems to still be hanging in there if not mistake, now you got the dental school and convenient to downtown while between Lafayette Square and Soulard.

^ there's been a couple plans for townhomes in the immediate area the past couple years but I'm not sure how they're progressing... I think one was just a block down from this development on Lafayette for the vacant lots at the corner of Tucker.

Kinda wish this was going to be another Timmy Ho's/Reliance Bank to add (at least incrementally) to the services and utility of this commercial node.

Hate to say it, but even a strip mall with 3-4 storefronts would be better than one or two stand-alone stores in their own asphalt parking/drive-thru moats.

I hate to say it but the housing projects in the middle of LS and this development I think has stifled further projects. I believe if it weren't for the location of that, the old hospital would have been saved at some point.

^Agreed

^Disagree. Those housing projects are light years better than what was there before (completely bombed out, and in some cases literally burned out hulking concrete high-rises), and seem to be kept up pretty well (thanks McCormack-Baron). I think being surrounded by massive high-speed streets/highway on at least three sides (the 4th side being Tucker, which isn't as wide but has a lot of steady through traffic), in relatively close proximity, does more to hurt the City Hospital property and surrounding neighborhood (Peabody-Darst-Webbe) than the PJs within it.

^There's also quiet a few single-family owner-occupied homes mixed in with the apartments.

I agree with both of you. The look is a bit surreal and simple things like more trees could help a ton, but the high speed traffic is also an impediment that severs the surrounding neighborhoods from one another. The suburban, out of place look of that development in particular has trained my mind to think of anything in the City that looks suburban must be some sort of current or former housing project, even when they are clearly not so, e.g. many suburban looking houses in the Gate District, Aventura apartments in FPSE. I agree, the development as it stands is light years ahead of old school style housing projects, but it would be great if changes could be made in order to more seamlessly unite the currently disconnected surrounding neighborhoods. Right now, all of the neighborhoods in that area are like little islands, unconnected to each other.

They're light years ahead of the former housing projects at least in part because they're better maintained. The old high rise version of Darst-Webbe was, for all its flaws, well built and quite urban. There's been a lot of discussion about why high rise projects failed. Some focused on design issues like public common space vs. private or semi-private space. Others discussed maintenance, or security. Have any talked about siting terribly well? I agree that things feel a bit off somehow. The buildings do look inexpensive and only minimally landscaped, but the surrounding thoroughfares could be a problem too. They really don't scale well to the streets around them. And having traffic zipping past at forty (or rather more) miles an hour probably doesn't do much to inspire confidence. Maybe dropping a couple of lanes of streetcar down the center of Tucker/Gravois would serve the dual purpose of slowing traffic down while providing a more durable and attractive alternative to "stroadification." And if it were a more desirable neighborhood, then maybe denser housing might make sense. (There are at least a few fairly successful large concrete housing projects: Both Paquin Towers and Oak Towers in Columbia are solid mid-rise masonry blocks. They're showing their age at this point, but the elevators work, the common areas are clean, the stairs feel safe, and so forth. And both are on quiet streets in otherwise mostly residential neighborhoods. And the residents have benefited from good community support. (Aha! That right there might be the single biggest difference. Having heard some stories . . . I'm fairly sure that was not true of Pruitt-Igoe or Darst-Webbe. Virtually everyone in the two CoMO towers is on Medicaid and receives Social Security disability, so folks aren't constantly in distress about whether they'll be able to pay the rent or get the next meal. It's a basic existence, but it is an existence. And there's counseling and community support to boot. Now if we could provide that kind of support to the mothers of young children so that their kids can grow up without suffering serious damage . . . )

Presbyterian wrote:I've read that the apartments will be in the four remaining City Hospital buildings along 14th Street south of Carroll. On Google Maps, you can notice that they still have their old roofing. I believe this will complete the renovations on the site. Unlike The Georgian, these will be rentals.

looks like these 60 units, which were supposed to be delivered in 2014, are having a hard time getting started or are not moving forward.

^^I think both of those factors are responsible. I drove past the single family detached homes fronting Tucker every day for almost a decade on my way into work, and it looks like the landscaping is frozen in time. It does feel like a subdivision that just went up even though it has been there for a long time.

But that area is also incredibly chopped up. The part that is east of Tucker is cutoff from Soulard by the highway, and further cutoff from Bohemian Hill by Tucker. The small cluster of houses in Bohemian Hill, City Hospital and the commercial stuff is cutoff from Soulard by Tucker and another interstate, and from Lafayette Square proper by Truman Parkway.

It is really incredibly how unpleasant the walk from the Soulard, from say the market, to Lafayette Park can be. You have the two aforementioned busy roads, and a couple of desolate stretches. By comparison a walk of a similar distance between Soulard and Benton Park, or Benton Park to Benton Park West is much more pleasant even though you have to cross an interstate in the case of Soulard to Benton Park.

Crossing an interstate is less of a big deal than a large surface road, in some ways . . . as long as there is actually a crossing. You have a bridge. You don't have to fight traffic. I never understood all the worry about the depressed section downtown. Some slightly improved landscaping might have done just as much as the ludicrously expensive project that has unfolded instead. But that's traffic under the bridge, I guess. If you could improve connections across Tucker, or Truman, however . . . but I seem to recall the folks in Lafayette were pretty opposed to anything connecting their neighborhood east. There was quite a NIMBY fight when Truman was designed, as I recall, and it resulted in what you have there now: the landscaping wall of planters and cut off streets. That was quite explicitly added to keep traffic the heck out. I suspect if there'd been a way to do it Park Avenue would have been cut off as well. (Along with 18th, Lasalle, Hickory, Rutger, Dollman . . .) I recall parking on the edges of Lafayette Square and walking downtown in the late 90s. I suspect that's a less pleasant walk now too. The geographic segregation of Lafayette Square from everything north of east of it is both completely intentional and quite clear. And the final bits of it are surprisingly recent. (It'd probably been going on since the seventies or eighties, but the last parts are well within the current century.)