urbanSTL

This development should not tear down a single house. It should not even be on the table for discussion. This is an irreplaceable historic district, and this hotel will threaten that context. There is a large vacant lot to the east (Taylor and Chouteau) that I'm sure is looking for a major tenant, and Drury could easily anchor that residential and retail development planned there.



In a city that viewed itself as a city and a worthwhile place, this site would be carefully planned to protect the historic district and produce a hotel that is sensitive to its surroundings.



It would conform to a pedestrian scale and would adopt an ounce of design standards, at least.



It would contain all underground parking.



It would, again, NOT take ANY homes.



Of course, when your leadership has no vision, and when your citizens hate the city they live in, it's much easier to conform to some corporation's vision. They will give us direction. And tax dollars.



That's the wrong direction for St. Louis. Drury seems to be willing to adjust their plans. That's good. Residents of the 17th Ward and the alderman should work to present a different site to Drury (including the above-mentioned) if the proposed one cannot be adjusted to meet resident concerns (and to NOT demolish a single property).



St. Louis's urban context is rapidly diminishing--Laclede's Landing has been sacked by an overwrought casino; the near North Side has been subjugated to a monied developer (and years of neglect and disinvestment that brought him up there in the first place); McRee Town has been felled for an inferior development sure to witness accelerated decline; most of Bohemian Hill has been cleared away from a shopping center now up in the air; modernist structures in the CWE (most of which demolished historic properties for their own construction) are now being wantonly targeted; commercial buildings in North City are becoming a dying breed thanks to the half of the preservation board who will gladly let St. Louis’s chief asset and its most reliable tool for economic development—its historic architecture—see the wrecking ball for the latest church that wants a parking lot or slum landlord who has deferred maintenance to justify demolition.



St. Louis is slipping away, and its last hope is to radically localize. To quit subsidizing huge chains, and start inviting creativity and innovation in the city; to support local businesses that exist, and draw outsiders to craft new ones; to save as much historic architecture as is structurally possible, and to promote only the best urban design for infill and new construction as is economically feasible.



Drury says it's flexible anyway.



Why NOT look at the proposed plans with a lot of scrutiny?

ttricamo wrote:^^



drops the H - i think you have the city's best interest in mind, and i really respect that, but I happen to believe that big business is part of what will save this city. Quite frankly, it's not economically advantageous to designate every part of the city a historic site. Think about how many iterations of one city block have occurred in Chicago, NYC, or Boston.



Strong economic growth is a part of any cities geo-political roadmap. "Saving as much historic architecture as is possible" must be an ancillary goal to bringing in more business - ergo more revenues for the city and more infrastructure.

I'm not at all anti-big business. I am extremely pro-small/independent business.



Why?



Small/local/independent businesses are threatened by an unfair bias against them at the hands of local government and traditional economic development theory. Massive subsidies go to these large corporations--and those dollars are never truly returned to the city. Further, large corporations with no ties to the locality in which they're located can simply up and leave when it suits them. They therefore have less invested in the local economy and return less to it.



There have been many studies that show that independents are the major generators of the local and national economy. They're simply not the big tickets, that recognizable brand that can be marketed and trumpeted to a wide audience. Name recognition does not make these large companies superior.



There are further studies that show that independents generate at least three times as much activity for the local economy than do national retailers. That's because they tend to use local services--in essence, after all, their "corporate hq" is local!



Small-scale urbanism is what distinguishes any city from its suburbs. The most successful of cities (ones that will survive the age of cheap oil) are ones that have learned and relearned this message. Local businesses/independents are on such a smaller scale.

Look, you can have half of the Grove, you can take five blocks of the Hill and level all of Fountain Park if that means we live in a safe, bustling metropolis with a viable mass transit system, a school system that works, and an infrastructure in place that allows me to NOT leave the city boundary in order to buy clothes, electronics, sporting goods, or anything else offered in Richmond Heights or West County Mall. Historically significant architecture will remain. Small business will not be choked out. I promise you.

But you can't promise me that. And wiping out our sense of place has precisely caused the lack of a "safe, bustling metropolis." St. Louis remains a city where the most prominent intersections of its wealthiest neighborhoods will lie fallow or will sit underutilized (Kingshighway and Lindell; many spots downtown). St. Louis remains a city where corporations threaten to leave without subsidies. It remains a city where people fear to walk, both because of crime and unfriendly, anti-urban design. It remains marred by interstates and urban renewal. It's a disjointed city that is eminently unwalkable. It has very few retail options anyway--in part because it tries to compete with the suburbs and not with other cities its size.



The promotion of small scale urbanism will both boost the economy and preserve historic buildings--because that is the required infrastructure. The quality of life in this city will never improve when our major streets are practically interstates and barriers to development; where neighborhoods with sunken economies continue to lose the architecture that brands (or will one day brand) them as places worth investing.



I wouldn't surrender any of those neighborhoods for large-scale economic development. It doesn't work in an urban context. It's the flavor of the week. Small businesses create more jobs than large corporations do anyway. We shouldn't take a snapshot of right now and assume that huge corporations are winning the competition for business. They are massively subsidized and supported by an apathetic populace.

Please save me the shpeel about shopping at mom and pop stores and artsy blah blah blah because that is not the answer to luring back the sheer number or residents needed to make this city great again.

But of course they will! People don't choose to remain in or move to Boston and Chicago for the Home Depot. They remain and move because there's a special culture to the place. A lot of that culture is encased in the DNA of the buildings and public spaces. (Of course, the economy is a huge factor, but places that offer small scale urbanism have a higher quality of life--in other words, they attract both jobs and residents to work them).

Change is needed for StL, especially in the leadership. And I love the city, but if our "chief asset and most reliable tool for economic development is our historic architecture" we're up sh*t creek.

Let's think about that. When did the city start to see its renaissance? Could it have been due to the 1999 State historic tax credit act? That seems to me when the rehab boom began and when all of the excitement over the city started to snowball.



It's because St. Louis's architecture and history is its most unique asset in the metropolitan region. We won't attract people to move to St. Louis with a bigger Best Buy or a Bottle District or a Ballpark Village with an ESPN Zone. We will attract people to the city because it will be some place that's like no other place. Right now, it's that, but in a negative sense. Economic development theories need retooling. The way for a mid-sized city that's already so far behind other redeveloping cities to improve is to innovate, not ape what other people have already done, and done unsuccessfully. In St. Louis's case, that's emulate suburbs to draw suburbanites back in the city.



St. Louis should be trying to draw residents from across farther borders--both state and international borders, that is. What sense is there in trying to attract those back who clearly don't want a vibrant, urban city?

That area of the Grove, like all parts of the city, is starving for some sort of development or rehabilitation. However, before they green light construction, the city, the alderman and the residents to make sure everything is tip-top.

We agree on this. And I respect that you want to improve the city as well. I just think it's the lazy response. Our city needs to innovate to survive at this point.

No reasonable person would call anything a century old "new construction."



St. Louis has accrued massive economic benefits for the inimitable housing it has allowed to remain for a century or more.



"New" construction, especially post-1950, in the city of St. Louis has contributed comparatively little.



For mid-sized cities, historic architecture becomes an especially important part of the economic equation.

Matt Drops The H wrote:No reasonable person would call anything a century old "new construction."



St. Louis has accrued massive economic benefits for the inimitable housing it has allowed to remain for a century or more.



"New" construction, especially post-1950, in the city of St. Louis has contributed comparatively little.



For mid-sized cities, historic architecture becomes an especially important part of the economic equation.

^ Any reasonable example (San Francisco? Boston? What else?) includes significant and contributing "new" construction. Are there cities I'm missing where historic architecture has been especially important to economic development that are also absent significant new construction? And I'm not sure that St. Louis has accrued "massive" economic benefits of any kind for any reason. I love this city, but it has decayed for the past 50 years.

^ Cool. Thanks. It's too bad that Kingshighway is not a pedestrian-friendly street (maybe it could be?). I understand the desire to not have the hotel turn its back on the neighborhood, but none of us want more than a function (and hopefully nice-looking) walking connect to the residential streets . . . and I can't imagine side-walk dining along Kingshighway/40, but we can't simply throw down an office park tower - a challenging site. I think that the Atlantic Terminal Building shows that tall can go with small and work.

Grover wrote:


^ Any reasonable example (San Francisco? Boston? What else?) includes significant and contributing "new" construction. Are there cities I'm missing where historic architecture has been especially important to economic development that are also absent significant new construction? And I'm not sure that St. Louis has accrued "massive" economic benefits of any kind for any reason. I love this city, but it has decayed for the past 50 years.

Well, the major example of a preservation-friendly city that has little new construction is New Orleans. Historic architecture is probably the crux of its very economy.



My point, though, was that all of the rehabbed housing in the city (since the 1999 historic rehab tax credit via the state) has contributed to the city's economy in more ways than any other economic development project.



By the way, those 50 years of decline have not been marked by stability for the built environment. Scores of neighborhoods have been erased--Mill Creek Valley, Kosciusko, southern portion of Old North St. Louis, DeSoto-Carr, significant portions of St. Louis Place and Jeff Vanderlou, McRee Town, Gaslight Square, large portions of LaSalle Park, everything in the path of I-55, 64, 70, and 44, much of Downtown, and others.



Those decades of decline are due in part to the squandering of urbanism for suburbanism.

Along the east boundary of Forest Park, on the east side of Kingshighway, between the Chase and FPSE, would it also be important to require that new towers are constructed "on-line" to mimick the Central Park or Copacabana Beach discipline, (presuming that some of the much-coveted vacant lots are ever built upon).

Matt Drops The H wrote:"New" construction, especially post-1950, in the city of St. Louis has contributed comparatively little.

I love generalities. Note though, that without post-1950 construction downtown St. Louis really would be a ghost town today.



As for the proposals, given the clear importance of a strong linkage between the hotel site and BJC combined with the somewhat unfriendly nature of Kingshighway and the desire to have a design that interacts with a street, maybe the idea is one not yet discussed: extending Euclid/ Old Kingshighway across Highway 40.



By bridging the highway, primary access to the site could be funneled through the existing Hospital Plaza/ Kingshighway intersection rather than through a new secondary road cutting through the residential neighborhood. Moreover, such a roadway would clearly confine development on those parcels east of what is the historic boundary of Forest Park, ideally on a rectangular area between Gibson and Chouteau and on a triangular area between Chouteau and the highway (plenty of space to locate two different hotels fronting on Euclid on each property plus underground parking). The new Euclid provides a clear pedestrian and auto connection between the hospital and the hotels and could be designed to be far more pedestrian friendly than Kingshighway. Increasing the number of connection between the CWE, the hospital complex and FPSE can only benefit the neighborhood. As for surface parking, make Euclid wide enough to accommodate on-street parking on each side to serve the hotels.

JMedwick wrote:

Matt Drops The H wrote:"New" construction, especially post-1950, in the city of St. Louis has contributed comparatively little.

I love generalities. Note though, that without post-1950 construction downtown St. Louis really would be a ghost town today.

Hah! Without 1950s-1990s demolition, downtown St. Louis might actually have the makeup to be a functional downtown. Who knows--maybe it never would have spiraled into such decline.