urbanSTL

Even with these destination-type cultural amenities, parking oversupply kills a downtown. It's critical that the city work to convince patrons to park in other already extant garages or on downtown streets--or, go figure, use the transit stop a block away!



Downtown has a serious parking oversupply. I am not saying the Abrams Building is a great urban building that draws activity, but here's the better solution if the Abrams were to come down:



Develop an urban, mixed use building (scale it according to current market demand). Do the Roberts thing and market it as the "greenest development in America" or something to increase interest. Deck it out with all the amenities and advertise the benefits , including the fact that you're steps away from a Blues game, an opera house, getting a marriage license, or bailing your cousin out of jail.



Include a good amount of parking in this development, but keep it away from the street.



What do you have then? No, not an island of a redeveloped large scale building that absolutely entices everyone to get back in their cars and leave immediately post-opera. Instead, you have a redeveloped monumental building with the potential for activity to spill outside of its own boundaries.



We can never expect Downtown West to be an urban place with such liberal parking provisions.

^ I agree fundamentally with your intentions and hope that this mindset is more firmly established. However, for the Kiel to be redone in a manner that will both achieve the intentions of its redevelopment with redeveloping the immediate area, constructive reuse of the interior of the Abrams for parking is the only feasible answer. That was Breckenridge's idea, and it was a damn good one.



Plus, in conjunction with the "garageification" of the Abrams, Breckenridge looked to construct a new tower on the parking lot directly south of the Municipal Courts building on what is now a parking lot. At this site, he envisioned residential/offices with ground-level retail as well as event overflow parking available within the first few floors. Here could be a solid take towards your vision of an independent mixed-use building with a parking element. Still, the Breckenridge idea considered the Abrams conversion to internal parking to be essential for any of this to get done.



It doesn't change that, for the redevelopment to occur, it must be done in a way to house visitors to both the Scottrade and the Kiel on the same night, with parking for all, in order to achieve fruition.

^ You're right, but we've seen the result of taking this approach to the extreme. So what's the compromise?

^ St. Louis is my kind of town! :Violin :

Each parking lot is a potential structure. Each parking garage is a megastructure bound to remain for at least 30 years. I vote for the development-ready parking lots.

Tough issue. I can see each side, but surface lots (think Kingshighway/Lindell) can sit for as long as a parking structure can stand. And it may be reality that developers want more parking before breaking ground on new projects and that we don't have an "A" mass-transit system, but how are we going to get better development when the argument is always that there's plenty of (often free or extremely cheap) parking - why take Metro?

More on the Kiel - $74M plan: http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/buildi ... s-forward/

Renderings from STLToday...

All the guys are in suits and ties. I wonder what's playing?

The renderings do not show much change (if any) to the Kiel itself. This jives with what Checketts and others have said, they're simply restoring the existing Kiel and updating sound/lighting/seating/systems. The building will be polished/cleaned, we'll see new doors, etc., but no big changes.