by Michael R. Allen
The 1.48-acre parking lot on the southeast corner of Euclid and Delmar is a great reason not to allow construction of another parking lot in the Central West End.
In the late 1970s, the non-profit Union-Sarah West Economic Development Corporation demolished a row of vacant commercial buildings here to build the lot under the guise that the parking lot was necessary to serve the renovated Euclid Plaza Building. Today, the lot sits vacant. Not only is the lot closed off to public use, it is never used at all. The parking lot is weedy and blocked off. The Roberts Companies have proposed new construction on the site, but nothing is current in the works.
While the fate of this lot and the fate of any lot built by the St. Louis Archdiocese cannot be compared — the Archdiocese will be a good steward of a new parking lot, I am sure — this lot raises a planning question. Does a neighborhood with so many underutilized surface parking lots at prime corners need another?