Lindell's show-stopper: The Chancery of the Archdiocese of St. Louis at 4445 Lindell, designed by W.A. Sarmiento and completed in 1962.
For years Toby Weiss and I have been giving tours of and writing about the unique concentration of mid-century modernism on Lindell Boulevard between Grand and Kingshighway. This significant concentration of modernism has sustained some losses and currently is enduring threats to both the IBM Building (1959, Hellmuth Obata & Kassabaum) and the AAA Building (1976, W.A. Sarmiento). However it remains the city’s strongest collection of non-residential mid-century modern design.
Modern STL, on whose board both Toby and I serve, has now published a beautiful two-page self guided tour of Lindell Boulevard that includes information about each of the street’s mid-century modern buildings as well as a brief essay that I wrote providing an overview of modernism on Lindell. Modern STL board member Neil Chace generously donated his talent to design the guide. Download it here and then go for a lovely walk down Lindell!
Yesterday the St. Louis Beacon published a great article providing an overview of Pruitt Igoe Now, an ideas competition for the site of the city’s largest housing projects. Here is the official announcement.
Pruitt-Igoe as part of the heart of St. Louis.
Pruitt Igoe Nowis an ideas competition launched by a non-profit organization of the same name, located in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. The subject is the 57-acre site of the long-mythologized Pruitt and Igoe housing projects — a site whose future is intertwined with emerging ideas about urban abandonment, the legacy of modernism, brownfield redevelopment and land use strategies for shrinking cities. This competition seeks the ideas of the creative community worldwide: we invite individuals and teams of professional, academic, and student architects, landscape architects, urban planners, designers, writers, historians, and artists of every discipline to re-imagine the site and the relationship between those acres to the rest of the city. The deadline for submissions in March 16, 2012. Submissions are accepted beginning now.
What now?
March 2012 will mark the 40th anniversary of the demolition of the first of the Pruitt-Igoe high-rises, designed by architects, Helmuth, Yamasaki and Leinweber, who have long been blamed for the troubled legacy of these towers–problems that are now known to be the result of complex political and economic circumstances. Although later maligned by historians, the Pruitt and Igoe housing projects were the embodiment of modern architectural ideals for public housing, and as powerfully symbolic of St. Louis’ urban renewal as the Gateway Arch would become. For forty years, the site of this complex has been largely untouched, and today the site is an overgrown brownfield forest. As countless other social housing projects across the country are torn down, and rebuilt in the idiom of new urbanism, the site of Pruitt-Igoe remains untouched. What is Pruitt-Igoe now? Can this site be liberated from a turbulent and mythologized past through re-imagination?
The Pruitt and Igoe homes comprised a neighborhood.
This call seeks bold ideas that re-invigorate the abandoned site: ideas from sources as diverse in media and background as possible. This competition imagines the site of Pruitt-Igoe as a frontier: the threshold between North St. Louis, which is showing signs of stabilization after decades of decline, and the new design for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.
Our jurors will select the first, second and third most inspiring proposals and award them $1,000, $750 and $500 respectively. A broad selection of entries will receive honorable mention and inclusion in an online gallery. In April 2012, a symposium on urban dwelling and creative intervention will be held at Portland State University; the advisory committee plans to curate all proposals, and exhibit these at the symposium. The advisory committee also plans to curate select competition submissions into a traveling exhibition that will tour beginning in Summer 2012, starting in St. Louis. The initial setting for display will be publicly accessible and either on or near the Pruitt-Igoe site itself.
The Pruitt-Igoe site is now a forested island surrounded by neighborhoods.
The competition was created by P.R.O. Director Michael Allen and Nora Wendl, Assistant Professor of Design in the Department of Architecture at Portland State University. Advisors include writer and former Pruitt-Igoe resident Sylvester Brown, Jr., artist Theaster Gates, architect Karl Grice, former St. Louis Housing Authority Chairman Sal Martinez, The Pruitt Igoe Myth producer Paul Fehler, Washington University professor Eric Mumford, Alderwoman April Ford-Griffin and St. Louis Beacon Associate Editor Robert W. Duffy. Jurors will be announced August 1.
Throughout the process, community and stakeholder engagement is crucial. Pruitt Igoe Now doesn’t have a budget for public relations consultants, but it doesn’t have a protected corner office either. Please get in touch and make this a better experience for the city’s future. Leave comments here, email contact@pruittigoenow.org or call 314-920-5680.
Chain drug store giant CVS has a date this afternoon with the city’s Planning Commission. At today’s meeting, CVS will present plans to demolish the landmark mid-century modern AAA Building (1977, W.A. Sarmiento) on Lindell Boulevard for a new store. Read more at NextSTL.
Already Mayor Francis Slay — who was quick to take the Board of Aldermen to task over the demolition of the spaceship-like Phillips 66 station at Council Plaza — has posted a statement on his site sympathetic to preservation:
I believe that the loss of any distinctive element of our built environment must be justified by a new good at least its equal. It is not my current impression that the amenity of a new chain drug store within blocks of a couple of existing ones or the very ordinary design of the proposed building is such a good. I will, therefore, ask my office’s representative on the Planning Commission to cast a vote against the project today. And I urge the other members of the Commission to, at least, to consider doing the same until the developer has been more directly engaged.
This weekend, East St. Louis is celebrating its 150th anniversary with a two-day program of events. All events take place at the East St. Louis Higher Education Center, 601 James R. Thompson Boulevard in downtown East St. Louis.
The Ainad Temple (1923) at 615 St. Louis Avenue in East St. Louis was designed by William B. Ittner and Albert B. Frankel.
Friday, July 8, 2011: 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
11:00 Building D Multi-Purpose Room
• Ceremony to mark the transition of the East St. Louis Action Research Project from the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville; representatives from the two universities will review the history of the ESLARP program and the exciting plans for the future
12:00 Building D Multi-Purpose Room
• Brown Bag Lunch Program: Dr. Malcolm McLaughlin will be the featured speaker at this event, sponsored by the St. Louis Metropolitan Research Exchange. Dr. McLaughlin is a lecturer in American Studies at the University of East Anglia in England and is the author of Power, Community, and Racial Killing in East St. Louis, a study of the 1917 riot. Free parking in Lot E. The cafeteria in Building B will be open for lunch purchases.
Saturday, July 9, 2011: 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.
9:00 a.m.
• Family History Center (Building B Cafeteria, until 2:00): bring your elders and family photos to the Family History Center. SIUE students will record participants and their memorabilia on videotape for the University Archive and website. (Participants will be asked to sign a copyright release for the videotaping.)
• History Display Area (Building D Multi-Purpose Room, until 2:00): come visit the history display area for exhibits of East St. Louis’s industrial and cultural past. These include special displays by Eugene Redmond (poet laureate of the city), Howard Rambsy (director of the SIUE Black Studies Program), Reginald Petty (renowned local historian and author), and Edna Patterson-Petty (award winning artist, whose work is on display on the Higher Education Campus).
Every time I give a tour of the concentration of mid-century modern buildings along Lindell Boulevard between Grand and Kingshighway, I always stop at the former IBM Building at 3800 Lindell Boulevard. Built in 1959, the three-story building may have been a rather boring business box, but the designers at Hellmuth Obata & Kassabaum liberated the form.
What makes this building architecturally interesting as well as very practical is the cantilevered concrete block screens over the upper floors. The sectional screen reveals in each gap that the windows are nearly continuous behind — thus what seems like a very heavy building actually is light and airy inside, and screened from the sun out!
The screen is another demonstration that architects understood basic ideas about deflecting harsh sunlight and increasing energy efficiency long before they could win LEED points. The IBM Building isn’t “green” in today’s sense, of course, but it sure makes a smart move with the screens. This feature is sensitive rather than forceful, too: the screen’s overhang neatly matches the perimeter line of the battered, stone-faced pedestal on the Lindell Boulevard side. The rubble stone contrasts smartly with the modern, regulated masonry and concrete above.
Alas, today St. Louis University started removing the screen from the building. Now called Adorjan Hall, the building houses various humanities departments. Most of the upper floors is office space, occupied by professors and support staff who will now work against huge, unshielded clear glass windows. An energy-efficiency feature from 1959 is being removed in 2011, when we supposedly know better how to “green” our buildings.
This morning, in an unusual step, the Housing, Urban Development and Zoning Committee of the St. Louis Board of Aldermen held a spirited and divided discussion on a seemingly-routine redevelopment ordinance: Board Bills 118 and 199, pertaining to the ongoing redevelopment of Council Plaza by developers Rick Yackey and Bill Bruce. Board Bill 118 enabled a redevelopment plan approved by the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority that would entail demolition of the mid-century awesome former Phillips 66 gas station now used as a Del Taco restaurant. Board Bill 119 makes changes to the Council Plaza tax increment financing (TIF) that would allow TIF funds to cover demolition costs. Both passed, but Board Bill 118 made it out with only on a 5-2 vote.
Photograph by Rob Powers, builtstlouis.net.
I write that it was “only” a 5-2 vote because the split truly is unusual for the committee. Bigger fish have been fried by consensus or with minimal dissent. The CORTEX redevelopment ordinance that is responsible for the current demolition (without preservation review) of the bakery complex at Vandeventer and Forest Park? Passed by a unanimous vote in 2006. The enormous and contested Northside Regeneration project’s ordinance, now invalidated by a circuit court ruling? Passed with only one “nay” — Alderman Terry Kennedy — in 2009.
Readers are no doubt aware of the demolition threat to the former Phillips 66 station, now Del Taco, at Council Plaza. On Wednesday morning, the Housing, Urban Design and Zoning Committee of the Board of Aldermen will consider Board Bill 118, a redevelopment plan sponsored by Alderwoman Marlene Davis (D-19th) that would make the demolition plan into city law. The committee has the power to change the bill or vote against its release to the full Board of Aldermen.
Once passed out of committee, Board Bill 118 will have to have at least two more readings at the regular Friday sessions of the Board of Aldermen. Its defeat or amendment on the floor is only possible if a majority of the 28 aldermen — that would be 15 — stand up for the beloved Googie building. One possible amendment would be clarifying whether preservation review will still apply under the legislation. The current version contains language that seems to bind the city’s Cultural Resources Office to approve any demolition permit for the midtown spaceship.
Should a majority endorse Board Bill 118, the bill heads to Mayor Francis Slay for signature — or veto.
Council Plaza is located at 212-300 S. Grand Boulevard and consists of two residential towers, a two-story commercial building over covered parking and the space-age Phillips 66 service station that is now a Del Taco restaurant. These buildings were built between 1964 and 1968. In 2007, the National Park Service placed Council Plaza on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district despite their relatively young age. The listing affirmed that Council Plaza had “exceptional significance” under National Register guidelines and could be listed ahead of its 50th birthday.
Lewis Place residents are cautiously optimistic following the announcement.
Today on the median of Lewis Place, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay joined Alderman Terry Kennedy (D-18th), Lewis Place Historical Preservation President Pam Talley, Health and Human Services Director Bill Siedhoff and Preservation Research Office Director Michael Allen to announce that the city was close to putting together $1 million in home repair funds for uninsured Lewis Place homeowners affected by the tornado on December 31, 2010. (More of our coverage, including photographs showing the extent of damage, can be found here.)
After over six months, some much-needed relief will arrive if the Board of Estimate and Apportionmate approves matching $500,000 in state disaster aid funds with an equal match out of the city’s major projects allocation of Community Development Block Grant funds. MayorSlay.com has details of the program here. Mayor Slay, Comptroller Darlene Green and Alderman President Lewis Reed, the three members of the board, all support the package. While there are still issues faced by underinsured homeowners, today’s announcement signals that major relief is finally on the way.
In 1947, the City of St. Louis published as a guiding document a Comprehensive Plan that called for bringing the city’s land use and zoning codes up to then-modern standards. Among the recommendations of the plan were the clearance and rebuilding of several large, older sections of St. Louis, including most of the historic Soulard and Kosciusko districts just south of downtown. In 1951, the Board of Aldermen took a dramatic step toward large-scale urban renewal projects by creating the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority (LCRA) “to undertake the acquisition, relocation, demolition, and site improvements of the urban renewal areas. . . which needed Federal assistance.”
The C. Hager & Sons Hinge Company Buildinga at 139 Victor Street, listed in the National Register of Historic Places, are among the few buildings not demolished as part of the Kosciusko clearance project.
Governed by a five-person board appointed by the Mayor, LCRA became the means for a variety of ends in redevelopment. At the end of 1953, LCRA attracted a new Executive Director, Charles L. Farris, former Deputy Director of the Federal Slum Clearance and Urban Redevelopment program, Housing and Home Finance Agency, Washington D.C., Farris previously had been appointed by LCRA Board of Commissioners on the recommendation of new Mayor Raymond R. Tucker.
Kosciusko around Russell Boulevard with Broadway and the Soulard neighborhood at left. View is looking north.
Under Farris, LCRA moved rapidly to implement the redevelopment recommendations of the 1947 plan. One endeavor was the clearance of the Kosciusko district, which city planners envisioned as an appropriate district for industrial expansion. Kosciusko was a dense, somewhat-rundown assembly of 19th century brick commercial buildings and tenements as well as industrial facilities that had sprung up on the riverfront and expanded into the neighborhood. Kosciusko had many social and physical ties to the adjacent Soulard area, and, in fact, architecturally was greatly similar. Like Soulard, the 2,941 residents of Kosciusko were predominantly poor. The housing stock was substandard, and the industries were land-locked with little alternatives except moving out of the district.
