Category: Downtown

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DALATC Downtown North St. Louis Northside Regeneration Public Policy South St. Louis

Baron May Seek Distressed Areas Land Assemblage Tax Credit Act; Discussion Needed

According to recent articles in both the St. Louis Business Journal and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, developers McCormack Baron Salazar may seek the new Distressed Areas Land Assemblage Tax Credit for the massive Chouteau Lake and Greenway project that they have contemplated for nearly a decade. This possibility is based on the fact that the state Department of Economic Development considers the entire city of St. Louis a distressed area under the legal definition of the tax credit act. Thus, any project in the city that meets the tax credit’s other requirements could qualify.

This probably isn’t what the authors of the tax credit had in mind, but the use would not be a bad thing. After all, the connection between the south side and downtown historically has been weak due to the railyards and Mill Creek before that. While rail lines are important and could see greater use in future times, the visual and physical barrier along the southern edge of downtown is detrimental. On one side, we have downtown and its burgeoning vitality. On the other side, the strong historic neighborhoods of the near south side. Between, we have the rail yards, the anti-urban campuses of AmerernUE and Ralston Purina and countless marginal uses. Making connections across this expanse will be a huge and visionary undertaking.

According to Richard Baron of the firm, he and his partners already control 23 acres in the project area. The tax credit would allow them to acquire more. Their project is unlikely to involve any residential relocation at all, although it may eventually include eminent domain.

While perhaps not the most pressing need for urban development, the Chouteau Lake project could be very good for the city. The details need full and open discussion. That discussion would benefit from the participation of developer Paul J. McKee, Jr., who has big plans for the northern edge of downtown. Unlike Baron, McKee has not published any rendering or discussed many details of his project. McKee has stated that he wants to use the Distressed Areas Land Assemblage Tax Credit in north city. In fact, his attorney Steve Stone is credited with writing the first version of the tax credit act.

These two large projects on the edges of downtown could unite the central city to its neighborhoods. The Distressed Areas Land Assemblage Tax Credit could enable wonderful urban-scaled projects that resolve big, old problems in the city — or it could enable years of neighborhood fear, deferred dreams and unfulfilled promises. Baron and McKee need to engage the public, each other, city planners and neighborhood leaders so that we don’t let two good opportunities turn into huge failures.

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Downtown Events

Downtown Walking Tours Offered Every Saturday

Want to know where Henry Shaw’s townhouse stood? Why the Chemical Building is so named? Heard about the Gateway Mall but not quite sure what that is? Or maybe you just want to see four bronze turtles carrying a lamp-post.

You can get your questions answered every Saturday from April through October on a Metropolis Downtown Architectural Walking Tour. Metropolis offers both an eastern and western tour each Saturday at 10:00 a.m. Tours generally last two hours.

Enjoy the last few weeks of tours in pleasant weather. Docents will share architectural information about downtown past, present and future (okay, I don’t know about the other docents but I offer some predictions).

Eastern tours start on the western steps of the Old Courthouse, near the corner of Market and Broadway.

Western tours start at the entrance to the Hyatt Regency Hotel at Union Station, near the corner of 18th and Market streets.

The tours cost $5. More information here.

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Downtown

One-Armed Bandit

by Michael R. Allen

I was taken aback by a developer’s decision to rename the Chemical Building in downtown St. Louis to “Alexa”, but I am completely floored by the latest move: a change of the building’s address to 777 Olive Street from its legal address of 721 Olive Street. That’s plain fiction.  Furthermore, an Urban St. Louis moderator changed the title of the thread on the project to reflect the supposed new address. Bah.

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Downtown Louis Sullivan

St. Nicholas Hotel Briefly Returns

by Michael R. Allen

In the past two weeks, construction of the Old Post Office Plaza downtown unearthed some fragments of a Louis Sullivan masterpiece lost twice, the St. Nicholas Hotel. The hotel stood at the northwest corner of Eighth and Locust streets downtown between its construction in 1893 and its demolition in 1974, surviving an unfortunate remodeling in 1903. Since 1974, its site has been paved and maintained as a parking lot. Salvagers picked the building of recognizable Sullivan ornament, but apparently other parts stayed on site.

When workers broke through the asphalt, they unearthed a mess of structural steel, brick and other parts of the old hotel. The city had an unusual and unanticipated archaeological site, offering potential clues on the elusive details of the St. Nicholas. Unfortunately, the potential opportunity came and went without any real investigation. Steel was loaded out to be scrapped, and more solid debris was either removed with other fill or left in the ground. The good news is that the excavation was fairly shallow, and surely more of the building survives beneath the plaza. Should the plaza ever be less than successful, and it future land use reconsidered, we may have another chance to mine the lot for traces of the prairie master’s hotel.

Photo courtesy of Landmarks Association of St. Louis.

The eight-story St. Nicholas Hotel was defined by a dramatic side-gabled roof, large center arched entrance on Locust and projecting oriel bays on both street-facing elevations. Like the Wainwright and Union Trust buildings, the St. Nicholas featured a monochrome exterior palette accentuated by terra cotta featuring Sullivan’s imaginative geometric and organic motifs. The roof profile was somewhat unique among Sullivan’s designs. A supposed fire led to conversion of the building to office use in 1903, when the gabled roof and arched entrance were removed and four floors added according to plans by Eames & Young. Renamed the Victoria Building, the hotel survived in diminished form for another seventy years. (Read more about the St. Nicholas in Patty’s Ramey’s article Louis Sullivan and the St. Nicholas Hotel, St. Louis, MO.)

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Columbus Square Downtown Housing Mid-Century Modern Pruitt Igoe

"Historic" Cochran Gardens

by Michael R. Allen

One local television station’s report on today’s fire at one of the Cochran Gardens buildings on Seventh Street north of downtown called the building “historic.”

The use of that adjective was bittersweet. The six red brick apartment buildings — including two buildings reputed to be the first high-rise public housing buildings in the city — are a handsome example of relatively sensitive mid-century design. Designed by George Hellmuth and completed in 1953, Cochran Gardens was the city’s third federally-funded housing project built by the St. Louis Housing Authority. It also was the scene for one of the nation’s earliest and most successful tenant management programs. For better or for worse, Cochran Gardens survived its contemporaries, form Pruitt-Igoe to Darst-Webbe. Tenant management helped, as did a modern design much more humanely scaled than the successor projects with uniform heights and building types.

Demolition of Cochran Gardens is currently underway, with five of the six buildings slated for eventual demolition. One of the taller buildings will remain. The replacement HOPE VI project is under construction, and seems better-designed than many recent examples. One wonders what sort of viability the Cochran Gardens buildings could have had in today’s downtown housing market. Next door, the stunning rehabilitation of the Neighborhood Gardens Apartments demonstrates that much can be done to creatively transform mass housing, and that there is demand for the end products. Whereas the intended tenants of high-rise public housing may have desired housing more along the lines of what HOPE VI projects provide, some people do choose to live in basic, sturdy spaces off of the ground. After all, the transformation of the wholesale buildings of Washington Avenue into desired housing suggests that just about any kind of building can be someone’s house. Why not a building design for housing in the first place? No matter — we lost the chance with Cochran Gardens. Next time?

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Downtown Green Space

Yet Another Downtown Park to Break Ground Next Week

by Michael R. Allen

On next Tuesday, August 8 will be a groundbreaking ceremony for the Old Post Office Plaza. Situated just north of the Old Post Office on Locust Street between 8th and 9th streets, the plaza site is currently a series of parking lots sharing the block with the Orpheum Theater, Mayfair Hotel and the site of the Roberts Tower. That the site is one of the most valuable pieces of downtown real estate is unquestionable. Located in the core adjacent to some of the city’s largest and most splendid historic rehabilitation projects and one block south of bustling Washington Avenue, the plaza site seems ripe for development. In fact, the Roberts Brothers’ proposed tower — what may be the first downtown high-rise since the Eagleton Courthouse — underscores the fact that developers see viability in this location.

Yet the site is being squandered for yet another downtown park. I admit that this site could be far worse for a downtown park. Sure, it offers a broad view of the Century Building Memorial Parking Garage (which fails to fully screen its descending floors). Sure, having an Old Post Office Plaza that faces the rear of the Old Post Office is more than a little strange. Yet the site does have some sense of enclosure, being surrounded by buildings that come up to the sidewalk line on all of its street-facing sides and butting up against the Orpheum Theater and the Roberts Tower. One can see some interesting views of wonderful buildings from the middle of the site. A failing of many downtown parks, including blocks of the Gateway Mall, is the lack of visual enclosure that creates interesting views as well as an urban sense of place. This site is better than most in that regard.

The design, published on the website of designers Baird Sampson Nuert (link here), provides the basic ingredients of the typical contemporary urban plaza: a large paved assembly space, a wooded lawn for passive recreation, a screen for moving images, dramatic lighting and the presence of moving water. Perhaps all of these plazas, at least in the United States, are now the descendants of Chicago’s Millennium Park with predictable dominant genes. The Old Post Office Plaza deftly packages the components of this type of plaza without overwhelming the site severely. The plaza design doesn’t dazzle, but it just might work. (One potentially troubling visual issue is the relationship between the new tower and the plaza.)

Of course, the plaza probably won’t get to work. There is a simple reason: It’s in downtown St. Louis. This is no slight on the center of our fair city, but a recognition of the fact that there is glut of park space downtown and already spaces like Kiener Plaza that receive the attention of tourists, noonday office workers and other users attracted to well-defined recreational spaces. The cool kids, it seems, prefer their outdoor concerts and movies on parking lots and streets, saving lots for buildings.

Downtown lacks a coherent vision for recreational space, an in the absence of that vision has accumulated enough of that space to serve a downtown three times more dense. The worst part of the Old Post Office Plaza is not its location, or its design, but its timing — it is simply too late to make a difference. The loose-knit nature of downtown has led to disconnection, visual uncertainty and diminished context for those truly good park spaces like Lucas Park. City leaders seem to see no problem with the situation, since the in-progress Gateway Mall Master Plan calls for neither treatment of the mall’s ills nor of the context that makes the mall so dreary. Instead, the mall is proposed for mere remodeling and the amount of green space downtown goes unquestioned. Thus, the Old Post Office Plaza stands little chance to redeem itself.

Categories
Downtown Historic Preservation Mid-Century Modern National Register

Plaza Square Apartments Listed on National Register of Historic Places

From Landmarks Association of St. Louis:

The Plaza Square Apartments Historic District was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on July 12, 2007. Located between 15th, Olive, 17th and Chestnut Streets in downtown St. Louis, the district includes St. John the Apostle & Evangelist Catholic Church from 1860 and Centenary Methodist Church from 1870 as well as the signature high-rise apartments completed in 1961. The Plaza Square apartment complex, the cornerstone accomplishment of the city’s first Urban Renewal project, was designed by the newly formed Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum architectural firm in collaboration with Harris Armstrong—an acclaimed leader of the Modern Movement in the Midwest. Evenly divided into two different configurations with a total of 1,090 apartments, the six buildings utilized native limestone, brick, concrete and colorful enameled metal panels (most now painted tan) to create a sleek contemporary aesthetic enhanced by balconies, landscaped grounds and underground parking

Although the “skyscraper home in a garden” initially attracted urbanites of all ages, Plaza Square soon experienced increasing vacancy rates. In 1965, Building # 60 at the southeast corner of 17th and Olive Streets was sold to Bethesda General Hospital which converted it into the Town House retirement community. Now dubbed BLU CitySpaces by a new owner, Building #60 is being converted to condominiums utilizing historic rehab tax credits. Thanks to the National Register nomination prepared by Landmarks Association for that developer, the other five buildings (which have been subjected to repeated foreclosures) are also prime candidates for reinvestment.

Categories
Downtown Green Space

Plaza Rendering Available 33 Years Ago

by Michael R. Allen


This rendering shows an envisioned “civic plaza” on the 800 block of Locust. The plan calls for passive space with views of the north elevation of the Old Post Office and a tall, modern high-rise built between the plaza and the Mayfair Hotel.

The date? This plan appeared in the 1974 Downtown Plan, prepared by Downtown St. Louis, Inc.

Categories
Downtown Infrastructure Streets

How About a Big Plan for Downtown Circulation?

by Michael R. Allen

I certainly don’t disagree that the Gateway Mall needs massive reconfiguration. I’m not opposed to drawing more people to the riverfront. I definitely would like to see a better connection between downtown and the Gateway Arch grounds.

However, as someone who uses downtown as a pedestrian up to seven days a week, I can’t say that any of those concerns is high on my mind as I walk around. One of my biggest concerns is the traffic flow. With the traffic lights not synchronized, the flow of traffic downtown is ragged — especially east of Tucker. This creates a somewhat unpredictable environment for pedestrians, and annoyances for drivers. Perhaps the Gateway Foundation or another civic-minded group would like to underwrite a study on synchronizing downtown traffic lights.

Another concern is the prevalence of loading zones and no-parking zones. On some streets, like almost all of Locust east of 9th Street and Washington east of 10th Street, there is no on-street parking at all. No surprise that few street-level uses are found on these stretches, and that pedestrians avoid these speedways. On-street parking would help businesses, slow traffic and create a more welcoming pedestrian environment.

Also of concern is the growing number of signs, benches, outdoor dining areas and other obstructions that impede the public right-of-way. While not devastating, this problem creates hostile spots for pedestrians, who aren’t always equally able-bodied. I welcome outdoor dining, but hope that the city thinks circulation on public sidewalks is a higher priority.

Then there are street and alley closures and cut-offs that force people into unnatural travel patterns. Sadly, the Gateway Mall Master Plan actually recommends new street closures. Such closures are the worst thing that could happen downtown right now. Streets are the mechanisms of urban exchange; they create economic opportunities for developers and merchants. More streets are always a good thing for a downtown.

Sidewalks and streets are our rights as citizens of a city. They create the means of traversing the city, moving people as well as goods. The success of downtown hinges on the usability of its streets and sidewalks, which deliver people to the buildings where they live, work or spend money. Big plans for the downtown area need to examine circulation issues. In fact, I would argue that the circulation issues are far more pivotal than the supposed lack of destinations fueling the Gateway Mall and riverfront plans. I think that many of the problems with people not going to certain parts of downtown is more due to poorly-functioning streets as well as a lack of places to live, work and shop (read: functional urban buildings). Fixing some of these problems will yield bigger results than any of the current big plans could.

Categories
Downtown Green Space Northside Regeneration

City Officials Making Best of Dirty Situation

by Harland Bartholomew, Jr.

ST. LOUIS — In an unexpected move, dirt for both the construction of the Mississippi River island and the mound at the western terminus of the Gateway Mall arrived early. Out of town crews trucked in more of the brown matter than St. Louis had seen in years, although construction of the new civic destinations is years away.

To deal with a possible dilemma, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay ordered the dirt spread across 75 non-contiguous acres of north St. Louis for storage. Slay thinks that the dirt companies may be eligible for a proposed land assemblage tax credit designed to smother areas like north St. Louis.

“We’re a unique city, with unique problem — too much dirt,” quipped Slay. The mayor says that other cities have actually noted dirt shortages in recent years.

St. Louis Planning Director Rollin Stanley said that St. Louisans have nothing to fear from the new dirt.

“Other cities have recognized that dirt provides the sort of 24-hour excitement that creates destinations,” Stanley said. “Dirt is literally always around, even in the middle of the night.”

Stanley added that the dirt would only be temporarily stored in north St. Louis.

“The temperatures in Hades are lowering, indicating that construction of the island and the mound could start at any moment.”

One person unhappy with the move is developer Paul J. McKee, Jr., who expressed interest in being the only recipient of the state tax credit.

“We do not have enough dirt in north St. Louis to construct an island in the Mississippi River,” read a written statement from McKee. “However, we are interested in seeking other parties who own dirt so that we can partner on making things with our dirt. We regret that the nameless and faceless dirt movers have changed the nature of my project so I cannot continue as an assembler of dirt.”

Slay suggests that competition for the tax credit is a good thing.

“Every city in America would love to have two large-scale plans for spreading dirt over economically distressed areas. Think of this as a blessing.”

On a related front, Philadelphia is donating a Starbucks kiosk from a downtown park to the St. Louis Gateway Mall effort.

“The last newspaper article calling the kiosk innovative was published in 1999,” said Philadelphia Parks Director Sara Collins.

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