Category: North St. Louis

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North St. Louis Northside Regeneration Pruitt Igoe

Pruitt-Igoe Belongs to Us

by Michael R. Allen

The St. Louis Development Corporation has proposed initiating a $100,000 two-year option on the 33-acre Pruitt-Igoe site for Paul J. McKee, Jr.’s Northside Regeneration LLC. During that time, the ddeveloper would have exclusive right to purchase the site for $900,000. What does this mean for the future of the site of one of the city’s most important events from the recent past?

For now, it means that the developer will be able to lay claim to the ground, and market the site as the potential location for commercial buildings. Yet the option does not stop public imagination of what could be done with the site. The Pruitt-Igoe parcel is owned by the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority, a public agency. Thus we are all owners of the site, and its future is a question of public interest. Most sites in the Northside Regeneration footprint are of marginal historic interest, but this one is rich with symbolism. What happens to Pruitt-Igoe’s remaining vacant land reflects our collective regard for the lives of all who lived in the housing project there.

Ahead of Northside Regeneration’s option, last summer I joined my collaborator Nora Wendl in launching the independent ideas competition Pruitt Igoe Now. Pruitt Igoe Now has solicited ideas and designs for the site’s reuse, and has attracted the interest of participants from around the world. We close the competition on March 16, and announce winners in late May. Our purpose is not to block redevelopment but to offer a powerful moment of civic reflection.

A playground at Pruitt-Igoe. Photograph courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

How do we honor the past life of the Pruitt-Igoe site through its renewal? Often historic sites connected with significant African-American experience are lost without deliberation. The list of buildings lost in Mill Creek Valley, JeffVanderLou and The Ville is staggering. The loss of public housing buildings has erased much of the postwar history of struggle and accomplishment. Pruitt-Igoe’s ruins are left as an imperfect marker of a complicated but definitive chapter in the city’s history.

WORTH READING: “Fantastic Pruitt-Igoe Design Workshop: Social Agency Lab and Neighborhood Youth” — an account of a workshop in which Hyde Park youth developed ideas for the Pruitt-Igoe site, written by a young participant.

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College Hill North St. Louis Planning Preservation Board South St. Louis Southampton

Thoughts on Citywide Preservation Review

by Michael R. Allen

On Monday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an article by reporter Tim Logan that raised the issue of the city’s lack of citywide demolition review. The article, which ran on the front page above the fold, took as a starting point the sudden, lonesome death of the Avalon Theater on South Kingshighway. Since the Avalon was outside of one of the city’s preservation review districts, it bit the dust — or, rather, became dust bitten by passers-by — without any review.

Multi-family buildings in the 5000 block of Winona Avenue, in the Southampton neighborhood.

Logan’s article included a promising set of quotes from two aldermen. The first came from Carol Howard (D-14th), who represents the eastern part of the Southampton neighborhood where the Avalon was located. The demolition experience has spurred Howard to seek demolition review for her ward, one of south city’s only wards that lacks review. Howard also endorses a return to citywide review, which St. Louis had before 1999. “It’s a tool, I think, that makes for better decisions,” she told Logan.

A view that could be read as dissenting came from Alderman Antonio French (D-21st), whose constituents include this writer. French’s first bill upon being elected in 2009 put the 21st Ward into preservation review for the first time since 1999. Yet the alderman wants to remove review for part of the College Hill neighborhood added to his ward in redistricting. French wants to concentrate preservation efforts on the intact largely Penrose and O’Fallon neighborhoods in his ward. “What works for Penrose and O’Fallon may not work for College Hill,” said the alderman.

The building at 1431 Prairie Avenue in College Hill is one of the last buildings left on its block.

Am I the only person who sees that both Alderwoman Howard and Alderman French are right? St. Louis does need citywide review, and building conservation strategies for depleted neighborhoods like College Hill — where many blocks are devoid of more than five or six historic buildings — need not entail preserving every remaining historic building.

Yet the crux of these two points’ convergence is that these decisions need to be made by qualified professional planners working in the interest of all city residents. Aldermen who serve geographic areas whose boundaries change every ten years, who lack training in urban planning and historic preservation, and who have to seek re-election are not the best people to make decisions for the long-term interests of the city’s built environment. Yet aldermen create the legislation under which review takes place, establishing guidelines that represent the public interest.

Alderman French might be suggesting that a citywide demolition review ordinance be informed by theories of planned shrinkage. Again, having professionals examining demolition seems like the best way to make that happen. Citywide review does not mean preservation of everything in the city, it means a system in which preservation planning is made under legal criteria interpreted by professionals who are free from political motivations. Applicants for demolition, aldermen, neighbors and preservationists will have a predictable public process with the same rule for every building.

If that sounds familiar, it’s what this city had before the Board of Aldermen passed the current preservation ordinance in 1999.

Categories
Abandonment North St. Louis Pruitt Igoe

Pruitt Igoe Now Submissions Due March 16

The start of the new year puts us two and a half months out from the deadline for the Pruitt Igoe Now ideas competition. The competition brief and submission requirements are posted at pruittigoenow.org.

The competition takes as its starting point imagined futures that involve the remaining 33 vacant acres of the former Pruitt and Igoe housing projects. Submissions need not be architectural, and need not include a building program for the 33 acres. Essentially, entrants are creating their own programs and geographic boundaries. Pruitt Igoe Now’s organizers hope that submissions consider the larger geographic context of the site as well as the backdrop of land abandonment in the city.

Recent coverage of the competition has come from The Atlantic Cities.

In November, competition co-manager and Preservation Research Office Director Michael R. Allen published an essay on the competition process in Next American City, entitled “What Remains”.

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Adaptive Reuse Hyde Park North St. Louis

Films in the Night on Mallinckrodt Street

by Michael R. Allen

Hopefully some readers are aware of the worthy efforts of the Rebuild Foundation to transform historic buildings in Hyde Park into creative spaces where art and community converge. So far, the Foundation has purchased three buildings around Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church, and work is well underway on two of the buildings.

1415 Mallinckrodt Street

The Rebuild Foundation’s adaptive reuse philosophy is rooted in great respect for the historic materials and craftsmanship found in Hyde Park’s architecture. Yet the Foundation, under the direction of artist Theaster Gates and project manager Charlie Vinz, has embraced the potential to transform tradition. That is, their rehabilitation work in interpretive instead of restorative. Since they are working on damaged, vacant buildings, the approach seems correct. These are not buildings in pristine repair with all of their features intact.

Instead, these buildings offer a narrative of decline through their distressed conditions. Rebuild Foundation uses what is left of the original fabric to forge a new architectural story of rebirth — one told through leaving some things in place, reworking others and bringing new materials and designs into the mix. The buildings gain a temporal relationship to the larger arc of the neighborhood, and their details do not mask that.

Preservation Research Office has been a supporter of the Foundation’s work, and we have twice provided curated film screenings for Foundation staff and volunteers. Our most recent night took place at the end of a work day on Saturday. To tired and productive workers we offered a selection of 16mm educational films — including the dazzling Bakery Beat — once part of the St. Louis Public Schools’ library. This is the same collection once used for the cine16 series, but now it is under our stewardship.

We hope to expand programming from the collection in the future, but in the mean time we enjoy opportunities to connect it to new audiences. The cultural heritage of the city can create unexpected moments as it is redeployed and reinterpreted today. Old buildings, old films, old craftsmanship — all continuous threads that make our city a remarkable and living place.

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Demolition North St. Louis St. Louis Place

Two For One, 20th and Warren Streets

by Michael R. Allen

Demolition of the fire-damaged corner store at 20th & Warren streets is nearly done (see “Lost: Corner Store, 20th & Warren”), In the process of demolition, wreckers have knocked loose a large section of the corner of the adjacent multi-family building. While the two buildings shared a party wall, they were not internally connected and the survivor was not threatened by the fire next door.

Of course, our demolition regulations do not protect adjacent vacant buildings, and we lose a few each year to careless demolitions next door. Meantime, the damaged buildings will sit awaiting owner or — most likely — city demolition efforts. Residents of the 1900 block of Warren lose a corner building and have to watch the wrecked building next door slowly collapse until it too gets leveled.

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Clearance Demolition North St. Louis Old North

One Building For An Extra Lane

by Michael R. Allen

This is the former Greyhound maintenance building (built around 1950) at the northeast corner of Cass Avenue and Hadley Street, currently being demolished by the Missouri Department of Transportation (MODOT). While the building’s loss has been shown on MODOT’s plans for the new bridge landing on Cass Avenue since 2005, the actual demolition could not be more clearly pointless.

For one additional westbound lane of Cass Avenue, an entire building gets taken down — at public expense. This building and another one to its north are in great shape, with brick walls and steel roof trusses. These one-story clear-span buildings would make excellent retail stores (a supermarket in this building would be pretty cool), offices, warehouses or even just garage space. However, MODOT’s allocations are generous enough to remove considerations like wisely using existing resources, or not buying nearly entire city blocks in order to get a 20 foot easement.

Then again, with the loss of the Brecht Butcher Supply Company buildings to the west in 2007, and subsequent demolition of nearly every other building north of Cass Avenue from 14th to 10th streets, the demolition fulfills the eventual clear-cut of the south end of Old North St. Louis. Whether new buildings take the place of the old is uncertain, Crown Mart and scrap yards notwithstanding.

Categories
Fire North St. Louis St. Louis Place

Lost: Corner Store, 20th & Warren

by Michael R. Allen

Last week, St. Louis Place lost one of its few remaining corner commercial buildings to a fire. The vacant three-story building at the southeast corner of 20th and Warren Streets was deteriorating, and had recently shown signs of a failing I-beam over the storefront. Still, the fire and the totality of destruction were startling. This was the end point of a street wall that was largely intact, so the hole is starkly apparent.

After the fire.

The adjacent four-family building survived. Both of these buildings were built circa 1890, and were fairly typical vernacular masonry buildings. The corner building, with its partially mansard-roofed third floor, galvanized cornices, foundry-bought iron columns and chamfered store entrance was not unique to the neighborhood, the north side or the city. Yet in an age when there were dozens of this type of building in this neighborhood, instead of less than a dozen, its fate would not have been noteworthy. Nowadays, its loss inflicts a huge blow to the neighborhood.

Last year.

The building was included in the 1986 addition to the Clemens House-Columbia Brewery Historic District, a National Register of Historic Places district first listed in 1984 (see the nominations and maps on this page. At the time of listing, most corner buildings of this type in this part of the St. Louis Place neighborhood were already gone.

The corner storefront was located in the Union Addition, laid out by Col. John O’Fallon and other investors in 1850 — five years before this area would become part of the city of St. Louis. Development was slow in the area south of North Market Street, because the city reservoir was drained in 1871 and its ruins not demolished until 1887. That same year, the Visintandines (headquartered in the Visitation Academy at Cass Avenue and 17th Street) subdivided the land between Mullanphy, 17th, Madison and Hogan streets. Upon removal of the reservoir’s earthen walls, and the platting of four new city blocks on its site, development of buildings along 20th Street (then 17th Street) took off. Additionally, the Columbia Brewery broke ground on its impressive new plant at 20th and Madison Streets in 1890. A streetcar line ran along 20th between Cass and North Market Streets in the middle 1890s, making this area more attractive for corner stores and commercial sites.

A corner commercial building probably located at 20th and Montgomery streets. Courtesy of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

A historic photograph in the collection of the State Historical Society of Missouri likely depicts a corner commercial building at the southeast corner of 20th and Montgomery streets just a block north of the now-lost building. While there are differences in details, the configuration of the storefront and the use of painted advertisements is similar. This photograph dates to 1955, when these buildings and their shopkeepers were essential parts of neighborhood life.

By 1997, the Building Division listed the building at 20th and Warren on its vacant buildings list. Owner Lillian Reeves stopped paying property taxes after 2008, meaning that the building would have soon gone to tax auction. Sadly, a chance at a new life for the building was close at hand.

Categories
Hyde Park Missouri North St. Louis O'Fallon Penrose Public Policy St. Louis Place The Ville

Capping Neighborhood Revitalization

by Michael R. Allen

In the past few weeks, proponents of the possibly impending economic development deal crafted between leaders in the Missouri House and Senate have made excuses for proposed cuts to the historic rehabilitation tax credit: “it was going to be cut anyway.” This rationale has led many St. Louis political leaders, developers and even usually-opinionated bloggers to concede that the state’s proven revitalization tool will have to be lopped to make way for a brave new future of subsidies for new cargo warehouses.

The corner building at 1530 Salisbury Avenue in the Hyde Park Historic District is now vacant.

We’ve heard that the “big buildings are done,” a statement that one could not safely make at the corner of 8th and Olive streets in downtown St. Louis, or in the railyard industrial areas of Kansas City. We have hard that it’s time for “new money” and new economics, a line that fails to mention that the cargo warehouse credits as written would only go to new construction, and that warehouses are not know for either welcoming pedestrian flanks or for innovative architecture. Worst, we have heard that a $10 million limit on historic tax credit awards of $275,000 or less is somehow protection of neighborhood microdevelopment.

The LRA-owned building at 2037 Adelaide Avenue is within the proposed O'Fallon Historic District.

To be sure, having some nod toward small projects is better than none, but what we have on the table is an annual $90 million issuance of historic tax credits in which small projects will only get $10 million – not a penny more. The $80 million majority of credits will go to the big projects – the ones that some proponents have claimed are “mostly done.” This skewed ratio prevents small developers and property owners from direct competition with large development operations, but it represents a move to cut small projects to over half of activity we saw in Fiscal Year 2011.

The vacant house at 2609 Rauschenbach Avenue in the newly-designated St. Louis Place Historic District.

According to data from the Missouri department of Economic Development (DED), in Fiscal Year 2011, the state issued around $21.5 million in historic rehabilitation tax credits to projects that received $275,000 or less in tax credits. This activity represents 165 of the 385 projects to which DED issued historic tax credits. Of course, the total issuance was $116.2 million, so the small projects were far from the majority. Yet they account for around 43% of all projects that used the historic tax credit.

A formula based on caps of $10 million for small projects and $80 million for large projects will end up slowing the pace at which neighborhood revitalization can take place, in small towns and big cities. In St. Louis, the effects could be most harmful in distressed neighborhoods across north St. Louis where new historic districts are being created or have been created in St. Louis Place, the Ville, Penrose, O’Fallon and the Wellston Loop. Literally thousands of north St. Louis buildings will be eligible for the Missouri historic rehabilitation tax credit by the end of the next year, in addition to buildings in the rest of the city. Will these buildings have fair access to an incentive designed to bring them back to productive use?

The answer to that questions rests with the General Assembly, as well as to backers of the tax credits for the cargo warehouses. Those who advocate for neighborhood revitalization can fight for a mechanism that may bring us more jobs, which the region does need, but they should not let their guard down when it comes to the mechanism that often is what stands between a rehabilitated, human-scaled building and a vacant lot or gas station.

The building at 4210 W. Cote Brilliante Avenue is in the Cote Brilliante Avenue in The Ville Historic District, which goes for state approval in November.

This is no either-or proposition – St. Louis will not be an attractive place for new investment if it neighborhoods aren’t improving. Missouri can’t give us unlimited money, but we can make sure that what we get doesn’t rob resources from neighborhoods that can’t afford lobbyists in the Capitol this week. A $10 million cap is too low. At least the cap should be based on last year’s activity of $21 million, so we don’t lose the momentum that is transforming tough blocks into great places to live.

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Abandonment North St. Louis

Cotton Belt Freight Depot: RFT’s Best Old Building

Looking south down the side of the Cotton Belt Freight Depot.

The Riverfront Times occasionally slips in a “Best Old Building” among its annual “bests.” This year, to our delight, it is the cementitious wonder of the north riverfront, the Cotton Belt Freight Depot. The honor is timely; the city issued the building permit for the 750’ x 30’ transfer depot on October 18, 1911. The five-story warehouse cost $165,000 to build and was completed in 1913.  Currently the distinctive building awaits reuse.

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Lewis Place North St. Louis

Scenes From the Lewis Place Festival

This year’s Lewis Place Festival took place on Saturday, September 17, and commemorated the community’s perseverance against the tornado damage that struck on New Year’s Eve last year. The Festival is sponsored by Lewis Place Historical Preservation, one of the city’s most committed neighborhood organizations.

This year, Lewis Place Historical Preservation gave out Distinguished Service awards to Centennial Christian Church, Alderman Terry Kennedy (D-18th), Preservation Research Office Director Michael Allen, Most Worshipful Prince Hall Grand Lodge of Missouri and Nile Trice for their efforts to help Lewis Place secure funding and assistance to deal with the tornado. Nile Trice’s efforts deserve special commendation; the 13-year-old raised $1,600 for tornado relief at her birthday party and plans to use her birthday parties as fundraisers for worth causes for years to come. We were honored to be part of efforts that include this inspiring young lady.

Ngoma in Motion opened the festivities.
The Centennial Christian Church Choir performing "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
Bungalows on the 4700 block of Lewis Place.
Food, drink and entertainment were abundant at this year's festival.