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Downtown Parking Preservation Board

More Parking Lots in Downtown St. Louis: Unacceptable

by Michael R. Allen

The red arrow marks 1105-9 Olive Street. The letter P denotes all surface and structured parking in the vicinity.

Yesterday the St. Louis Preservation Board unanimously voted to withhold preliminary approval of Larry Deutsch’s plan to demolish the historic building at 1105-9 Olive Street and replace them with a surface parking lot. Deutsch’s attorney, former alderman and City Counselor Thomas Connelly, attempted to divert consideration of the ordinance criteria with unrelated arguments about the viability of downtown development, tenants’ demands for parking spaces and the loosely-documented structural condition of the building’s east wall.

Categories
Parking

Jones on Parking and the Treasurer’s Office

Last night Tishaura Jones won a four-way Democratic primary for City Treasurer. From her campaign website comes this statement about parking policy. Currently, the Parking Division is under the control of the City Treasurer, with revenue collected from parking not placed directly in the city’s coffers.

Treasurer Larry Williams used his office to help finance the parking garage at Seventh and Olive streets. Visually atrocious, the "hubcap palace" is rarely ever more than half full.

Here is Jones’ statement:

No major city in the US has a “Parking Czar” that controls the building of city garages and where parking meters are placed. The primary function of the Treasurer’s office should be to collect, manage, and invest the city’s funds…period. If elected, I will work with other city elected officials and the Missouri Legislature to transfer this function to the appropriate department and concentrate on increasing the return on investment of the $1.5 billion currently under management.

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Downtown Parking

Can You Find the National Historic Landmark?

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Art Midtown Parking

Art Is in the Eye of the Monthly Parking Pass Holder

by Michael R. Allen

On land once part of a thoroughfare renamed for our native superstar Josephine Baker now rises a menagerie of sculptures. In 2007, the city closed this block and deeded the land to St. Louis University, which planted grass. The university had just demolished a historic livery stable building at the northwest corner of the intersection for yet another giant Grand Center surface parking lot used sporadically for special events. The demolition and the resulting gaping asphalt heat island dealt a blow to nascent renewal on Locust Street, but the area has recovered somewhat. The little strip of closed street has even begun to become something other than an unpleasant lawn.

The maiden sits in the sun achieving a rather bronze tone.

The lawn now sports this sultry nude, whose most private parts are tastefully concealed by earth and sand — yet the shapely parts that identify her as woman are evident to freshman and Fox patron alike. The careless reviewers who call this statue a mere figural representation of a naked young woman in a wading pool are incorrect. The intent of the artist no doubt is complex, and I surely am stumbling in my interpretation. Still, the lady clearly represents fair beauty Grand Center, with one foot playfully set upward suggesting the whimsy of the performing arts. The sand, however, represents the ominous force of parking lots. Our damsel is smiling yet actually is in distress.

The livery stable before its demolition in 2007.

The paradox inscribed in a single statue is powerful, and far more useful to our citizens than any block of street or any nod to a long-gone banana-skirt-wearing dancer.  Right?

Categories
Downtown Parking

Convenient Parking at Seventh and Locust

by Michael R. Allen

News about the conversion of St. Louis Centre into a parking garage for the “convenience” of tenants of One City Center brought to mind a page from the brochure published by the developers of Ambassador Building when the building opened in 1926. An entire page is devoted to the “convenient parking” near this building, although the definition of “convenient” allows for parking facilities over eight blocks away.

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Central West End Parking Planning

One of the Central West End’s Parking Lots

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?

Categories
Demolition Downtown Parking

Lost: The Mercantile Club

by Michael R. Allen

Recent discussion about development around the intersection of Seventh and Locust streets — prompted by a plan to convert St. Louis Centre into a parking garage — brings to mind one of that intersection’s lost landmarks. The Mercantile Club stood at the southwest corner of that intersection, where now there is a parking lot.

The illustration here appeared in the Northwestern Architect in December 1891, showing the successful entry by Isaac S. Taylor in the Club design competition. Completed in 1892 according to the plan shown here, Taylor’s design beat the work of other architects, including Louis Sullivan. (Had Sullivan won, Seventh Street would have been home to three of his works, with the Union Trust Building directly adjacent to the south.)

Taylor’s design clearly was influenced by the Romanesque Revival architecture of H.H. Richardson as well as the architecture French Renaissance, which favored high-pitched roofs and turrets. The base of the building was Missouri granite, with brick above punctuated with terra cotta ornament.

The site had been occupied by the town home of Henry Shaw, which was relocated to a site on Tower Grove Avenue at the Missouri Botanical Garden. In 1891, the Mercantile Club was a rising and successful group consisting largely of downtown businessmen, and the site chosen for the club home was in the heart of members’ commercial interests.

Later known as the Compton Building, the Mercantile Club fell in the early 1970s for the current surface lot.

Categories
Demolition Downtown Parking

Lost: Lucas Avenue Warehouse Meets the Dart

by Michael R. Allen


Photograph from the collection of Landmarks Association of St. Louis.

Following through the recent downtown demolitions with some link to the Miss Hullings Building tragedy, here are photographs of the slender commercial building that once stood at 1427 Lucas Avenue just a block north of Washington and a block east of the City Museum. The link to Miss Hullings? This building was also designed by prominent architect John Ludwig Wees. The visual link to Miss Hullings is clear: a tripartite division into ornamental base, a more prosaic center and a crown featuring an arcade of Roman windows beneath a brick cornice.

Sure, these weren’t the buildings that Wees put in the front of his portfolio, but they were hardly throwaway designs. Every architect has a way of designing when the budget is lavish, or when it’s severely restricted. Where the architect’s hand comes through the most is in the middle — the work that he or she designs day in and day out. Wees certainly gave his commercial buildings a strongly modern sensibility, meted through a classical screen. The first two floors — the public interface at the sidewalk — exhibits a restrained classicism through a limestone surround, a central cast iron column with Corinthian capital, lion heads inside of wreaths above each storefront and an egg and dart cornice in the limestone surround above the whole assembly.

Photograph from the collection of Landmarks Association of St. Louis.

The egg and dart is every building’s sad nod toward fate. That pattern enshrines the life cycle of creation and death in a succinct, poetic metaphor. Egg brings life. Dart takes it away.

Alas, the dart of death frequently comes in the form of heavy metal. The wrecking ball took down this splendid essay in commerce around the last months of 2000, when St. Louis Auto Sales successfully obtained an “emergency” demolition permit from the Building Division. A building that once housed Continental Shoemakers and countless dry good companies ranging from leather wholesalers to garment retailers met the dour economics of parking. Not quite an egg there, eh?

Categories
Demolition Downtown Parking

Lost: Miss Hullings Building

by Michael R. Allen

Steve Patterson’s post “Stealing a Sidewalk” shows how the parking lot at the northwest corner of 11th and Locust streets invades the public right of way by paving over what legally is sidewalk space. The post takes me back to the doom and gloom days of the mid-1990s, when the so-called Miss Hullings Building at that site fell to the wrecking ball at the hands of owner Larry Deutch.

Here’s a photograph of the Miss Hullings Building in February 1997, a few weeks after demolition started, taken by Lynn Josse.


The four-story commercial building dated to 1905, and John Ludwig Wees was the architect. The second and third floors’ robust window grid was softened by a more traditionally Romanesque third floor window arcade and corbelled cornice. The scale of the building was a nice complement to the taller buildings on the other three corners of the intersection — the Alverne, Louderman and 1015 Locust buildings.

Miss Hullings operated a famous cafeteria in the building from 1931 through 1993, when Larry Deutsch sought a demolition permit. The staff of the city’s Heritage and Urban Design Commission (now the Cultural Resources Office) first denied the permit, but on appeal to the Commission recommended approval. Commission staff member Jan Cameron laid out reasons for original denial, but added that the building was not among Wees’ finest. Deutsch proposed leaving the first floor walls of the building in place to screen the parking lot!

At a September 22, 1994 meeting, the Commission voted 4-3 to deny the appeal. Commissioners Karl Grice, Fred Andres and Jeff Brambila spoke strongly against demolition. Acting Chairman Susan Taylor joined these three to vote to deny the appeal. Voting against denying the appeal were Sarah Martin, Renni Shuter and Brad Weir.

Brambila said that “this building has a very definite presence and its context to me is extremely strong.” Andres reminded his fellow commissioners that “the [1993] downtown plan specifically says that there should not be further surface parking lots in the core of downtown.” Reading the transcript from this meeting, one finds many quotes that could have come out of the recent Preservation Board meeting on the Robert Brothers’ plan to demolish two buildings that stand two block east at the corner of 10th and Locust. There are great arguments about context, the importance of adhering to downtown planning documents and the imbalanced trade between building space and car space.

The owners next filed suit against the Commission. On December 13, 1995, Circuit Court Judge David Mason ruled in favor of Deutsch’s company, citing the statements by the Commission staff that the parking lot plan met their criteria for redevelopment and that the building lacked sufficient architectural merit for staff to recommend denial of the appeal.

According to Judge Mason’s ruling, “[the building] by virtue of HUDC staff’s representation to the HUDC, had no architectural merit, had an acceptable development plan, had no neighborhood effect nor reuse potential and had no urban design effect.”

The good sense of the Heritage and Urban Design Commission was overturned. Later appeal of Judge Mason’s decision by the Commission was denied, and demolition commenced in January 1997. Years later, we are still living with the court ruling against common sense.

Categories
Central West End Parking

Central West End View from 1953

by Michael R. Allen

This view of the Central West End dates to 1953 and was taken by the City Plan Commission to show the parking facilities available in the vicinity of Barnes Hospital. The photographer took the photograph from the twelfth floor of McMillan Hospital and aimed north up Euclid Avenue (left). In the foreground is the depressed railroad tracks now used by MetroLink.