Category: People

Categories
Century Building Downtown People

Update on the Century Building Legal Battle

From Roger Plackemeier:

To the curious and interested…..

awhile back I sent out an update message on the Century Building malicious prosecution suit. At the time I reported that we had had a hearing on the motion made by the plaintiffs to disqualify Matt Ghio as our attorney. During a hearing on Friday for another matter we learned that Judge Ohmer had denied the disqualification motion back on September 30th, but neither side had been notified. Chalk one up for the good guys!

Thanks to all who sent messages of inquiry and support.

Categories
Documentation People Urban Exploration

Matthew Coolidge Coming to Town

Thanks to Larry Giles for the heads up on this.

Looking for St. Louis

Matthew Coolidge, founder of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, to explore St. Louis urban landscape Oct. 26-29

Oct. 12, 2005 — Forget purple mountains and fruited plains. The contemporary American landscape is more typically composed of parking lots and shopping malls, factory towns and industrial developments, argues Matthew Coolidge, founder and director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles. Later this month, Coolidge will host a series of events investigating St. Louis’ urban landscape.

The visit — co-sponsored by the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University — comes as part of “Unsettled Ground: Nature, Landscape, and Ecology Now!” a yearlong series of lectures, panel discussions, artistic interventions and workshops exploring the intersection of contemporary architecture, art, ecology and urban design.

At 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 26, Coolidge will lecture on “Interpreting Anthropogeomorphology: Programs and Projects of the Center for Land Use Interpretation.” (“Anthropogeomorphology,” a phrase Coolidge coined, refers to the landscape as altered by humans.)

The talk is free and open to the public and takes place in the Sam Fox School’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, located near the intersection of Forsyth and Skinker boulevards.

On Thursday and Friday, Oct. 27 and 28, Coolidge and Washington University students will examine a variety of “unusual and exemplary” St. Louis sites through a series of workshops collectively titled “Looking for St. Louis.”

On Saturday, Oct. 29, workshop participants will in turn lead additional volunteers over “routes” established by Coolidge.

Events conclude from 6 to 8 p.m. Saturday with a special, one-night-only exhibition, also titled “Looking for St. Louis,” at the Sam Fox School’s Des Lee Gallery, 1627 Washington Ave. The exhibition will include images, texts, artifacts and diagrams drawn from the workshops.

For more information, call (314) 935-9347 or email samfoxschool@wustl.edu.

Categories
Historic Preservation People Urbanism

ReVitalize St. Louis

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
New Grassroots Organization
Committed to St. Louis’ Revitalization
Announces Formation

As you may or may not know, The Rehabbers Club will be celebrating its 5th Anniversary in October of this year. From its humble beginnings as a small monthly support group, our membership now numbers nearly 1400! It is wonderful that so many people are interested and involved in caring for St. Louis’ building heritage.

As the Rehabbers Club expanded in membership, broadened its base, and took on additional projects like the semi annual “Works in Progress” tour and the rehabbers classes, its organizational needs have changed. Handling money, building organizational capacity to manage projects, accepting donations, and sustaining the group require a level of organization above the loose affiliation of the e-mail list we all know and love.

A group of volunteers has been working diligently to lay the ground work for this new organization. So today, with much pride, we announce ReVitalize St. Louis!

OUR MISSION:
We are a diverse coalition of citizens committed to revitalization in the city of St. Louis through historic preservation and sensitive, planned development. We address social, political and economic issues as they impact each of St. Louis’ neighborhoods.

OUR VISION:
Through partnerships, education, outreach, and support, we hope to create positive change in the urban St. Louis community with an eye towards preserving and rejuvenating the city’s physical landscape and inspiring progressive civic action.

OUR BOARD MEMBERS:
Claralyn Bollinger (Treasurer), Marti Frumhoff (President), Tim Klaas, La’Shonda Turner-Brown (Vice President), Gayle Van Dyke, Steven Wilke-Shapiro (Secretary), and Taron Young.

OUR CURRENT PROJECTS:
St. Louis Rehabbers Club: This is a Yahoo! Groups email listserve that boasts over 1300 members – from an original group of 23 just 5 short years ago! This group shares everything from seasoned “how-to” content and where to live, to which local hardware store carries a hard-to-find item and who to contact at city hall for permits as well as a slew of other rehab-related subjects. The group meets once a month in a different city neighborhood with a determined goal of visiting all 79 designated areas over time.

Rehabbers Classes: Created out of a request for in-depth subject coverage from Rehabbers Club members, the classes, begun in 2003, have been a wonderful addition to the rehabbing community. The 14-week once-a-week classes have highlighted diverse subjects like historic tax credits, environmentally-responsible rehabbing, and both mixed-use and urban redevelopment issues, just to name a few.

The Big BIG Tour: This huge city-wide house tour with on-site homebuyer’s fair is enjoying its sixth successful year. It is totally free to the public and is a very popular venue with sponsors and exhibitors as well as the thousands of attendees who have passed through its doors over the years.

STAY TUNED. MORE IS COMING.
The Rehabbers Club won’t change. Those who want to continue to share renovation knowledge and resources online and at the monthly Rehabbers Club meetings probably won’t notice a difference.

However, there will be many opportunities for anyone who is interested to become more involved in reshaping the City. Please consider volunteering for one of the working committees or helping out at one of our many events.

Our working committees are Built Environment, Fundraising, Marketing, and Programming. We hope you will join us in creating the foundations for these committees as they take shape.

Our small and humble website is in the works and if you’re interested in becoming a member, we have membership opportunities available, all of which we’ll be telling you about very soon.

We look forward to your involvement and input as we all move forward together in continuing this great renaissance in the city of St. Louis!

Enthusiastically,

Marti Frumhoff
President

ReVitalize St. Louis
P.O. Box 63062
St. Louis, MO 63163

Categories
Media People

Save William Stage

From Eric Seelig:

Did you ever like Street Talk, the man-on-the-street section in the Riverfront Times? Did you ever like William Stage’s old running column in the days when the RFT had editorials? Now might be a good time to write to the RFT. As you may have read in last week’s issue, William gave a goodbye message at the end of the “Best of Street Talk 2004,” but as I found out last night, this is not his choice, and if possible, he’d like to keep his job with the RFT. The only real reason given for replacing the column is because the higher-ups wanted a new column, and saw getting rid of one that’s been running for 22 years as the only way to accomplish it. I don’t know about you, but I always liked Street Talk, and I don’t see any point to eliminating it except possibly “eliminate personality from the newspaper.” If you’d like to see Street Talk continued in the RFT, or would at least like to see William keeps his job instead of being dropped just because the RFT could, NOTIFY THEM, and tell other people who might be unhappy about this to do likewise:
feedback@riverfronttimes.com
Tom.Finkel@riverfronttimes.com

Eric

Categories
Chicago Louis Sullivan People Salvage

The Legacy of Richard Nickel

by Michael R. Allen

Today at the Chicago Cultural Center I attended a slide-show presentation of Richard Nickel‘s photographs of the buildings of Adler and Sullivan, given by Ward Miller of the Richard Nickel Committee. The slide-show included lesser-known color photographs of such notable buildings by the firm, including the Auditorium Building, the Ann Halstead Flats and the Jewelers Building. I was awed once again by the sensitivity to architectural detail that Nickel imparted in each of his images. He articulated buildings in another language than architecture, and thus made them greater than they were when he found them.

As a fitting summation of the day’s introspection, I found this essay online tonight: Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground by Dan Kelly. Kelly traces minor buildings and fragments of Chicago buildings by Adler and Sullivan — the ones Frank Lloyd Wright discouraged Nickel from including in his unpublished Complete Works of Adler and Sullivan — and concludes:

“…the most minor buildings that construct the city’s neighborhoods are always “missed” when they’re gone, most often because no one bothered to notice them when they were still here. It follows that preservation isn’t just about landmark status or collecting museum-quality ornamental scraps; it’s about noticing what builds a neighborhood into a neighborhood. The city’s blandest buildings can possess rich histories.”

Indeed. This insight had to be what drove Nickel to keep working, and it’s what drives this blog. Hopefully, we will help people avoid the “missing” of buildings and, with more effort, the losses themselves.