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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.

4 replies on “One Building For An Extra Lane”

roads roads roads but no places to go to… i don’t get it. i’ve never seen a highway interchange attract anything other than strip malls, gas stations and motels, so our prospects for new construction are pretty bleak i think, even if something does get built. i really wish MODOT would just go away, but it looks like they’re not going to stop until the city is completely gone. then they’ll be that much closer to their dream of making Missouri the easiest state to drive through with no reason to stop, except to get gas at one of our city’s many many many convenient gas megaplexes.

Here is a phrase that the Missouri Department of Transportation  should adopt — Waste Not- Want not. — barbara

MoDOT is an arm of the oil industry and of  the concrete cartel and business interests that have been raping the city for years. MoDOT is not an institution run for the citizens. Missouri is 5th in the amount of state roads in the nation http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/ohim/hs04/pdf/hm80.pdf. The governing philosophy of MoDot is to supply profits for their friends.
NextSTL has a blog article recommending MoDOT receive an additional 15 cents gas tax. For what? More of the same? It seems to me it is way past time to completely rethink and remake transportation systems. MoDOT should not receive another penny of additional funding until transportation policies are fashioned to match today’s realities of oil wars and global warming.
 The unused MacArthur bridge could have been updated and rehabbed if additional bridge crossing was really needed. A better solution yet would be more mass transit across the river, eliminating the need for a new bridge. Those options are never put on the table. Instead we have a predetermined process of solutions favored by insiders that create more problems than they solve.

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