Preservation Research OfficeSonic Atrophy has returned to the internet after a two year absence. The website features photographs of abandoned places along with narratives on the anonymous site creator’s experiences visiting and photographing the places. Most of the locations featured on Sonic Atrophy are in the St. Louis region, but some are located in other places including Peoria and Cairo, Illinois and Gary, Indiana. Visit the website here.
by Michael R. Allen
Photo from Land Reutilization Authority.
This three-story commercial building with a distinctive chamfered corner stands at 3500 N. Grand Boulevard (northeast corner of Grand and Hebert) in the Lindell Park neighborhood. Formerly home to a bank, this building in the Classical Revival style was built in 1909.
This is just one of the thousands of properties owned by the city’s holding agency, the Land Reutilization Authority (LRA). LRA seeks $15,000 for this building — a price below market value. A recent sales contract fell through and the building is again on the featured properties section of LRA’s website.
Last September, I published a blog entry entitled “LRA’s Problem With Marketing: It Needs to Start.” I chastised LRA for leaving properties that had sold in the featured properties list without adding new ones. One year later, I am pleased to report that LRA’s website features only available properties on this list. I am not pleased to report that the online list still represents the bulk of LRA’s marketing efforts.
While many blame LRA itself, that’s a cop out. As a municipal authority, LRA is hidebound to funding and operational binds placed on it by those with budgetary and legislative authority. Ultimately, each of us city residents is a stakeholder in LRA. LRA’s staff cannot effect major and necessary policy changes related to the disposition of city-owned buildings and land — but our elected representatives can.
by Michael R. Allen
UPDATED Monday, Sepetmber 24.
Three applications for demolition are on the final agenda for Monday’s meeting of the St. Louis Preservation Board. The permit applications are:
– 2868 Missouri Avenue in Benton Park (national and local historic district), owned by Craig Hamby & Brian Magill. A two-story corner commercial building, located across the street from the restaurant Yemanja Brasil, mostly collapsed last year. An adjacent building is stable, but the owner seeks to demolish it too. Application includes new construction.
– 4153 (owned by James and Betty Mitchell) and 4220-22 Martin Luther King Drive (owned by LRA) and 4224 Martin Luther King Drive (owned by Tommie Hampton) in The Ville. The buildings on Martin Luther King are brick commercial buildings. The building at 4222 Martin Luther King collapsed last month, perhaps causing damage to its neighbors.
There is one appeal of a staff denials:
– 2217-19 Olive Street downtown, owned by Gary and Gail Andrews. This is a two-story, flat-roofed brick commercial structure.
The meeting begins at 4:00 p.m. on Monday, September 24, on the twelfth floor of the office building at 1015 Locust Street.
by Michael R. Allen
A recent article published on Preservation Online entitled “Winging It in Buffalo” provokes thoughts about the nature of widespread urban abandonment. In the article, writer Stephanie Smith discusses the situation of Buffalo, New York, where city leaders have started a “Five by Five” program to bring its vacant building rate closer to five percent within five years by demolishing 1,000 buildings a year. City planners there estimate that 10,000 buildings should be demolished.
This campaign to “right size” the city makes sensible historic preservation planning next to impossible. The Buffalo preservation board has to consider 1,000 applications a year. There is no way that preservation board members can even begin to make sense of what comes across their desks. At the same time, city leaders at least pay lip service to the idea that massive clearance is ultimately detrimental to neighborhoods.
The larger issue here is relevant to St. Louis and other cities: widespread abandonment creates public safety and land use crises of unprecedented scale. Natural time dooms many historic buildings, while political time expedites that process. Economic time brings solutions slowly, and may not move fast enough for the comfort of residents who remain in areas where abandonment is rampant. While the federal government has spent billions of dollars on supposed crises in nations like Iraq, we have failed to direct it to play a meaningful role to resolve our urban crises. Local problems rely on local solutions — and severely limited local budgets. How and when do we break from this cycle?
Thanks to my colleague Lindsey Derrington for the link.
A new game downtown is taking bets on how many times workers on the Ninth Street Garage will tear out and rebuild the sidewalks around the new parking garage. Today crews were seen repaving already-paved sections of the sidewalk on Locust Street along the north elevation. In recent weeks, the crews went through many changes on the Ninth Street side that involved installing a thin strip of granite since buried under a sheen of dust that renders it nearly invisible.
Needless to say, the sidewalks around the garage do not include street trees.
KWMU’s Maria Hickey interviewed Coast Guard Commander Mark Cunningham about the incident involving Miss Rockaway Armada; listen here.
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.
by Michael R. Allen
If your hand-made river vessel, powered by wind, bio-diesel and sun and made of junk, sadly happened to fall apart in the river, you probably couldn’t have better fortune than to have that happen near the city of St. Louis. St. Louis teems with scrappy mobs of ingenious anarchist inventors, bands of starstruck architects, teams of poetic moonshiners and do-it-yourselfers who know how to rebuild even whole neighborhoods.
I think that Miss Rockaway Armada has found the perfect port to recover from strange misfortune. No doubt that the good crew will be afloat one way or another within a few days.
Florissant house added to National Register – Brian Flinchpaugh (North County Journal, September 17)
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.