Preservation Research OfficeDemolition of Old MFA Feed Store Will Begin Monday – Sarah Wienke (Washington Missourian, September 14)
A former lumber mill built in 1865 and located in Washington, Missouri will meet its end starting Monday — but there’s a small silver lining. The owner of the building, most recently used a feed store, plans to salvage every part of the building that he can.
Thanks to Richard Callow for the link.
by Michael R. Allen
Karen Heet is now Real Estate Coordinator for the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group. Karen formerly worked for Millennium Restoration and Development Corporation where her work put her at the forefront of community-driven historic preservation work. I look forward to Karen’s involvement with my neighborhood. Some challenges ahead include development of city-owned land, dealing with Paul McKee’s holdings in Old North, developing design standards for the neighborhood and completion of the Mullanphy Emigrant Home project.
The Regional Housing and Community Development Alliance recently created the new position of Historic Preservation Specialist for Matt Bivens, who is now working on the “Crown Square” project almost daily. The creation of this position shows that RHCDA anticipates continued and growing involvement in historic preservation projects. This is also one of the most interesting new jobs in historic preservation created in St. Louis. Matt was one of my predecessors at Landmarks Association of St. Louis and most recently was serving as Senior Architectural Historian for SCI Engineering of St. Charles. Matt is energetic, tenacious and an asset to any organization.
Meanwhile, the Cultural Resources Office will soon be considering applicants for its new permit review position.
by Michael R. Allen
Today I passed by the site of the Noah’s Ark Restaurant in St. Charles, Missouri. The ersatz ark fell to wreckers on August 29. The restaurant had to be one of the most prominent and best-loved pieces of Googie architecture in the St. Louis region. The Biblical premise behind the off-the-interstate restaurant charmed and delighted as many as it baffled. Built in 1967 by an airline pilot with a dream, the ark once marked the outer limits of St. Louis suburbia. My one childhood trip from the east side to the ark seemed like a journey to the edge of the world that I knew as St. Louis. Nowadays, the site is east of the homes of hundreds of thousands who call themselves St. Louisans. In place of the whimsical restaurant and its attached hotel will come a pool and exercise center.
(Last year Toby Weiss posted her thoughts and photos of Noah’s Ark here.)
by Michael R. Allen
Detail of commercial building at 2712 N. 14th Street.
A land assemblage project has led to large-scale development in the Old North St. Louis neighborhood. Construction is almost fully underway at Crown Square, better known as the “14th Street Mall” redevelopment project. The moribund 14th Street Mall had long been an impediment to redevelopment of the historic neighborhood, with a pernicious spread of abandonment out from its center at the intersection of 14th and Montgomery streets. Since the closure of 14th street in 1975, the commercial district lost viability and eventually almost every commercial and residential tenant.
The abandonment of buildings led to fires and demolition into the late 1990s. Since the “mall” began as a thriving urban commercial district, ownership was never consolidated. In the years of decay, divided ownership and some land speculation proved as big an impediment to revitalizing this area as the abandonment.
Several years ago, the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group formed a partnership with the Regional Housing and Community Development Alliance (RHCDA) to acquire properties around the mall for redevelopment. This move was debated within the community and initiated by the neighborhood organization, which sought the strategic partnership with RHCDA.
The assemblage strategy was to overlay the area. Basically, if a property was vacant, the partnership made an attempt to acquire it. If it was occupied, the partnership did not. The partnership expressly avoided the use of eminent domain, rumor-mongering or threats in their assemblage operation. In fact, they did most of the necessary assemblage without a redevelopment agreement that would have granted condemnation rights.
Also noteworthy is that the overlay approach was based upon full respect for the traditional lot sizes of the neighborhood. This restriction would force the partnership to do development on the intimate, urban scale of Old North St. Louis. However, the partnership intended to not only respect the scale of the neighborhood but its architecture as well. The plan of the partnership was to rehabilitate each of the nearly 30 buildings acquired, and later build on vacant land.
The goal of historic rehabilitation both honored the community’s pride in its heritage and allowed for utilization of an important financing mechanism: the state historic rehabilitation tax credit. That tax credit was key to ensuring that this project was economically feasible. The uncapped historic rehabilitation tax credit has seeming infinite use in north St. Louis and other areas where large-scale renewal is needed.
In the end, the partnership acquired about ten acres within a 25-acre redevelopment area. The remaining acreage includes streets and alleys — also key components of community renewal — as well as property owned by rehabbers, homeowners and businesses that are now stakeholders in the Crown Square project. As soon as assemblage reached desired levels, the partnership secured a redevelopment agreement with the city of St. Louis and sought financing to make the neighborhood’s dream come true. This is the project that should have been the basis for a smart distressed areas development project.
The result is a $32 million project that will create 78 residential units and 26,000 square feet of commercial space within a 16-block area. In a historic neighborhood with small blocks on a street grid, that’s a large project — and a great model for future endeavors in north St. Louis. Hopefully, the Distressed Areas Land Assemblage Tax Credit and the scale of development that it stipulates does not discourage people from learning lessons from Crown Village.
Follow the fast-paced construction work at Crown Square on the What’s New in Old North blog.
by Michael R. Allen
Yesterday Governor Matt Blunt signed into law the “economic development” omnibus passed by the Missouri legislature last week. The bill contains the Distressed Areas Land Assemblage Tax Credit, a measure designed to reimburse landbanking costs in impoverished areas. Specifically, the tax credits’ authors intend for them to be used in north St. Louis for a project by developer Paul J. McKee, Jr. The details of that project are not available to elected officials or citizens.
by Michael R. Allen
I was taken aback by a developer’s decision to rename the Chemical Building in downtown St. Louis to “Alexa”, but I am completely floored by the latest move: a change of the building’s address to 777 Olive Street from its legal address of 721 Olive Street. That’s plain fiction. Furthermore, an Urban St. Louis moderator changed the title of the thread on the project to reflect the supposed new address. Bah.
by Michael R. Allen
Photograph by Nicole Rork for Detroit Ruins. Used with permission.
I want you to look at a website of photographs of abandoned places…
I already sense the disinterest.
Well, hear me out. I want you to look at Detroit Ruins.
I want you to see how Nicole Rork offers a tour of the ruins of Detroit, Gary and a few other cities through images that are at once prosaic and beautiful. I want you to notice that she provides short histories of the places she documents, with accurate information and links to other sources. Rork captures the vividness of faded colors, the brightness in dark rooms and the larger world in confined spaces. She’s a bit of a conjurer — taking shots with views wide enough to suggest that life in some form is lurking right outside of the frame of the still scenes she documents. Perhaps she is confronting that force somewhere while her camera takes its picture. Perhaps not. Does it matter? The subject matter itself gains a new life through her gaze.
I want you to look at Detroit Ruins.
by Michael R. Allen
In the past two weeks, construction of the Old Post Office Plaza downtown unearthed some fragments of a Louis Sullivan masterpiece lost twice, the St. Nicholas Hotel. The hotel stood at the northwest corner of Eighth and Locust streets downtown between its construction in 1893 and its demolition in 1974, surviving an unfortunate remodeling in 1903. Since 1974, its site has been paved and maintained as a parking lot. Salvagers picked the building of recognizable Sullivan ornament, but apparently other parts stayed on site.
When workers broke through the asphalt, they unearthed a mess of structural steel, brick and other parts of the old hotel. The city had an unusual and unanticipated archaeological site, offering potential clues on the elusive details of the St. Nicholas. Unfortunately, the potential opportunity came and went without any real investigation. Steel was loaded out to be scrapped, and more solid debris was either removed with other fill or left in the ground. The good news is that the excavation was fairly shallow, and surely more of the building survives beneath the plaza. Should the plaza ever be less than successful, and it future land use reconsidered, we may have another chance to mine the lot for traces of the prairie master’s hotel.
Photo courtesy of Landmarks Association of St. Louis.
The eight-story St. Nicholas Hotel was defined by a dramatic side-gabled roof, large center arched entrance on Locust and projecting oriel bays on both street-facing elevations. Like the Wainwright and Union Trust buildings, the St. Nicholas featured a monochrome exterior palette accentuated by terra cotta featuring Sullivan’s imaginative geometric and organic motifs. The roof profile was somewhat unique among Sullivan’s designs. A supposed fire led to conversion of the building to office use in 1903, when the gabled roof and arched entrance were removed and four floors added according to plans by Eames & Young. Renamed the Victoria Building, the hotel survived in diminished form for another seventy years. (Read more about the St. Nicholas in Patty’s Ramey’s article Louis Sullivan and the St. Nicholas Hotel, St. Louis, MO.)
Kathleen McLaughlin, Riverfront Times: Forum on Paul McKee’s North-Side Doings Devolves into Name-Calling
Steve Patterson, Urban Review: Alderwoman Argues Against Modern Zoning, Prefers Piecemeal Approach
by Michael R. Allen
Yesterday, on the last day of the legislature’s special session, the Missouri House of Representatives passed the economic development omnibus (HB1) sought by Governor Matt Blunt. The bill contained a new version of the Distressed Areas Land Assemblage Tax Credit Act (DALATCA), modified slightly in the House and Senate economic development committees and on the floor of the Senate.
The basic formula proposed by Blunt survived: The credit creates a $95 million tax credit program that covers 50% of acquisition costs and 100% of maintenance and interest costs on eligible parcels located in census tracts that meet federal and state income-based definitions of distressed areas. No more than $10 million in credits will be issued annually. The tax credit is available to applicants who have assembled at least 50 acres within a 75-acre redevelopment area established by a municipal redevelopment agreement. The 50 acres need not be contiguous, and no parcel acquired by eminent domain is eligible for the credit. The applicant can only redevelop 75% of the project area alone, and must assign redevelopment rights to other developers or create partnerships to redevelop the remaining 25%.
Obviously, the tax credit structure has changed very little since first proposed by Peter Kinder in February 2007 and drafted by Steve Stone, attorney for developer Paul J. McKee, Jr. The whole idea is still predicated on a scale that is unrealistic for urban areas and small towns. The whole idea remains predicated on rewarding McKee for an acquisition project he has already undertaken in north St. Louis. Consequently, the credit fundamentally is a reimbursement for purchases already made rather than an incentive for future development.
However, the legislature made a few changes to the tax credit, at least one of which may be of consequence:
The credits cannot be used to cover fines or bills levied by municipal government.
To be considered eligible, a parcel must have its municipal taxes, fines and bills paid in full.
The redevelopment agreement must be approved by ordinance of the governing body of a municipality.
The redevelopment agreement must include a timeline for redevelopment.
All redevelopment work conducted by the applicant must be done in compliance with Missouri fair labor and wage laws.
The tax credits are considered redevelopment tax credits under state law, requiring an applicant to furnish financial information as well as project cost and completion date.
These are small but welcome improvements to the bill. However, the only ones that alter the state’s expectations of an applicant are those relating to redevelopment timelines. These stipulations encourage actual development planning and construction, two aspects not previously part of the proposal. The two stipulations relating to municipal fines and bills are important on principle, but are of minor consequence to the nature of land assemblage rewarded by DALATCA.
The version of DALATCA headed to Governor Blunt’s desk may require McKee to make his project better, but it won’t enable other people to start new ones. DALATCA remains a gilded albatross designed for one project. The governor should veto the omnibus, but that seems unlikely. Still, the scrutiny that the tax credit act invited may lead to future amendment or scrapping of DALATCA and enactment of a tool of wide and true use to distressed areas in Missouri. After all, most legislators probably weren’t thinking about the scale, form and nature of development before this tax credit act came along. They will take some time to learn the lesson that DALATCA is a huge mistake.
Full text of HB1 is available here; DALATCA is section 99.1205.