Check out what's happening in the NewQuestCity Forums for Missouri .

Bipartisan Agreement That Peter Kinder Is Unfit For Public Office
01/10/2012

This morning from Missourinet: "A fourth candidate and second state senator is joining the Republican race for Lieutenant Governor.  State Senator Lu Ann [Ridgeway of Smithville served ten years in the House before serving her two terms in the Senate."

Panelette Blow Out
01/10/2012

The Saturday panelette was a bit tame. Diane Sawyer did her best to get some fireworks started, but even she got bored after a while. Flip Flopper Romney pretty much got a pass. There weren’t many highlights. You gotta love Suits Santorum repeatedly saying “when I left the Senate.” Does he think no one remembers that his opponent won by the largest margin of victory for a Senate challenger in 2006?

Newt seems to be surrounded by liars. Paul was his target on Saturday. I have noticed Callista wearing the three strand pearl necklace. I thought that was a first lady prerogative. Maybe she thinks it’s now or never.

The war on religion is replacing the war on Christmas. Newt is incensed at the anti Catholic bias, and Perry is ready to go after the anti religion folks as soon as he sends troops back to Eyerack.

Marriage and who can do it was another hot topic. Miss Liberty just loves it when Newtie talks about the sanctity of marriage.

When asked where they would be if not in new Hampshire having such an edifying debate, Perry said he would be on the shooting range (doesn’t he get enough practice while jogging?), Cranky Ron Paul would be reading economic tracts, Huntsman would be on the phone with his naval sons (small dig at Mitt’s 5 sons who don’t serve), Newt would be watching the basketball championship game (since that’s not til March, I suspect Newtie isn’t really a sportie), and Mitt and Suits would be watching football. As an aside, Miss Liberty is curious as to why we are still playing bowl games. What happened to the traditional big New Year’s Day blow out?

Here’s pretty much the take away from Saturday, according to the candidates themselves. Paul is a racist earmarker, Newt is a draft dodger. Santorum is a corrupt big government politician, Huntsman is a democrat, Romney is an elitist, and nobody cares about Governor Good Hair Perry. 

Sunday’s Meet the Press event was a bit more lively. Miss Liberty is pretty sure the panelette read all the press about Romney getting a pass on Saturday. They jumped in with all 10 feet. 

Even when attacked, Romney can’t seem to ditch that silly little Cheshire grin.

Kraske Predicts McCaskill Victory Over Brunner
01/10/2012

From Steve Kraske's latest column in the Star:

Here are seven other forecasts to bank on for the year ahead...

Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill skates across the finish line with a re-election victory. It’s going to be ugly, but McCaskill bobs, weaves and glides just enough to win her second term against a gift GOP candidate.

That “gift” GOP nominee will be John Brunner, the St. Louis businessman who has enough money to buy himself a place on the Republican ticket in August over Sarah Steelman and U.S. Rep. Todd Akin. The deciding factor: Brunner’s experienced political team.

Two Debates This Weekend!
01/10/2012

Two, count 'em, two New Hampshire panelette debates this week-end. Bet you were suffering from withdrawal, it's been so long since we saw these folks on the same stage. The full compliment of the still ins will be there, but no also runnings are invited. We might know beforehand if Flip Flopper Romney really won Iowa. Seems the vote count is being questioned. 

The knives have been out, with Gingrich and Santorum bad mouthing Romney, Paul slamming Huntsman for speaking Chinese and adopting foreign children, everybody slamming Paul for not bombing Iran, and the meanest cut of all, no one even acknowledging that Governor Good Hair Perry is running. 

Romney's trip with his dog on top of his car is getting replay, Suits Santorum says he is the Jesus candidate, Gingrich is saying blacks shouldn't take food stamps (reserving them for deserving whites?), and Mitt is getting some questionable help from McCain, who keeps misidentifying the enemy. Miss Liberty says to be prepared for multiple violations of Ronald Reagan's  eleventh commandment this week-end. There will be speaking ill of fellow republicans. Of course, they are all working overtime to make sure President Obama is blamed for this week's good economic news. Santorum's take was the most inventive - republican optimism, because they know they will win in November, is the reason for increased job creation!

Here's a flash from the past: Pizzaman Herman Cain has a new political group called the Solutions Revolution, which seems to be a vehicle for promoting his laughable 999 plan. His other big announcement is that he will make an "unconventional endorsement" before the South Carolina primary. Since he considers himself an unconventional candidate who ran an unconventional campaign, Miss Liberty is pretty sure he is going to endorse himself.

Brunner Gets Another Chance at Debates, Chickens Out
01/10/2012

So yesterday we wrote about John Brunner deciding to skip the first debate to be held for the GOP Senate wannabes, leaving it to Sarah Steelman and Todd Akin to appear on KTRS.

Today we find out that not only has Brunner decided to skip the first debate, but he's been given a second chance to debate in January, this time in Branson on the 30th, and he's chickening out of that one, too!

A spokesman for the 3^rd likely candidate, St. Louis businessman John Brunner, has said he is unable to commit at this time, saying the campaign’s original verbal commitment to Earls Family Broadcasting last November was to a debate, not to a specific date.

A debate in GOP-friendly Branson and Brunner can't commit to being in attendance.  Whatcha hiding, John?  Scared to answer questions about being a "job creator" who actually laid a bunch of workers off while getting rich? Terrified of questions about your refusal to answer other questions about the Ryan plan to privatize Medicare?

If I were scheduling/hosting debates, I'd go ahead and ask Brunner all the questions I had, and then play this in leiu of any actual answers:

Daily Dose of Blairmont 199
01/05/2012

• 2519 Dodier Street (Union Martin LLC, April 2008, $200,000)

Links:

• 2519 Dodier at the city's Geo St Louis database
  
• Aerial view from Maps.Live.com
  
• More on Blairmont:
  Built St. Louis || Ecology of Absence || What Can I Do?

Links:

• 2541 W Sullivan at the city's Geo St Louis database
  
• Aerial view from Maps.Live.com
  
• More on Blairmont:
  Built St. Louis || Ecology of Absence || What Can I Do?

March 2007


May 2008


"Thou shall not steal!! Exodus 20:10 In Jesus Name, You shall not Steal!!! Exodus 20:15 In Jesus Name! Jesus Loves You & Forgives You!!! Repent of your sins and die SAVED."

Links:

• 2532 W Dodier at the city's Geo St Louis database
  
• Aerial view from Maps.Live.com
  
• More on Blairmont:
  Built St. Louis || Ecology of Absence || What Can I Do?

Alternately, a new, contemporary design could be put in place. So much of the original facade has been lost that it wouldn't be out of place to perform a purely contemporary intervention.

Either way, Blairmont has a host of wonderful things they can do with this house, now that they own it. By rights, the only problem should be choosing from among the several options.


August 2003 - photograph by Kevin Keiffer

Links:

• 2209 Sullivan at the city's Geo St Louis database
  
• Aerial view from Maps.Live.com
  
• More on Blairmont:
  Built St. Louis || Ecology of Absence || What Can I Do?

(Of course, it might have been simpler to simply not empty the houses out in the first place, right?)

Links:

• 2530 Warren at the city's Geo St Louis database
  
• Aerial view from Maps.Live.com
  
• More on Blairmont:
  Built St. Louis || Ecology of Absence || What Can I Do?

Standing amid a solid block of apartments buildings, single family homes, and multi-unit houses, this building represents a fine opportunity for Paul McKee to lend a true helping hand to the St. Louis Place neighborhood. I look forward to the inevitable rehab and renovation, which should restore the luster of this handsome house to its original shine.

Links:

• 2338 St Louis at the city's Geo St Louis database
  
• Aerial view from Maps.Live.com
  
• More on Blairmont:
  Built St. Louis || Ecology of Absence || What Can I Do?

01/05/2012

Myself and my two intrepid companions were inside the Calvary Cemetery mausoleum Saturday afternoon, when the eerie silence and occasional rumbles of thunder were broken by the creepy wail of the tornado sirens. The mausoleum was closing down for the day, so we had to leave. We got in the car, drove about 30 yards, and the heavens opened up. We stopped outside the cemetery gate and waited out one of the most intense storms I've ever seen.



90 minutes later, we were in Old North, enjoying some beautiful sunshine.



Both were startling contrasts with what was by and large a gray and dreary weekend.

got to photograph that place some time.


Image courtesy of Chris Naffziger

That thought eventually combined with an exploratory adventure in the summer of 2006, when I was first introduced to the idea that, among all the heavy and light industry east of the highway, there were actually houses. Whole or fragmentary neighborhoods once stood on this land. Michael Allen once observed that today's "Old North" neighborhood doesn't even include the original North St. Louis town boundaries to the east. Today, abandoned and recycled houses could be found left and right, in a long thin swath from Old North to Baden... but they were disappearing fast, like this batch from that 2006 trip.



This was a fascinating notion. Did people still live there? (Yes, but not many.) What kind of environment are they in? (Isolated.) What would happen to the surviving houses? (Abandonment, followed by demolition.) Here was a conundrum - not many people would be willing to move into such environments, totally surrounded by industrial uses, which means that as each current occupant gives up the ghost and moves on, the houses tend to fall into abandonment. And yet, people do still live in a few of these places. Others have been converted to businesses, or even assimilated by the industrial concerns that devoured their neighborhood.

I still have some areas left to document fully, but the Forgotten Houses of North Broadway shows the bulk of these isolated survivors, fragments of an earlier era for the St. Louis riverfront.

On reflection, in my endless quest to find the city's more exotic, far flung, forgotten, neglected, and endangered corners, I have always regarded photo expeditions to Soulard as a guilty pleasure, an overdone cliche, something to be avoided in favor of seeking out places and buildings that might not be there tomorrow. In spite of its near-demise after World War II, Soulard today seems like a safe bet to stay put. So I've never put in the serious hours there needed to truly document it and capture its essence.



Nonetheless, I have gotten many of the highlights and landmarks, and present them on a humble tour of Soulard. This will be the first of many south St. Louis tours, and some day it will be more extensive. It doesn't fully capture the charm of this amazing neighborhood, but it's a start.

Because the meeting was targeted at local residents and not open to the press, full details are still forthcoming (specifically, at an upcoming May 21st meeting.) Attendees have reported a wide-ranging plan, encompassing "job centers", retail and residential. The details seem to be rather skimpy at this point, particularly in light of looming funding deadlines. Questions and comments from the area's residents are reported to have been fiery and uncompromising, befitting McEagle's years of abusive tactics in the neighborhood.

The Post-Dispatch recounts more of the details here and here.

I really haven't heard enough details to have a real reaction. There's been nothing to indicate if the plan involves clear-cutting existing houses, or if preservation will be a priority. Nothing about how urban or non-urban the new construction will be - will this be about rebuilding the city or reproducing the suburbs in its place? No visuals released to the public yet, and you can't really talk about buildings without visuals. I'm slightly heartened that McEagle is at last, finally, talking to residents, acknowledging a plan, getting information out there. But after all this time, it's only a minimal start.

Washington Avenue tour is now completely revitalized and up to date.



So much has happened on the Avenue, and my own standards for page and image format have risen so much, that a complete revamp was the only option. I've re-scanned all the old photographs, in many cases setting them alongside new ones taken on my most recent St. Louis trip or in the intervening years. Huge amounts of information about many of these buildings is now available online, and I've pulled some of that together as well. I even snuck in the Tudor Building, which featured on a very early version of Built St. Louis but had since fallen off the radar.



The transformations are amazing. Dingy, battered storefronts have been reworked all up and down the Avenue. Dirty facades have been cleaned and repaired. The 2004 streetscape improvements have transformed the area's vibe.



The last fragments of the street's old life, its gritty urban and garment district days, are fading away. Of all the storefront operations visible from the street, only a handful predate the 1990s (Levin's, Levine Hat Company, Mankofsky Shoe Company, possibly the relocated Erlich's Cleaners). Most are less than five years old, and almost none of the businesses I photographed in 2001 remain today.



But the new generation of businesses has brought new life to the street, people and light, neon signs and sidewalk dining. Rising from its threadbare state of ten years ago, Washington Avenue has become the most urbane street in St. Louis.

More on 2322 Montgomery at Ecology of Absence.

Links:

• at the city's Geo St Louis database
  
• Aerial view from Maps.Live.com
  
• More on Blairmont:
  Built St. Louis || Ecology of Absence || What Can I Do?

I've added a ton of little updates all over the place - spinning major buildings off onto their own pages, combing through a two-year backlog of visits and adding newer photos, getting rid of those annoying thumbnail images so that you don't have to click a million times to see all the photos. There's way too many updates to list on the front page; you'll find them all over the place.



With the online world having converged to a blog-focused mindset, and a vast crop of bloggers having taken up the mantle of sharing current events from St. Louis, I've come to see Built St. Louis as less of a current news site and more of a book - a slow, long-term project, rather than a constantly-updating fountain of quickly-forgotten news. I try to write from a more long-term perspective now, so that if I don't get back to update a page for a couple of years, it won't sound ridiculously dated in the meantime.

Example: in updating the Eads Bridge page, I realized that some of the text about "current" conditions had not been changed in almost ten years! Equally startling was the realization that the time period of my own observations, from when I first encountered that structure up to the present, now encompassed a whole historical period of the bridge's life - its existence without an upper deck - that has long since passed. (Yes, I'm really obsessed with bridges right now. Can you tell?)

I also look over some of my earlier writings and conclude that, on occasion, I could stand to tone down some of my vehement enthusiasm. This site began as nothing more than my own observations - but time, technology, reading and experience have granted me access to plenty of information about the city's history, so there's relatively little excuse for writing everything in the first person. I'm trying put a clearer and more structured separation between facts, observations, and opinions. I still have strong opinions, and I still intend to use the site as a platform to voice them, but I want it to be useful as a reference source as well.



I'm slowly moving everything toward integrated navigation, where a tour of a geographic area will also scoop up buildings from other tours that are in that area. So when you tour, say, The Hill (not up yet, but like many others, it's coming) you'll also come across pages from the Historic Churches tour, and the Ittner/Milligan schools tour, etc. etc. etc. So far, you can best see this on The Eastern Edge tour, which combines the old "Forgotten Houses" tour with several of the Industrial City pages and a few new ones.

This creates some navigational chaos at times, but it avoids duplicate pages, it ties everything together nicely, and most importantly, it makes future updates a lot easier.



But you don't care about any of that, right? You care about pretty pictures of amazing buildings.

Well, I recently got an email from a site visitor who provides exactly that, in spades, on the SkyscraperPage.com forums. Go check 'em out and be reminded why St. Louis is so fantastic.

Part 1
Part 2

I had a spectacular visit to the city over Thanksgiving weekend, my second trip into town this year. The sun shone for three solid, beautiful days, and I saw many spectacular sights, old and new.



I'm currently working on some revisions and fixes to the site's existing pages, unifying the formatting, fixing broken code, and setting up a standardized navigation scheme. It's a big job and won't be finished any time soon, but stay tuned. In the meantime, here's a bunch of random photos from two weekends ago.

It offers some pretty impressive views of downtown, too. Check out the views, the renovation, and a bevy of new and re-scanned photographs at Built St. Louis.

It's always interesting to rework a project page I haven't touched in a while. In this case, I'm reminded of how hopeless and frustrating the Syndicate's situation seemed in the late 1990s. The building repeatedly came within weeks of demolition, and while we lost the Century, the Syndicate survives. Today it's nearly everything that's right about downtown St. Louis - beautiful architecture, mixed use, a bright future.

They just need to fill up that ground-floor retail space, and we'll be all set.

The Framing a Modern Masterpiece limited competition has selected 9 teams to redesign the surroundings of the Arch grounds and reconsider ways of "integrating open space into a city’s urban fabric".

Thing is, the problem is not just one of integration, but also of proportion. There's too much "open space" and not enough "urban fabric". This is the basic problem and if it is not directly and boldly addressed, nothing of substance will be accomplished.

Solving that problem requires doing something utterly blasphemous: getting rid of green space, and I mean lots of it. In the Arch's case, that means the gigantic swaths of unused land - including the reflecting ponds that sit to the north and south of the walkways approaching the Arch. These are utter dead zones - uncrossable, unused, unnoticed, and speaking for myself at least, unloved. They are photo opportunities, but not part of the city.



The reflecting pond shown here is ringed by distant walkways. I would be thrilled to see everything inside those walkways filled in, the street grid extended into them, and new buildings in the 2- to 6-story range constructed on them. A curving line of modern facades could front the walkways approaching the Arch, bringing the life of the city and the destination power of the Arch together, framing the Arch as part of the city rather than an abstract and distant sculpture. Hold the buildings back a few feet, enough to preserve the line of trees on the north and south walkways, include retail and restaurants and living space, and you've created a streetscape as lovely as any in the city, while answering the inevitable question of tourists walking out after visiting the top of the Arch: okay, what do we do now?

I would urge the competition teams not to get lost in grand visions of cutting-edge design philosophies, abstract notions, and isolated instances of avant guard design. St. Louis is a gridded 19th Century American city. This is a simple, basic concept that has worked for two hundred years, and it is what will work best here, too. The entire problem is that the grid was violated, desecrated, and ignored. This is not a new problem, requiring radical and untried visionary solutions; it has been confronted and solved many, many times in recent decades.

The mission is to bring the city and the Arch grounds together. This is not an abstract or philosophical mission. There is no reason not to be quite literal about it - in fact, anything else will result in failure. The Arch isn't going anywhere, so bring the city to the Arch.

The Arch grounds stole away forty square blocks of downtown St. Louis. It's time to give some of it back.

at Flickr. At last, the initial schemes are visible to the public.

In general, the slides are fairly unrevealing. Several show the near north side as it currently stands (minus the last year or so's worth of demolitions.) There are a few abstract diagrams showing things like the project area, proposed land uses and schematic building layouts.

Particularly frightening is an acquisitions map showing property that McKee has (or apparently thinks he can get via the city) in blue. It's an ocean of blue, dotted with some little white islands. What's it like to be living on one of those islands right now, watching the waters rise as they have for the last five years?

There's not a whole lot to react to in the plan; all that can be seen are vague generalities. There is one big question to be asked, though: Why does it need to be so big?

What about this plan requires such a vast acquisition? What kind of synergies are planned here that require this scale?

The question is very important, because this land is in the city - an urban environment with all the complexities that entails. Anybody who's studied their Jane Jacobs -- or taken a stroll down a functioning urban street like Delmar Avenue or Cherokee Street -- knows that the best city environments are highly complex and largely organic. They grow and thrive much like a living creature. Small cells appear -- businesses, houses, apartment buildings. They divide, they grow, they endure, and each adds its complexity to the whole, creating something greater than the mere sum of its parts. These small parts are crafted at the scale of human beings, and they create lovely, pleasant, desirable places to live. Just as a complex ecology resists being wiped out by a catastrophe, so too is a complex city resistant to the vagaries of economy, fashion, and time.

So why does this project need to be so huge? Why does it need to happen all at once? We need to ask such questions, because such a vast scale implies a monoculture, and it implies a broad brush, and it implies a non-human scale, and it implies sledgehammer solutions to problems that require a scalpel.

In fact, it sounds a lot like old-style mid-century urban renewal -- the kind that wiped out big swaths of Soulard, that nearly claimed Lafayette Square, that obliterated the Mill Creek Valley, that gave us phenomenal successes like Darst-Webbe and Pruitt-Igoe. The kind we're still cleaning up from over fifty years later.

To insist that redevelopment can only be done on a vast scale shows a profound lack of understanding of the nature of cities.

Here's my hypothetical suggestion instead: start with Old North St. Louis, a neighborhood that's long been pulling itself up by the bootstraps. Take the 30 or so Blairmont-owned buildings in the neighborhood, and rehab them all. Sell some, rent some, do a mix of market-rate and income-restricted, whatever -- just get them occupied and looking healthy again. Thirty properties, figure maybe $50,000 apiece on average to get them up to snuff -- $1.5 million in initial investment. If I'm way off on my estimate, maybe it's $3 million -- somewhere in that ballpark.

That's chump change to a fellow with McKee's pockets, but it would be a HUGE shot in the arm for a neighborhood the size of Old North. Thirty vacant properties, gone in a flash! If Paul McKee Jr. had done this three years ago, the locals would've carried him down the streets on their shoulders. And aside from the trust and good will that would've been built up, the neighborhood would be visibly stronger, that much more desirable, more attractive to other developers --

-- so much more, in fact, that you could then maybe start spreading the success across West Florissant, into St. Louis Place. Rehab another thirty houses between Florissant (a major barrier) and St. Louis Place Park (a desirable amenity lined with occupied houses). Suddenly eastern St. Louis Place is on its way to becoming as strongly entrenched as Old North.

Phase 3? Well, now that you've reinforced your assets, then you can start to think a little bigger. There's a lot of vacant land in Old North - how 'bout some infill? How 'bout pushing west of the park? A big project out on the 22nd Street prairie would get a lot of support by this point.

...and so on. If this type of plan had been started in 2003, we'd be through several grand ribbon cuttings by now.

This is how cities -- not suburbs, not strip malls, not shopping malls, not lifestyle centers, but cities -- have grown for hundreds of years, and it is a pattern and a truth that we ignore at our own peril. Attempts to inflict massive change inevitably result in massive trauma.

This doesn't take money ranging into the billions of dollars. This doesn't take five years of land acquisition. This doesn't take endlessly gargantuan juggling acts. This doesn't require monolithic land assets or totalitarian site control or eminent domain.

It does, however, require understanding that a true and proper city is vastly complex, finely grained and multifaceted. Furthermore, it takes patience and care. Paul McKee Jr. has demonstrated that he is endlessly patient. Whether he cares remains to be seen, but to date the track record does not look good.

The St. Louis archdiocese plans to demolish the building and replace it with a surface parking lot. The group hopes to promote a preservation and reuse plan, which could benefit both the church and the neighborhood.

Read more at www.NoParkingLotOnLindell.com.

~ Repair Your Credit Today! ~
Don't let false reporting
lower your score!