Centene Stadium (St. Louis) – Wikipedia, the soccer stadium finishing up construction now, is reshaping the Downtown West neighborhood. This got me thinking about a vacant parcel just south of the stadium, next to the former YMCA that became a Drury Hotel in the 1980s. The official address is ...
Every five years I post about Twain. Not Mark Twain, but the COR-TEN steel sculpture by Richard Serra (1938 – ) It was inaugurated 40 years ago today — May 1, 1982. St. Louis loves to hate this sculpture, bashing it is a group bonding experience. I like it, partly ...
The baseball diamond bounded by Dodier, Grand, Sullivan, and Spring is commonly called Sportsman’s Park, but it has had many names during the century prior to the Herbert Hoover Boys Club taking over the site. When I decided to write a post about this I naïvely thought it would be ...
Escalators are great, very helpful to those who find stairs difficult. However, like elevators, they’re expensive to install and maintain. Escalators exposed to the elements are even more challenging to keep in operation. When our original light rail line opened in 1993 two stations were located within an old freight ...
When I was a kid a 1970s filling (gas) station was a small corner location with a few pumps and a small interior. Inside they might have a vending machine or two. They also did some automotive work, like tire repairs, in the shop portion of the building. Restrooms were ...
A new book explores one of my favorite topics: the overlap of urbanization, capitalism, and disasters. Think our bad habit of developing in flood plains, then acting shocked when levees results in flooding elsewhere. The term “disaster capitalism” is very appropriate. Over half the world’s population lives in urban regions, ...
Voters in Missouri will be going to the polls tomorrow, unless they voted absentee as I did. The post will cover St. Louis city & St. Louis County. For voters in Jefferson & St. Charles counties click here or here, respectively. The ballots in the city are identical, and short. ...
Former governor Eric Greitens is a candidate for the U.S. Senate, one of nine Republicans seeking the GOP nomination in the Missouri primary on August 2, 2022. The Democratic primary has eight candidates. Senator and former Governor Roy Blunt is not seeking another 6-year term. Greitens was recently in the ...
As I outlined two years ago, the blocks around new Centene Stadium will most certainly change in the coming years, decades. We’ve already seen some buildings on Olive be razed for the stadium, and more for a new garage. These weren’t architectural masterpieces, but they were urban. Hopefully it’ll be ...
Willam H. Whyte is one of two people who influenced how I see our built environment, the other is Jane Jacobs. Had I known about either in 1985 I probably would’ve studied urban planning instead of architecture. Both focus on observation, but in very different ways. On an otherwise normal ...
Monday’s post was about reconnecting the pedestrian grid at 8th Street, just south of Cass Ave — see 8th Street Walkway Needed To Fill Missing 110’ Connectivity Gap. Today’s post is about exploring options for new housing on the large lot known as 801 Dickson Street — it stretches a ...
When cold water flats and tenements were cleared just north of downtown for St. Louis’ first high-rise public housing project, Cochran Gardens, several blocks of 8th Street were erased from the grid. Six decades later 8th Street was rebuilt* when the mixed-income Cambridge Heights apartments & townhouses replaced Cochran Gardens’ towers. ...
Imagine the car of the future, no steering wheel or pedals. Just get in and tell it where to go and then it quietly whisks you to your destination. Will this ever be a reality for anyone living today? Maybe, for newborns. A newish book looks at the promise of ...
Many more of you now have a smart electric meter, assuming you’re an Ameren Missouri customer, than when I have previously posted about this new technology — and the variety of billing rates that go along with it. My three prior posts: April 2021: Smart Electric Meters & Time Of ...
Earlier this month I attended the 2-day media preview of the Chicago Auto Show. I’ve attended the show every year since 2014, except last year when the usual February show was rescheduled to the summer because of the pandemic. This year’s show was smaller than previous years, but there was ...
Urban highways & interstates allow drivers to get from point A to point B quicker than had they taken surface streets, but they’re also a major divider between the existing neighborhoods they cut through. In the late 1950s the downtown’s 3rd Street Parkway was being extended north, eventually connecting with ...
In October 2021 I booked an Amtrak trip to Chicago for a weekend next month. At that time the trip was scheduled to take 5 hours 40 minutes to Chicago Union Station, via Lincoln Service. This is faster than it has been over the years — improving every year since ...
Monday’s post Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Not Right For St. Louis certainly ruffled a few feathers — at least among non-transit riding civic boosters. Lots of good discussion on the Facebook post. What we need next is to go through specifics one by one to see if there is any consensus. ...
When considering costly new transit infrastructure it’s import to look carefully at existing conditions — identifying problems and offering solutions that solve them without creating new ones. Many in St. Louis are now pushing for investing Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in St. Louis. The most recent is for the Kingshighway ...
The 2020 Census results results for St. Louis showed what I had predicted, the bulk of our population loss came from northside wards. This was also true in 2010 and in 2020. No reason to think 2030 won’t be more of the same. We can sit back and do nothing, ...
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