St. Louis / Khartoum

St. Louis should be a sister city of Khartoum, Sudan.

 In North America, the two biggest rivers meet up in St. Louis.  The Missouri meets the Mississippi and then flows down to Cairo, Illinois and Memphis, Tennessee.  Before hitting the Gulf of Mexico down in New Orleans it flows within a few hundred miles of a place called Alexandria, Louisiana.

In Africa, the Blue Nile and the White Nile meet in Khartoum before heading to Egypt's Memphis, Cairo, and Alexandria.


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Khartoum is a pretty interesting place.  There are 8,000,000 people in its metro area.  It is a 3rd World oasis in in a vast desert.  It is the capital of the largest country in Africa.

The potential trade offs of a partnership between St. Louis and Sudan are great.

University Relations
-St. Louis students could study Arabic, African Studies, Anthropology (Dinka, Bari, etc.), Hydrology, Desert Ecology, etc.
-Khartoum students could study whatever they want.
-Sudan is diverse and changing, has a long history, and a fragile ecosystem.  Academic research potential is vast.

Business
-We have money, they have resources
-Our companies there, their companies here.
-They connect with the American market, we connect with the African and Middle Eastern markets.

Human Rights
-A more stable and worldy Khartoum is a more stable Sudan.  Providing avenues for St. Louis volunteers and aid organizations to assist the Sudanese in securing a better quality of life would benefit the whole world. 

The Future
-Sudan will not always be poor and violent.  Their population and resources will develop them in time.  Who will be their partner when they get there?

UMSL / UMKC

University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL)
15,543 students
352 acres

University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC)
14,818 students
157 acres

UMSL is a suburban campus near the intersection of I-70 and I-170.  It is between downtown and the airport.  As we move from downtown St. Louis, we might hit it if we happen to be following the highway. If we take public transit we'll be sure to pass its parking lots.

UMKC is a bookend to downtown Kansas City.

The streets are numbered from the river in KC, like St. Louis, but they go a bit farther.  KC is linear and goes south.  To the west is the state line, and to the east is the city limits.  KC goes north and south between downtown and UMKC, they're natural partners.

UMKC is relatively dense,

UMSL is spread out.  The buildings are disconnected from each other, and the university is on a quest to gobble up the denser, but poorer surrounding neighborhoods so that there will be room to spread out further.  Students and faculty often drive between parts of the campus.  No attempt has been made to address the walking problem between the two halves of the campus bisected by Natural Bridge.

UMSL has spent a lot of money to change its entrance from Natural Bridge to I-70.  With its own highway exit, UMSL has established itself as a very large car depot and spends a great deal of its infrastructure expenses on more and more parking.

For whatever reason, UMSL has failed altogether to embrace transit oriented development despite having two train stations on campus.


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At UMSL South, there is nothing visible from the station but parking lots and very poorly landscaped mulch piles.  Though there is a lot of student housing, and even a couple colleges nearby, a new student could get easily lost.
In line with the car-oriented, suburban, anti-community planning, there're also rundown student apartments in a nearby gated community full of international students who thought they were moving to a big American city.

On the east side of the station is a row of inaccessible hedges that can be brushed aside to reveal a dirt path to natural bridge and the library there.  As UMSL buys out the local community, this will no longer be used.  The school will fulfill its public service mission by alienating the public, and Metro will stand by complicit.


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At UMSL North, a poorly planned performing arts center was put between the station and the student center without any regard to the students who would be walking in the space.  Walking to the performing arts center from the student center is puzzling and not at all direct.  Included in this anti-walking plan was a sidewalk in an unusable place and a large unused road as a barrier.  The students, in great numbers pouring from the train each morning, made their own path through the poor landscaping.  Signs were put up to discourage the new path, and those signs were kicked down and walked on by the students.  On rainy days, students preferred walking in the mud over going out of the way to use the sidewalk planned for them.  After a couple years gravel was put down on the dirt path.  Still later a sidewalk was finally put in.

To the north of the station is another dirt path, this one to the Mark Twain Fitness Center, another inaccessible building.  There's another dirt path leading to a cul-de-sac of what used to be a neighborhood before it was bought out and demolished.  If you follow the old streets there, and you're not killed crossing Florissant Road, you can find your way to some car-oriented university housing that the school calls "Mansion Hills."


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As UMSL has bought land to connect them to I-70, they have built a large research park--home of the Fortune 500 company, Express Scripts.  This office park is very close to the North Hanley park and ride lot.  With the land in Bellerive that UMSL is acquiring, they will have North Hanley on their campus in the next few years.
North Hanley was not built to UMSL's specifications.  Metro is the anti-walking planner there.  Passengers alighting at the station can walk to a parking lot or to a highway...  The station is not a destination for anything at all.  The Express Scripts employees who would like to use public transit would find that they cannot cross the tracks separating the vast parking lots.



It is very simple.  If UMSL invested better in its land use, it wouldn't need so much.  If it invested in its walkability and oriented itself clearly to the metrolink stations, more students would ride the train.  Doing the same for the MetroBus stops on campus would have a similar effect.  With less people using their cars on, there would be less need to build parking. 
Money would be saved, that money could be invested in better academics.
A community would be nourished, and that community would yield alumni donations, which could be invested in better academics.

UMSL is a public university with a public mission.  It is against their mission to be uppity and inaccessible.  They paid millions of dollars for a public relations company to come up with a new slogan for them to put on all their promotional materials: "Just Think."  Not sure if they even use it anymore, but it'd be great if they did  just think  about their plans a bit before they put them into action. 


let's look at student per acre density
UMSL:   15,543/352  = 44 students per acre
UMKC:  14,818/157 = 94 students per acre

UMKC serves twice as many students per acre as UMSL.

Portland State University claims to put its money into transit over parking.  It serves 24,284 students with a 49 acre campus.  That's 495 students per acre.  This is why people are moving to Portland.
Look around the map, I challenge you to discover where the university ends and the city begins,


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This is a negative entry, but I am an alum, and I donate to UMSL monthly.

Tom Sawyer / Museu Marítim de Barcelona

I've been thinking lately about the downtown St. Louis waterfront.  Specifically, I've been thinking of our replica steamboat cruises.

The Tom Sawyer is pretty great.  I once attended an all night dance party on it.  Dancing on a boat is exciting.

Our riverfront actually has quite a few different ships than can be admired, entered, and enjoyed.  None of them are really worth multiple visits for someone like myself though. 

Plenty of cities have boats for tourists to climb around in.  I entered my first submarine in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry.  Later, I entered one in Surabaya, Indonesia.  There's one at the Seoul War Museum.  I feel like I've been in a dozen others as well.  Those are all out of the water though.  St. Louis needs one that's still actively using the water, like the Tom Sawyer.  Like... a schooner I walked around on in Barcelona,

This schooner is moored in the marina near the end of La Rambla.  It is part of the nearby Museu Marítim de Barcelona (Maritime Museum).

Being from the middle of a continent and having not seen the ocean until I was 21 or so, I'm amazed and afraid of the ocean.  When I visit seaport cities, I usually see whatever I can.  (Madrid's model ship Museum is a must see)  NYC has several docked ships as well. 

La Rambla is the obvious point of orientation fro Barcelona.  Walking down it towards the water, you should see Columbus up on a post,

The museum is very near there.

Barcelona's Maritime Museum is housed inside a very old shipbuilding facility.  I saw models while I was there of the city built by the Romans and Barcelona in the middle ages.  That warehouse has pretty much always been there, and its use now as a museum is pretty fantastic.

a Spanish Galleon--full-sized and fully accessible.

It fits...

I would love to have a museum like Barcelona's in St. Louis.  I know, we're an inland port, but we've got plenty of history too.  We don't need a space as large as this.  We could follow the lead of Melaka, for instance,

Melaka has a deep history of being attacked and conquered by sea.  First came the Portugese, then the Dutch, then the English, then the Japanese, then the English again.  This ship is a part of their maritime museum, which is in the building behind it.  The ship alone though offers quite a lot of exhibit space inside.

Would a riverboat museum be silly in St. Louis?  Are there already too many non-profits fighting donations?  If we added tugboats and barges, we could get quite a flotilla going.

Arts in Transit / Fukuoka's Nonsense Symbols

Try as I might, I can't find an old route map for the metrolink. 

Remember what it looked like though?  Above Laclede's Landing there was a tiny arch.  The rider knew if he wanted to get to the arch he had to get off at that stop.  There was an airplane by the airport.  that was a good symbol too.

I found these when I went to Fukuoka, Japan,

Can you see what I see?

There are funny symbols next to the station signs.

As a non-Japanese speaker, the individual station names quickly faded from my mind after I learned them.  I was very capable of navigating around the city though because every station had an easy symbol that I could remember.  I planned trips like, "I need to go from the roll of cloth to the pink flower."  I'd walk down the street and see this guy on a sign,

and I would know where I was. 

In a big city like Seoul or Tokyo, this might not fly, the station map would just be too busy and difficult to look at.  In a smaller city like Fukuoka or St. Louis, it could make sense.

The Metrolink has a great Arts in Transit program, but I'm not sure if they have a unified master plan.

Clayton Station has some grandfather clocks installed.  What if time was a continued theme for the station?  Install more clocks, hourglasses, and maybe a giant waterclock.  Then put a watch or hourglass on the route map.  That makes sense.

How about Delmar?

There's actually been quite a lot of art installed around Delmar Station, but this is the big recent one.  What if Delmar was stylized after a bee hive?  It is one of the busiest stations.  The yellow and purple benches could have yellow and purple bees nearby.  It'd be nonsense, but it'd be fun.  On the route map, there could be a bee or hive image, maybe even a honey pot.

Other stations?  Grand should probably have this,

I sincerely hope that the rumored possibility of a new metrolink station at Sarah by the CORTEX building will happen.  That area needs some activity, and it would be connectable to the Grove.  As the CORTEX district is supposed to be all about biotech, I have an idea of the perfect theme and symbol,

A station that resembled the inside of a cell...  well, that'd be awesome.  I imagine some soft foam surfaces and maybe some foam swimming noodles suspended in the air, a bathroom that looks like a mitochondria, etc.  There'd be a station agent in the nucleus. 

Ronald Wilson Reagan Memorial Bridge / Brooklyn Bridge

I really can't understand what Reagan has to do with our new bridge.  Whoever chose the name Ronald Wilson Reagan Memorial Bridge is probably not a resident of St. Louis City.  That name came from the wise and just Missouri General Assembly.

To recap, the new Reagan bridge will be built over the Mississippi  north of downtown.  I-70, which currently crosses the river with I-64 and I-55 at the Poplar Street Bridge, will cross north of the arch.  The stretch of I-70 between the two bridges will then become an extension of I-44.  Got that?

Now this new bridge has been on the books for twenty years and will not be finished until at least 2015.  Its history boils down essentially to Missouri attempting to make Illinois pay for all of it.  The argument being that Missouri would get nothing from it and only people from the Metro-East would really use it.  The funders in Jeff City holding the purse strings for MoDot didn't see any reason to fund it.

Now it is moving forward.  The initial project cost of $1.8 billion has been scaled back by Missouri's lack of interest and we've got a new half sized bridge for a cost of $640 million.  The rest will magically be funded and built later.  The money on the table now is,

Federal: $239 million
Illinois:  $313 million
Missouri:  $88 million

Who will benefit from it most?  Missouri, of course.  This has the potential to totally redesign our downtown and the NorthSide.  We will no longer have a need for the great I-70 wall going through the middle of downtown blocking our city from the waterfront.  We can justifiably tear it down.

The story reminds me of something though. 

The Brooklyn Bridge took a long time to get built too.  They started building in 1870 and didn't finish until 1883.  That's thirteen years of just the construction.  Why so long?  Well, other than the difficult technology needed that had only really been used in America in one other city... Eads Bridge, which opened in St. Louis in 1874...  there was a horrible budget problem.  Brooklyn, which was not yet a part of New York City, was seen as a backwards suburb or sorts.  New York insisted that Brooklyn pay for the lion's share of the bridge and at one point even cut off the funds.  The Bridge just sat half finished.  How very similar to our half bridge.

There's more too.  The Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge was set to anchor itself with its cable car terminal and all in a seedy slum area in the proximity to the gang-ridden Five Points.  The Manhattan Islanders were pleased to see it go.

Now where does this new Mississippi River bridge go in St. Louis City? 

Details here.  Well it goes into McKee's NorthSide development.  Voices all around are screaming for federal dollars to rework our poor north riverfront.  I just like that trestle going through the middle there.

There's more of course. 

The Brooklyn Bridge was built with a few controversies.  There was a wire salesman that sold faulty cables that were strong enough anyway.  There was Boss Tweed and the bribes he needed. 

What about us?  Well, McKee has been trying to capitalize on the new bridge for a few years now.  He bought up some of the property around the new interchange with the idea of trading it to MoDot for the property at the end of the Gateway Mall by the aborted I-64 interchange for the highway that never happened there.  McKee wanted his trade for the better glory of the city and a proper bookend office tower for the mall.
In 2003, city own land next to the interchange was sold for $2 to a developer who then resold the land to MoDot in 2009 for $2.3 million dollars.  Tax dollars at work, my friends.

With the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, Brooklyn did become a closer part of New York City.  It was annexed into the city in 1893, so the bridge was more than just symbolic.
Perhaps our bridge could help to heal our region and soothe our irrational anti-Illinois sentiments.  I just hope it has a pedestrian/bike way on top of it half as cool as the one over the East River.

CityArchRiverCompetition / What This Blog Has Called For

There's a competition on.  By the end of 2015, we should have a brand new way of looking at this,

I'd like to collect a few ideas from other entries here to show some of what I hope to come from this competition.

In comparing the Gateway Mall to Gwanghwamun Plaza in Seoul, a possible new entrance to the underground museum emerged,

This would require the removal of the underused park in front of the courthouse, the Luther Ely Smith Square or (LESS, as in less useful to the city).  There's no reason the new entrance couldn't be called the Luther Ely Smith Connection or Entrance.  Such an entrance would be in line with some of the proposals put forward by the NPS itself.  If the museum is expanded towards the courthouse underground, a new entrance would be an obvious choice. 

Granted, this would need to go under I-70 if I-70 is to remain as it is currently is.


In comparing the East St. Louis Riverfront to Parc Guell in Barcelona it was noted that the current observation structure designed by HOK is hideous and absolutely must be removed at all costs.  In its place there should be a proper observation area where people can gather as opposed to a small platform at the end of a long hike up a boring ramp.  Enter Gaudi's Parc Guell,

Parc Guell has a large platform with mosaic benches jutting off level from the side of a small mountain in Barcelona that affords excellent views of the city.  The columns supporting the platform make an interesting space, but one that is underused.  For St. Louis, we should put a museum under the platform and continue that museum into the supporting mountain, or mound.  We should built an earth-sheltered structure that very vaguely resembles the best structure in the metro-east, Monk's Mound,

Such a mound would be not be flashy and not try to steal any thunder from the arch on the other side of the river.  The mound would, of course, need a back entrance that connects directly to 'downtown' East St. Louis.  As for what museum would be placed there, perhaps the one that was supposed to go there a long time ago:  the National Architectural Arts Center. 


In comparing Singapore's Marina Bay to our riverfront parks it was noted that they plan to use something called supertrees,

They're building their downtown skyline around a body of water to provide the best possible views as citizens walk around the bay in an endless circle along their new waterfront.  They have a new pedestrian bridge that would look wonderful attached to the Poplar Street Bridge.

From Marina Bay, we can see the value in being able to see a skyline from the inside of a circle of highrises.  Likewise, highways should be bypassed whenever possible by raised, linear pedestrain parks (also called overpasses).

A long-range plan that provides for a walkway along the path in orange above would be of great value to St. Louis.  Anchoring the corners of that walkway with metrolink stops would also be of great value.  Any future development in East St. Louis should attempt to overcome the barrier presented by the highways and capitalize on the view of the Missouri side of the river by building a very long line of buildings with unobstructed line of sight to the arch and downtown St. Louis.  Such buildings should also have connections to the riverfront park as shown in the above image in blue.


In comparing the Mississippi River to the Han River in Seoul, I tried to show the value of overcoming highway separations, developing wetlands and recreational spaces instead of office parks, and connecting to a larger trail network.  This new central park for our region should connect to the other parks and fit into the plan for the river ring and other pre-existing concepts,

By making the river a destination and a place of excitement, and not a place of dreaded floods and lethal mosquitos, we can reconnect our citizens to our roots.  We are a river city, let's look and act like one,

Lastly, the great divison made by memorial drive and I-70 must be addressed in as many places as possible.  A cheap way to address some of the visual disconnect would be to take the "hallway concept from the Gateway Mall and apply it to the border of the arch grounds.

This wouldn't create a direct connection, but the shared theme would create a stronger impression of it being part of the same space.  Use the same light wands and colored pavement.  Bulb-outs like the South Grand project used on Memorial Drive would help considerably.  Applying the Hallway idea to the overpasses on I-70 would be helpful as well.  The sidewalks on the overpasses currently do not scream safety and comfort.

The north riverfront trail should continue along the riverfront, past the arch, and down to Jefferson Barracks.  How that happens remains to be seen, but it needs to happen. 

The parking garage on Washington that cuts off street traffic from the arch grounds should be redesigned. 
On the South, Poplar Street should be rebuilt and attached to the grounds in a walkable fashion.


All that being said, I am very hopeful about the competition.  I will follow it very intently.  I would like to see all the people in the St. Louis region able to follow it physically and virtually.

The St. Louis Virtual City Project / The Mannahatta Project

The Virtual City Project at the University of Missouri-St. Louis has been on going for about fifteen years now.  They secured a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2001.  There was also funding secured a while back from the various historical societies and the St. Louis History Museum.  The funds are far from sufficient and the graduate student labor propelling the project suffers form regular turn-over and spotty research niches.  A great many lesson plans have been created for area teachers, and the history department has been outstanding with secondary ed outreach.

Still, there is much to do with the project.  They had a slowly expanding wiki (http://vcities.umsl.edu/), but the link appears broken. They were using it behind the scenes.

The project should be expanded beyond UMSL.  Every university in the region has a stake in it.  Wash U should especially pick up the tab on all things related to Forest Park and the 1904 World's Fair.  The History Museum and the St. Louis Public Library have both done things related to the World's Fair in the past decade.  As non-profit, publically funded, entities they could certainly cooperate on the project as far as possible.

The Landmark Association, local neighborhood associations, urban planners, and all sorts of people should have a stake in the project.  If such stakeholders could carve out their own little sections of the project, it could progress much better.

We should also endeavor to bring in out-of-town data collection groups like everyblock.com, seeclickfix, and openstreetmap.org.  There's a great deal of information about the city that we are letting slip away each day.  Likewise, St. Louis based internet sites caught on sights like the internet archive can be of great value to us in the future.    We might also try to get some professional renderings done of the place when the project gets a bit more funded.  An excellent example from New York City can be seen from a group called Pixel Case.

Imagine being in a google earth like enviroment over St. Louis in the year 2000. You swoop down to look at the old busch stadium, pop into street view, and then walk into the library to use a computer. Your avatar sits down, and up pops the internet as it existed at the time, as preserved by www.archives.org. Walk out of the library, head down the urban mall towards the arch. Toggle the years back, see the arch deconstructed and warehouses pop up. Keep going, if you get the exact day right and the exact time of day, you may just see Pierre Laclede in his boat. 
Perhaps you want to go to the 1904 World's Fair.  Hop in a paddle boat in the Grand Basin and toggle backwards while looking at the art museum.  As the season's change and the renovations are undone, crowds will move in and out.  So many festivals you never knew about and winter sled riders will flicker in front of you.

Naturally, the best coordinator and funder for the project would be a well-endowed public planning gallery such as the one I have previously advocated on this blog.  Here's a ten year old model from 1999.  We shouldn't modify it, this is history.  We should keep it, and start new ones for today.

Let's make a public planning gallery that collates all the information about the city.  We need a central clearing house for information that can process it and render it physically before.  Why shouldn't it also render it digitally and preserve it as well?
 
Attempts to go back in time can be tough, but quite incredible.
 
Take a look at the Mannahatta Project.
 


 
My first exposure to the Mannahatta Project came from reading Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, which explored the abandoned places of the human world, how fast human built environments decay, and what human environments replaced.  The Pruitt-Igoe site would certainly of merited inclusion, for instance.
 
The Mannahatta Project sought to imagine what nature was like before the grid plan and the habitation of millions of humans.  There used to be streams in New York City.  There were animals and plants that aren't there now. 
 

 
The project was put together by the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the various NYC zoos, and the New York Botanical Gardens.
 
Now, St. Louis has a fantastic Zoo and Museum tax district, which makes the Missouri Botanical Gardens and the St. Louis Zoo publically funded urban partners.  If, as we say, our Zoo and Botanical Gardens are among the best in the world, they too could put together something like the Mannahatta Project.  Only, they could do more.  Let us discover not just what St. Louis was like when the mound builders were there.  Let's discover far before and far after.  When did certain animals and plants disappear from St. Louis?  How did the riverside development of wetlands into office parks affect our seasonal flooding?  There's so much data to put together.
 
St. Louis used to be full of mounds, streams, and caves.  We've removed all the mounds except Sugarloaf.  We've buried most of our streams, but have recently decided to daylight a few.  We filled in our caves, but a few still remain.