The Arch Grounds / Millennium Park

This post is a follow up to,

Memorial Drive / Michigan Avenue

St. Louis Riverfront / Chicago Lakefront

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The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, also just called the arch grounds, is only about 91 acres and sadly serves as more of a museum and memorial than an active downtown urban park. 

Grant Park, in Chicago, has 319 acres with museums, sports facilities, concert venues, public art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.  Chicago is a significantly larger city than St. Louis and has a much more active urban core.  It makes sense that it would have a larger downtown park as well.

Traditionally, St. Louis has always measured itself against Chicago.  The two cities used to be major rivals for control of the middle of the country.  Chicago won, and it got the railroads, money, development, people, and all that other stuff.  St. Louis lost and got a memorial to its former glory.  Chicago is seen as the place to be and its downtown park is always evolving.  St. Louis is seen as a place to leave and its downtown park is an unchanging national monument with bare lawns and duck filled ponds.

Growing up in St. Louis, I always believed Chicago to be a smaller city just from the way people talked about it.  The Cardinals would always beat the Cubs.  I was quite surprised to actually go there and find it to be the third largest city in the country.

I think it's fair to say that a lot of St. Louisans think of Chicago as a hated equal despite the disparity in size.  Chicago-envy drives local politics and all local ideas seem to spring from something in Chicago.  The dumbest one being this constant desire for a downtown aquarium.  The most interesting ideas are related to Millennium Park (part of Grant Park).

CityGarden, in the Gateway Mall adjacent the arch grounds, sparked a lot of landscaping and city building buzz.  The Urbanophile, (a blogger in Chicago) suggested it was created by a Millennium Park Effect.  Like CityGarden was just an attempt to take what worked in Chicago, put it in St. Louis, and have it magically work again.

The Millennium Park Effect actually affects three major projects:  CityGarden, Chouteau Lake, and the design competition around the arch grounds.

The comparison to CityGarden is fair, both have beautiful flowing fountains with kids running around in them.  CityGarden is an attempt to salvage a piece-meal urban renewal project tortured by fits and starts for nearly a century (note the skyscraper taking up half a block of the mall).  CityGarden was part of the master plan and it sort of connects to the Richard Serra sculpture nearby.  CityGarden filled a gap.  CityGarden filled a blank lawn.  Millennium Park covered a railyard. 

There is a movement in St. Louis to pull out a railyard, restore an historic lake, build a buiness district, and better connect Forest Park to downtown.  The Chouteau Greenway might never take off, but it would probably have a big impact.  It would be like a second Gateway Mall running adjacent to I-64, and probably still cut off from downtown on the other side of the interstate.  Are the two railyards in Chicago and St. Louis connected?  Absolutely. 

What the Millennium Park Effect really did in St. Louis was spur the movement towards reinvestment in the arch grounds and the possible creation of...  gulp...  an aquarium...  Now there's a big competition to make the arch grounds and the nearby Illinois riverfront into something like Grant Park.  By including Kienar Plaza and part of the Gateway Mall, it helps create a sense that they're part of the same park, but it doesn't include CityGarden.

Is the arch competition a direct outgrowth of the success of Millennium Park?  Maybe not, but it surely has had some influence.  The goal of the competition is not to make the arch grounds into something like Millennium Park.  The goal is to make better connections.  Again, this is an old issue that is finally being addressed.  For years, people have suggested putting a lid over part of I-70 to let people get from the mall to the memorial.  Such a lid would be expensive and ineffective.  It'd have no effect on the mess at the corners.  Washington Avenue's vibrant loft district deadends at the northwest corner of the park where it hits the elevated section of I-70.  There has been a vacant lot at that corner on Laclede's Landing since the interstate was first put in.

This giant highway is being rerouted across a bridge to the north.  We won't need it downtown anymore.  Perhaps we can have an entrance more more like Michigan Avenue next to Millennium Park,

No vast gulf between sidewalks, Michigan Avenue is crossable and active.  City to River, the group advocating for the removal of the unneeded section of interstate in St. Louis by the arch, has a post on their blog imagining Millennium Park cut off from the Chicago Loop by a highway like the one in St. Louis.  Their renderings are quite amazing.

Obviously under such conditions, Millennium Park wouldn't be a success story at all.  There would be no

Millennium Park Effect echoing around the country.  There would just be people in Chicago complaining about needing bridges and tunnels to get to the park, sad about how much money it cost.  The citizens of Chicago should be proud of their beautiful urban boulevard,

They should be glad they don't have an expensive elevated highway with high repair costs and noise pollution that hampers any real estate development in the surrounding area.. 

Michigan Avenue is part of Millennium Park, just as Memorial Drive in St. Louis is part of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.

CityGarden has the public art and Lurie Garden like flowery retreats.  Kienar Plaza is the city's gathering place.  Maybe the park in Illinois could use a giant metallic bean and some ball fields.  The arch grounds are in place as a memorial and will probably be mostly untouched by the competition, though the main field will always be the main concert venue in the city.  Or the main place for any sort of public gathering,

The final gift of the Millennium Park Effect to downtown St. Louis should be a vibrant, connected Michigan Avenue.