St. Louis Central Corridor / Downtown Chicago

This past weekend I found myself walking around downtown Chicago with a group of Koreans, and one of them asked me, "Is Chicago bigger than Seoul?"

What an amazing thing for a life-long resident of Seoul to ask.  "No, absolutely not." I replied.  "Seoul is much larger.  The difference is that Seoul has many city centers:  Jongno, Gangnam, Yeoiudo, Shinchon, Jamsil, etc.  while Chicago has only one." 

Seoul is a solid blanket of decentralized density.  Look at the subway map.

Chicago, on the other hand, has pushed all of its deveopment into one dense, mixed-use downtown.  Look at the Metra and CTA maps.

Seoul is a decentralized city that is uniformly mixed-use and dense, with few places standing out as particularly denser than other places.  Chicago is uniformly low-rise neighborhoods with one massively developed spot in the middle.  Chicago isn't quite a megacity, but can convey that feeling to people visiting only its downtown, even if those visitors are from a genuine megacity.

So my Korean friend nodded in agreement and then asked me about St. Louis.  I replied that St. Louis is smaller than Chicago and has several city centers, so we fail to achieve any kind of meaningful density.  It might be argued that we have four or five different centers.  Look at our bus and light rail map,

St. Louis has a downtown of great historic density and purpose.  As a home for office towers though, the Clayton CBD stands in opposition, splitting whatever towers our business community might muster between two different sites nearly seven miles apart.  What's more, when asked, "What is the center of St. Louis," the average resident might offer alternate locations like the Central West End, Grand Center, or Forest Park.  There's no clear consensus.

Chicago's downtown has many great universities sharing facilities and renting spaces right next to each other.  SLU and Wash U have private campuses stretched along the St. Louis central corridor.  Downtown Chicago has Grant Park and the Museum Campus.  The STL Central Corridor has the Gateway Arch and its grounds, Forest Park, the ZMD, and Shaw Park.  Both cities have many of the same things, but Chicago has them together, and St. Louis has them far apart.

Chicago's CTA held a contest asking how to improve public transit ridership without building new facilities, and the winning idea suggested the obvious:  concentrate real estate development around the downtown loop.  The idea being that all of downtown Chicago is TOD, and increasing the TOD increases ridership.  That strategy would not work the same in St. Louis, because our downtown is ten miles long and not universally supported by transit.  The only transfer station in St. Louis for light rail is Forest Park station, where there will also be a street car in the future.  Clayton, the Central West End, and Downtown all have bus terminals.  Downtown has a rubber-wheeled trolley, Amtrak, and Greyhound, but it isn't that much better connected than the Central West End or other places along the central corridor.

The exception to Chicago's great concentration of density south of the river is Streeterville and the Magnificent Mile.  Development has shot out of the Loop towards the John Hancock Building in the form of high rises and luxury apartment stores.  It is as if the great success of density shot out along a seam.

The exact same thing could happen in St. Louis along the lines of the City to River plan to remove the elevated lanes of I-70 north of downtown and make an at-grade urban boulevard heading north towards the new I-70 bridge.  Or it could happen with McKee's new 12th or 22nd street projects in the NorthSide plan.  Or it could happen with SLU and Grand Center better connecting to South Grand.  Or maybe it could happen along Brentwood Boulevard as Clayton better connects itself to Richmond Heights.

Will north-south development in St. Louis benefit the central corridor or further decentralize it?  It would be nice to see development in north city.  It'd also be great to have the north side better connected to the south side.

Before we can really do those things though, we need an unbroken line of development along the central axis.  If our many city centers are to fully develop their manifold glory, they would be better served by growing into each other.  Lindell and Forest Park Parkway (Market Street) ought to be higher priority development areas. 

How could we build a stronger central corridor?

1)  Fill in Harris-Stowe's campus and merge their sports programs with SLU's
2)  Fill in SLU's campus, rip out the fences, and build on the grassy fields
3)  Send the Loop Trolley down Forest Park Parkway or Lindell
4)  Build the Sarah Street MetroLink station
5)  Redesign and rebuild the 22nd street interchange and the Market/ForestPark Ave/ Compton interchange
6)  Build however much of the Chouteau Greenway can be built, and leave the rest for later.
7)  Put a bike sharing program in the CWE and expand east and west.
8)  Connect Oakland Avenue and the Chouteau Greenway by a bike/ped tunnel under Kingshighway through the highway berm.
9)  Double up on the regional investment in CORTEX
10)  Establish the coffee district with proper signs and facility tours
11)  Establish a downtown campus of St. Louis Community College between Union Station and the Gateway Multi-Modal Transportation Center, and let them grow into the new 22nd street interchange.  Let Union Station become the student union for the entire SLCC system.
12)  Provide all SLU students with Metro passes
13)  Establish Forsyth, Manchester, Oakland, and Clayton Ave/Rd as Bike St. Louis corridors.
14)  Plan the proposed I-64 BRT route smartly, investing Maryville and MoBap into downtown while transforming the Galleria, Plaza Frontenac, and the Chesterfield Mall into TOD
15)  Restore the Sun Theater and fill in the parking lots of Grand Center with mixed-use buildings

It would also be nice if we could find a way to conceptually add East St. Louis to the Central Corridor,

1)  Expand the CVC to include the Metro-East
2)  Add ped/bike expansions to MLK, Eads, Poplar Street, and MacArthur Bridges.
3)  Activate the many national scenic byways that go through the Metro-East and concentrate them on East St. Louis
4)  Establish ESL as the downtown of the Metro-East, perhaps even moving the county seat from Belleville
5)  Revisit the arch grounds competition regularly in the future to work on ways to connect East St. Louis to the river.
6)  Put an Amtrak station on both sides of the river
7)  Establish an express train between MidAmerica Airport - downtown ESL - downtown St. Louis, and Lambert
8)  Expand SIUE's campus in ESL
9)  Bring Madison and St. Clair Counties into regional taxing districts like the ZMD, Metro, and Great Rivers Greenway
10)  Make the head of the new aviary an endowed chair in ornithology at SIUE along the same lines as the botony chair at Wash U that oversees the botanical gardens.