Ted Drewes / Shake Shack

Tonight the revised plans for the arch grounds were revealed and one of the suggestions was something like a 'Shake Shack' in the new Kiener Plaza.

Among other things, the Shake Shack sells frozen custard.  That of course begs the question:  If we're going to put a little building in Kiener Plaza that sells frozen custard, why not make it local?

Kiener Plaza is our gathering ground, perhaps the very heart of downtown.  Putting up a little Ted Drewes hut in the middle of it would draw people from all over.  It has been proven that St. Louisans will drive absurd distances for the express purpose of buying at a window what they could buy at a grocery store. 

Arch Competition...  buzz
New Museum Entrance... buzz
Gondola... buzz
Downtown Ted Drewes...  BUZZ

It'd be a new day in America.


(Anyway, when Kiener Plaza gets destroyed... what happens to the Running Man?  I hope he stays in the Gateway Mall somewhere)

Kingshighway Skatepark / Burnside Skatepark

There are people in my neighborhood doing something amazing under a decaying bridge.



They have built it entirely by themselves from donated materials.  Their project is very similar to an older skatepark in Portland.



Skate Oregon describes Burnside Skatepark as,

Built without permission, by skateboarders and later sanctioned by the city, Burnside is the preeminent example of action. Burnside's unique growth and evolution -through the sweat and blood of a handful of dedicated individuals- have matured into one of the best skateparks in the world. Burnside and its creators are true pioneers, setting the stage for community built skateparks across the country.
Burnside is public, free and has no pad requirements. It is also subject to periodic review by the city. Burnside is not permanent. The city can, at any time, with excuse of public nuisance, condemn and destroy it.  Park on the street only, not in adjacent private parking lots.  Please respect yourself and others.

This lack of permanency is a problem.  The Burnside Bridge in Portland is still strong.  The Kingshighway Bridge in St. Louis is falling apart and needs to be replaced.  The St. Louis Board of Aldermen just recently approved the reconstruction of the bridge.  No official mention was made related to the denizens of the bridge's underside, but a plea of help appeared on the King's Highway blog a few days later.

With the looming threats of our bridges demise, KHVT has been feverishly searching out new spots to develop. If anyone has ideas, spots or private property that you think would be a good place for a new park please email us at kings.highway@yahoo.com. Also we are in need of some more members to our team. We are currently looking for anyone with experience in grant writing, accounting, fundraising, sales/donation solicitation, skateboarding advocacy and non profit work to help take our organization to the next level! We are a 501c3 accredited non profit organization but at this time we are only excepting volunteers. If you are interested or know someone that might be, send a brief informal resume of experience that would apply to kings.highway@yahoo.com . Helping us out would be a great resume builder and will give you a chance to give back to our community! We will take all the help we can get! We have a massive site in the works for a new park but we are still in the early stages so i cannot give out any details just yet but know that St. Louis skateboardings future is looking very bright, or should i saw dark?!?!? hint hint.....   B.

There are many great places around St. Louis that could easily accomodate this group of DIY community maintainers.  It would be nice if the new bridge could be built with them in mind.  Otherwise, they could be added to the new Grand Viaduct, MVVA's Underpass Park, or maybe Cementland.  I hope they find a permanent home.

Bike St. Louis / Portland Bike Box

St. Louis is not a rich city, and I understand that.  They can't plow the snow off every street or even most streets.  That's why we have designated bike corridors.  That's why when there is snow I hope to use the Bike STL routes... assuming the bike lanes are not filled with the snow plowed out of the car lanes.

Today, I was waiting for a red light at Shaw and Vandeventer, in a car lane, and the guy behind me honked at me thinking it'd make me disappear.  I had no way to tell him that the area where I was supposed to wait was covered in snow, so I just waited it out and went about my business. 

I bike Shaw, and I'd like to tell you dear reader about the most interesting part of my route.


Mobot's road of walls, fences, and silence.  Click to enlarge


Shaw doesn't cross Kingshighway in a straight path.  I start by waiting in this box that the driver's next to me seem incapable of seeing.

Most people get irritated by me biking past them at red lights to get up to the front, but the simple fact is that I don't accelerate as fast as them and the light is short.  If I'm in the back, I won't make it across in time, and that's not good for the cars behind me.

I usually bike straight across the intersection to let the cars behind me pass or make thier left turn, then I jerk left to get back on Shaw behind them, which can be a tight squeeze.

Then I bike across MoBot's dead street to Vandeventer where I stop for another light.

Then I'm clear across in a neighborhood again.

There's no bike lane on Shaw, nor does there need to be.  But these little boxes at intersections are really helpful.  The only problem is that driver's usually don't see them.  What's worse is those times when I am biking with friends and I don't know if we should line up or just take up the car lane too.  The Shaw bike boxes only fit one rider at a time.

Because this is a designated route, and because we want to advertise it so, we really ought to make my our little boxes highly visible.



No, more than just visible, we should make them stand out.



Bike lanes and crosswalks ought to be colorful.  Bike boxes ought to be highly visible.  Portland has green.  Madison has red.  London has blue.  I don't really care what color we choose as long as it's consistent across the region.

Having a large, lane-sized bike box doesn't take anything away from the cars, but it makes a huge difference for people on bikes.  Every stop light is a five second social moment in peace instead of a fearful pause with the guy behind you making his engine growl at you because he thinks you're doing something illegal and dangerous.

The lesson for today is that the St. Louis snow removing teams do not seem aware of the bike routes, but they probably would if there were a few bright green boxes out there.  Further, if they failed to clear the bike lane, they'd probably manage to get the majority of the box that cuts into the car lanes.

Winter in St. Louis is not at all too cold for biking, but the snow and ice is a problem.  I got to work today to discover someone cleared all the sidewalks and deposited the snow on top of the bike rack.  It was buried, so I used a lamp post instead.  Yikes!

Bus Interchanges / Better Bus Stops

The Central West End bus interchange is a concrete gas chamber that many people like me find themselves waiting in for unacceptable periods of time.  It's filled with smoke from cigarettes that Metro seems unconcerned about, and gas from tailpipes that Metro can't afford to separate with glass doors like those in the Ang Mo Kio Hub in Singapore.

I don't blame Metro for their lack of money, but I do question whether they need the expensive inter-modal facilities they've invested in.  Last year there was one bus between Dogtown and the Botanical Gardens, and now it has been broken into two that terminate at the same interchange.  Now people like me going in one direction or the other must wait (forever!) at the Central West End bus terminal.

We have these interchanges because Metro is trying to plan around their existing MetroLink stations and build little transit towns.  Making the buses go to them contributes to a "destination" feel.  That's the Singapore model.

This is a picture of the Ang Mo Kio Hub mentioned above.  It's the center of one of the many transit towns in Singapore.  All attention focuses on the train station, and one would never know that they could walk to other areas if they tried.  Each town is an island completely disconnected from the others by all but train and bus.  One would never walk from Ang Mo Kio to Bishan because the two towns do not properly blend into each other.  They're bisected by large roads and a sizable park.   

Delmar, Forest Park, and the Central West End are all great places with lots of buses, but again they are islands to each other.  A half-mile walking radius around them is not going to help Porter Park much or Delmar and Euclid for that matter.

Transit villages make sense in disconnected suburbs or commuter towns with historic mainstreets.  In an established city mostly full of connected urban neighborhoods, it seems a shame to spend so much money making the best spaces for TOD into vast parking lots of idling buses and smoking drivers.  It's a shame to do so when elsewhere in the city we're left with scenes like this,


0.2 miles from Delmar Station

 Money spent on bus interchanges don't do much for the quality of a neighborhood unless they're integrated into something actively used.  In the case of the AMK Hub above, the bus interchange is part of an indoor mall complete with a full-service grocery store and a movie theater.  In the case of most MetroLink stations, they're part of a parking facility of some sort.  Here's North Hanley,


click to enlarge


Here's the Central West End,

This is a problem.  Metro spends a lot of money on parking structures that contribute very little to TOD or any kind development for that matter.  Metro spends very little on bus stops, and those bus stops therefore contribute very little to the streets they're on.

Atlernatives?   Nicer bus stops.  Bus stops as transfer stations.  Transfers on streets all around train stations, not bunched in hidden facilities.  They might look like this,

That's Oxford Circus.  You may remember it from a post on this blog about the potential of Washington and Memorial as a bus transfer intersection for the landing.

Or maybe they'd look like this,

This bus stop in the middle of the road is next to my old train station in Seoul, which was covered here in relation to Memorial Drive downtown.  By having a bus stop in the middle of the road, crosswalks become shorter and easier to cross, and crowds use them instead of blocking the sidewalks.

 
The shared bus lanes are used by many different buses.

One bus stop may serve many bus routes, and studying them while you wait can help you plan future trips.  The longer you wait at a bus stop in Seoul, the more useful you find it to be.  Buses come every five minutes though, so it's impossible to read every route.


Seoul and London are megacities with neighborhoods that blend into each other, and real estate by train stations is expensive.  Claiming the medians for buses decongests the sidewalks while still maintaining eyes and feet on the street.  It calms traffic and activates crosswalks.  It takes buses away from parked cars, and on well established corridors creates places for transfers.  

Why does the Kingshighway bus travel like this?

At the part of Kingshighway where the crosswalks need the most help, we have taken the bus away.  We've also added twenty minutes or more to the north-south commute time.

Again, we could have this,

or this,

Which costs more?  Which is better for the city?

First Night Saint Louis / Art Prize

For the longest time now, Grand Center has been focusing on concentrating activities within its vague boundaries to the disadvantage of the rest of the community.  This is true of the efforts to stop the renovation of the Kiel downtown, and of the poaching of programs from the rest of the region, like the relocating of KWMU and KDHX.  This is not dissimilar to Jane Jacobs' complaints about Carnaegie Hall shuttering in the name of Lincoln Center.  A concentration around the center leaves the rest of the city dry.  If that concentration is then too isolated, then it too will dry up.  I do not want to see the region's art community concentrated and then bled, and I assume Grand Center doesn't want that either.  Hence, this post.


I enjoyed this year's First Night celebration in Grand Center,

but there was one nagging thing that bothered me the entire evening. 


Blue:  Closed Streets   Red:  Event Venues

Transportation for First Night was not planned smartly.  In fact, it was planned with an obvious bias agaisnt buses.  Grand Center is pretty much the middle of the city of St. Louis.  It's at the intersection of Grand and Lindell, or more specifically the 70 Grand and 10 Lindell buses.  The 10 connects our two CBDs in Clayton and downtown.  The 70 is the best bus line in the system, runs the length of the city, and has been picked in Metro's long-range plans as the backbone of our future bus rapid transit system.

Grand Center and the Grand Bus are tied to each other.  The success of one builds the success of the other.  The success of either builds the success of the rest of Grand:  restaurants on South Grand, students at SLU, and the great parks at the ends.  It's a reciprical relationship, and we need to stop poisoning it.

SLU's shuttles are the biggest poison in the system at the moment.  Every day, the 70 Grand goes up and down the street picking up regular people, and the SLU shuttles shadow it picking up students and excluding regular people.  If SLU ditched the shuttle, gave its budget money to Metro, and gave passes to its students, the Grand bus would see increased ridership, better buses, and better frequency. 

Just as SLU makes this mistake on a daily basis, Grand Center did it in a big way on New Year's Eve.  First Night shut down Grand Blvd and rerouted the 70 Grand bus around Grand Center.  Metro did not post anything about this in advance.  Instead Metro ran extra trains to Grand MetroLink station where a shuttle waited at the bus stop to take people along the 70 Grand's route to Grand Center.  Services were duplicated, and quality was sacrificed.

For the sake of the event, the most reliable bus in town disappeared and a shuttle replaced it.  

Our night went like this.  We took the MetroLink as we were told, found no shuttle waiting, and simply walked.   At the end of the night we needed to get home to South City and waited with a half dozen others at the bus stop for the 70 Grand to take us home.  It never came.  Obviously it didn't get the extra service that the MetroLink got.  Three of us at the bus stop split a taxi to get home.  I guess the others found their own means.

 
Let's replan the St. Louis event.

Grand shouldn't be blocked off, and the bus should be allowed to take people right into the center of the event along its normal route.  Three of the main venues this year (Xavier, Scottish Rite, and the Busch Student Center) were on unblocked streets and worked just fine.  If an outdoor block party is still desired, there's a huge parking lot framed by the Contemporary Art Museum, the Shelden, and the Grandel Theater that could hold a crowd much better than comparatively narrow Grand Blvd.  Block Washington Avenue, it's smaller and has no buses.  Closing Grand ruined the holiday for lots of drivers.  I saw them making illegal lefts with the cops screaming at them.

Don't run shuttles.  Run extra buses.  Moreover, take ownership of the Grand bus.  Make people see the Grand bus as an extension of Grand Center.  Every inch of every bus should have been covered in First Night advertisements throughout the month of December.  It goes the whole length of the city!  People could see it and say, "That's the bus I'm taking to Grand Center for First Night."  Logistics solved!

On New Year's Day, the shuttles are gone, but the bus remains.  Teaching people to transfer to a temporary shuttle taught them nothing about the city.  Teaching them to ride the bus connects them to something we're all a part of.  Run some extra trains to get the east-west people, but run extra buses too for us north-south types.

Most important of all, let's let First Night expand out of Grand Center and let 70 Grand be the vehicle of that expansion.  Add in the bars on South Grand.  Add tours of Compton Water Tower.  Put outdoor stages in Fairgrounds Park, Tower Grove Park, and Carondelet Park.  Shoot fireworks from every other block along the entire bus route and let the whole city see it. 

St. Louis is a city of house parties.  That's what everyone did over the holiday.  I've got my First Night button, but most people I've talked to have never heard of First Night despite its twenty years in St. Louis.  It's an isolated block party in a city of isolated house parties.

At the beginning of the new year, we should push ourselves to step out and see new things, not stay home and spend the first day of the year recovering from a hangover.  As it is, First Night is an exploration of venues not usually entered.  One must look at the list of peformances and the map, and find venues perhaps unfamiliar.  Yet even these are confined to the relatively small and safe Grand Center.

ArtPrize up in Grand Rapids is a scavenger hunt for art that covers the town in art and sends people looking for it based on rumors and advice from friends.  They hunt down obscure oddities in parts of town they usually never frequent.

When ArtPrize is over, random pieces of art are left hanging around Grand Rapids, like this bunny in St. Louis from a previous First Night.

Why not increase the frenzy of exploration at our First Night?  Why not send people hunting for venues along the entire length of Grand?  Why not leave a legacy of art, effective transportation, and better linked communities? 

Let's celebrate the city as a city with city things:  buses, sidewalks, and accessible streets.  Big events like First Night should be a shot in the arm for the city and for Metro, not a punch in the face.