Mourning the loss of what never existed: Centene's Downtown Headquarters

This is probably my most unusual post yet, the loss of something that never existed. After recently announcing that they were canceling their plan to move to Downtown, Centene made the official announcement Tuesday that they would return to their original plan and build in Clayton at the corner of Forsyth and Hanley. While this is no surprise, and there was speculation that this would ultimately occur before the announced cancellation of the Downtown plan, it is still a hard blow to the ego of Downtown St. Louis.

Ballpark Village w/ Centene transposed over the present cess pool

Perhaps more than any event in recent memory, including the resurgence of a residential population, the new baseball stadium, or the movement of many other smaller companies to Downtown, the announcement that a major corporation was moving Downtown, building a new 30 story building (with possibly another in the future), and ultimately attracting 1,230 new jobs, was symbolically the sign that Downtown had after 50 years of decline again returned as the hub of the St. Louis region.

April 1962 - Ground breaking for the 16 story Pierre Laclede
building at Forsyth & Hanley. This building began the rush of
office tenants leaving Downtown St. Louis for the Clayton.
Harris Armstrong's Scruggs Vandervoort Barney department
store, which will be demolished for Centene's headquarters,
is in the background.

Now with Centene's headquarters, the recently announced redevelopment and expansion of Brown Shoe's headquarters, and several other large proposals on the boards, there will be some who will say that Clayton may well have taken that title.

Decommissioning A City: The Team 4 Plan in real time - Youngstown, Ohio

A post today by Abby Wilson on GLUEspace focuses on a CNN Money article about a plan currently being implemented in Youngstown, Ohio. Dubbed Plan 2010, is essentially the decommissioning of the city, block by block in areas of the city that have decayed. Abandoned buildings are demolished, streets and infrastructure are ripped out, and the area is returned to open green space in order to save money that would otherwise be spent to maintain the infrastructure.

This is basically the "Team 4 Plan" officially adopted and put into action. Youngstown has given up hope that urban re-birth will ever occur and is pulling the plug. The really scary thing is that officials in other smaller rust-belt cities are coming to Youngstown to study the plan to see if it is something they should adopt in their respective cities.

Great article about the San Luis in the Vital Voice

The most recent issue of the Vital Voice contains a great article by Lindsey Derrington of Landmarks Association concerning the endangered San Luis Apartments (formerly the DeVille Moter Hotel). The article, which can be read online, thoroughly covers all aspects of the topic and is well worth a read.

Dick Gregory Place on the brink of devestation!

The Wagoner Place National Register Historic District is less than a year old, but the real question now is will it survive. Almost half of the single family homes on Dick Gregory Place are not only abandoned, but are in such a severe state of decay that without intervention within the next year or so, they will likely not survive.

1702 Dick Gregory Place

(all photos this post from the Geo St. Louis website)

1702 Dick Gregory Place - rear

The Wagoner Place Historic District was listed on the National Register on December 19, 2007. The district is composed of the 1700-1900 blocks of Dick Gregory Place running north from Martin Luther King, and single block (4600 block) of five streets to the west of Dick Gregory: Aldine, Cote Brilliante, Leduc, the north side of MLK & the south side of North Market. The agenda from the April 2007 Preservation Board meeting where the nomination process began can be found here.

1704 Dick Gregory Place

1704 Dick Gregory Place - rear

The home below doesn't look too bad from the front, or initially from the rear. Then I noticed that the stair visible through the open door is collapsing, indicating that there is more serious damage than is immediately visible from the exterior.

1710 Dick Gregory Place

1710 Dick Gregory Place - rear

In July of last year, two of the buildings on Martin Luther King Dr. were targeted for demolition. The doctor's building at the northwest corner of Dick Gregory and MLK, originally built as a two family house was almost lost as demolition began at the rear of the building without a permit. Luckily a resident reported the work, and it was stopped. The Preservation Board denied the application made by the neighboring church which wanted to demolish the building for parking. The agenda from that meeting item can be found here. The building is now owned by LRA, and the questions remains as to what will happen to it.

4635-37 Dr. Martin Luther King Drive

4635-37 Dr. Martin Luther King Drive -rear

At the same July 2007 meeting of the Preservation Board, the beautiful three story building at the opposite end of the same block at the intersection of MLK and Marcus was listed in a request to demolish 33 buildings scattered through the larger Ville Local City Historic District. The request was made by 4th Ward Alderman Sam Moore. The agenda for this item can be found here.

One of the larger buildings in the immediate area, the storefront and apartment building is an extremely important asset to both the local and (then pending) national districts, and rightly so the board ruled against demolition. Several other demolitions were allowed due to the sever condition of some of the buildings. Again the future of this building at MLK and Marcus is in doubt. It is owned by LRA and while it is largely in stable condition, a large portion of the north wall of the third floor is missing, and with the building wide open like this, deterioration will be rapid.

4647 Dr. Martin Luther King Drive

4647 Dr. Martin Luther King Drive - rear

With all of these buildings owned by LRA and a historic district in place, you would think that the City would want to get someone interested in taking these buildings off their hands and renovating them using historic tax credits, right? Yet I checked the RFPs on the City's web site, and there are no RFPs for this district, or in the Ville neighborhood, or in the entire 4th Ward! This is inexcusable! ... and they say the Team 4 plan is fiction??!! ... makes you wonder doesn't it. I hope I am missing something here and that someone is actually looking at putting together a plan to save Wagoner Place... but somehow I doubt it. This is one of those cases where the City needs to step in and spend a little of their demolition pot of $$ doing some desperately needed triage. Doug Duckworth recently posted a nice set of additional photos of Wagoner Place on Flickr which inspired me to do this post.

31 Days of Blairmont... and counting

If you have not have not done so already, please take a look at a month-long series by Rob Powers here at the Built St. Louis Web-log. Each day for the past month Rob has been posting about buildings owned by Paul McKee's Blairmont and several other shell companies that have amassed over 660 properties in several North St. Louis neighborhoods, many of which contain historic buildings that have been allowed to rot and decay or worse.

I bring this to attention on his site because the outright assault on buildings by Paul Mckee collectively represents the greatest threat the urban built environment in St. Louis today. Buildings are being lost on a regular basis due to brick rustling (which may be encouraged or even organized by McKee), fire, or simply collapse due to severe neglect.

Please have a look at this sad chronicle, and please contact the politicians listed on yesterday's "What Can I Do" post and tell them that this f***ing madness needs to end NOW!
For a more in-depth look at the devastation including a map of all the properties, check out Michael Allen's: World of Blairmont.

Sad fate of a house on Hebert

No, this is not one of Paul McKee's Blairmont properties. No, it was not the victim of brick rustlers. Until a last Monday this house on Hebert in Old North St. Louis was undergoing a full gut rehab, having been a formerly abandoned LRA property. So you may be asking yourself what the hell happened? What happened is possibly one of the most blatant acts of gross negligence and stupidity I have heard in a long time... over week later I am still trying to wrap my mind around this one.
So the shell work had been completed, including full tuckpointing, masonry re-building in some areas, new floor joists and sub-floor, new windows, new roof, etc. and work had apparently already begun on interior finishes. Apparently there was some foundation underpinning that needed to be done. OK, I'm going to stop here and state the obvious: that foundation underpinning is something you do in small sections at a time. The foundation contractor, who obviously has a complete absence of common sense, excavated the dirt away from the rubble stone foundation all the way to the bottom along the entire east side of the house. This act alone is not advisable for a 100+ year old rubble foundation, as in many cases, they need re-pointing, and exposing the entire length can make the foundation become unstable. Then he precedes to dig under the footing, and keeps digging, until...well you see the result.

To make matters worse than they could have been, the the new floor joists were not simply inserted into the old masonry pockets as they would have been when the house was built. If this were the case, it is feasible that a good part of the shell would still be standing, since the floor and joists would have been able to fall away from the shell. Instead, the genius bolted band boards to the exterior walls and attached the joists to the band boards, so when a portion of one wall started to collapse, the floor structure dragged the rest of the house down with it. It is unclear at this point what will happen here, but my guess is will end up a vacant lot.

Archdiocese wants to create a "campus" in the CWE

Proposed site plan at Lindell and Taylor

This morning at the CWEA Planning and Development Committee meeting, the architect hired by the Archdiocese of St. Louis explained that the Archdiocese wants to create a "campus" by demolishing the San Luis Apartments at Lindell and Taylor and building a surface parking lot in its place. Yes that's right they used the "C" word! As if that was not bad enough, the next words spewed from the architect's mouth were that the "campus" would make the Archdiocese collection of buildings "not a hodge podge that happened over time"!

WTF! "a hodge podge that happened over time"!!?? uh... most of us call that a CITY! To complete the campus look, for "security" purposes, the surface parking lot would be surrounded by a SLU style black iron fence. So... will they eventually want to fence the Catholic Center, the Cathedral, and Rosati Kain?

Rendering of the proposed surface lot from the corner of Lindell & Taylor

The parking lot would have 150 spaces (although about 20 of these would be lost to a request from the CWEA Planning and Development Committee request to respect the Lindell building set back line) as compared to 180 spaces that exist in the 3 levels of structured parking in the San Luis building... not exactly a net gain.

The architect pointed out that the existing apartments that were originally hotel rooms are only 240 square feet. If these were combined to create actual one bedroom apartments, with some two bedrooms mixed in, the unit count could reduce from 226 to about 100. If one parking space were allocated to each still relatively small unit, there would be 80 spaces left over for daily use by staff at Rosati Kain.

A representative of Rosati Kain explained their need for additional parking by staff and students. To gain additional parking without demolition, the Archdiocese could put some parking for students on the large grounds of St. Elizabeth Hall, which is directly north of the cathedral across Maryland. To minimize the effects on the grounds, they should use a product called Grasspave2, which uses interlocking plastic rings in real grass to provide the structural capacity to park on the grass. A double loaded row of parking along the Newstead edge of the property could yield about 70 spaces. The combination of this with excess parking at the San Luis would provide more parking than the current demolition proposal.

Grasspave2 product used on each side of a drive aisle

This proposal will need to go before the City's Preservation Board, so it is far from too late to prevent this slap in the face proposal form being executed.