As I skim back over my just-posted take on the Bohemian Hill development proposal, I'm struck by how many links I ended up putting in it. It's amazing how many people are already discussing this proposal, just days after its announcement.
Lest you take that for granted, I challenge you to find any comparable discussion among the residents of Milwaukee. Apart from my little blog, and one or two other bloggers who occasionally touch on issues of urbanism, architecture and development, there's nothing. Silence. A void. There simply is no online community discussing the physical form of Milwaukee or its future.
Granted, Milwaukee can afford to rest on its laurels a bit -- our last Mayor went on to become president of the Congress for the New Urbanism. When he first came to town, he saw a new Walgreens on Brady Street (Milwaukee's equivalent of Delmar) with a parking lot in front of it. "Why'd you build it like that??" he asked the developer. "'Cause that's what the code says we had to do!" was the answer. Mayor Norquist promptly set about changing the code. Then he tore down a freeway; we're just starting to fill in the 16 acres of downtown land that it opened up. It's Milwaukee's poor fortune that he was unable to tear down a second freeway that would have connected downtown to the neighborhoods to the south.
Now we see the results of all that, as urban buildings are popping up like weeds all over Milwaukee's downtown and East Side.
St. Louis, alas, cannot take such consideration for granted. Every bit of urbanism must be fought for, tooth and claw. Ultimately, the city's long-outdated zoning laws need to be replaced; otherwise, it's a case-by-case battle, never-ending and often lost.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Saturday, February 10, 2007
"We'll never be like Chicago!"
Having lived and debated both north and south of the Windy City, I have heard Chicago brought up many times as an example of how to carry out some particular aspect of urban design and planning. And without fail, somebody will pop up with the stock local pride response: "St. Louis/Milwaukee isn't Chicago! And we shouldn't try to be!"
It drives me crazy, because it completely misses the point.
Chicago, while plagued with the same problems that most Rust Belt cities must deal with, is a highly successful urban environment when compared to most American cities. It packs considerable population density across a large area, enough to support a busy and thriving mass transit system. The rail portion of that system succeeds because it runs so frequently that it's a viable alternative to driving. It's desirable not to drive because things are so dense, parking so scarce. Things are dense because a large volume of historic buildings have been preserved, and where they have been destroyed they've been replaced by buildings of greater density. It has both major chains and small local stores. It has a diversified economy, fueled by this variety of scales. It has busy street life. It has, in short, all the hallmarks of a true urban environment.
But those are not the trappings of some kind of mythical aura of Chicagoness that if emulated will turn all your citizens into zombie Bears fans. They are the basic requirements of any successful urban environment, regardless of its size. They apply across the board -- in Chicago, in New York, in San Francisco, and yes, in St. Louis and Milwaukee.
Build upon those things, and your city succeeds. Diminish them, work against them, allow developers to build sprawl instead of density, and your city fails.
It is not about becoming Chicago; it is about becoming an urban environment, and Chicago is the closest example one that works. Your city may never "be like Chicago" in whatever other ways you're thinking of (certainly it's unlikely to match Chicago's population), but it would do well to learn some of Chicago's lessons. They transcend any one location.
It drives me crazy, because it completely misses the point.
Chicago, while plagued with the same problems that most Rust Belt cities must deal with, is a highly successful urban environment when compared to most American cities. It packs considerable population density across a large area, enough to support a busy and thriving mass transit system. The rail portion of that system succeeds because it runs so frequently that it's a viable alternative to driving. It's desirable not to drive because things are so dense, parking so scarce. Things are dense because a large volume of historic buildings have been preserved, and where they have been destroyed they've been replaced by buildings of greater density. It has both major chains and small local stores. It has a diversified economy, fueled by this variety of scales. It has busy street life. It has, in short, all the hallmarks of a true urban environment.
But those are not the trappings of some kind of mythical aura of Chicagoness that if emulated will turn all your citizens into zombie Bears fans. They are the basic requirements of any successful urban environment, regardless of its size. They apply across the board -- in Chicago, in New York, in San Francisco, and yes, in St. Louis and Milwaukee.
Build upon those things, and your city succeeds. Diminish them, work against them, allow developers to build sprawl instead of density, and your city fails.
It is not about becoming Chicago; it is about becoming an urban environment, and Chicago is the closest example one that works. Your city may never "be like Chicago" in whatever other ways you're thinking of (certainly it's unlikely to match Chicago's population), but it would do well to learn some of Chicago's lessons. They transcend any one location.
Friday, February 09, 2007
...and my city was gone
Published in the St. Louis Business Journal, reproduced in full in Toby Weiss's B.E.L.T.: Look what they want to do to Soulard!!
This is a bad, bad plan. It is suburban in form, scale, and layout. It is meant to cater to the heavy interstate traffic behind it, rather than the pedestrian-scale neighborhoods on either side. It will do nothing to knit together the sundered fabrics of Lafayette Square and Soulard. Its brick facades are only the dimmest and most trivial of gestures toward its context.
And it is certainly not "how you build a great city". You do that by creating memorable physical environments, scaled and planned for people instead of cars, responsive to historic context -- not scattered one-story buildings fronting on five acres of parking.
For reference, here's a map of the immediate area:
The gray houses are still standing. The red ones are gone. I will have much more to say on this -- stay tuned.
This is a bad, bad plan. It is suburban in form, scale, and layout. It is meant to cater to the heavy interstate traffic behind it, rather than the pedestrian-scale neighborhoods on either side. It will do nothing to knit together the sundered fabrics of Lafayette Square and Soulard. Its brick facades are only the dimmest and most trivial of gestures toward its context.
And it is certainly not "how you build a great city". You do that by creating memorable physical environments, scaled and planned for people instead of cars, responsive to historic context -- not scattered one-story buildings fronting on five acres of parking.
For reference, here's a map of the immediate area:
The gray houses are still standing. The red ones are gone. I will have much more to say on this -- stay tuned.
Monday, February 05, 2007
The Fagin Building
Before there was the Arcade Building, there was the obscure, bizarre, short-lived Fagin Building:
A. W. Fagin Building
This page, by a distant relative of the building's architect, offers some detailed views and interesting commentary. The Fagin Building showed a use of bold forms similar to those of Frank Furness (and similarly reviled in the architectural press of the time); its facade contained vast areas of glass to allow natural light to flood the interior -- a Modernist tenet decades ahead of its time. It was remodeled into the far less interesting Burlington Building after only a few years, but for that short time St. Louis had a truly remarkable gem of architecture.
A. W. Fagin Building
This page, by a distant relative of the building's architect, offers some detailed views and interesting commentary. The Fagin Building showed a use of bold forms similar to those of Frank Furness (and similarly reviled in the architectural press of the time); its facade contained vast areas of glass to allow natural light to flood the interior -- a Modernist tenet decades ahead of its time. It was remodeled into the far less interesting Burlington Building after only a few years, but for that short time St. Louis had a truly remarkable gem of architecture.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
There's Still Crime in the City
So now I'm doin' it my way
I took the law in my hands
USA Today: Cities see crime surge as threat to their revival
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Violent crime leaps in city
Time Magazine: The Next Crime Wave
From an interview with outgoing Milwaukee chief of police Nan Hagerty:
Same issue, the Milwaukee Shepherd-Express's response to the Time story.
From Flickr.com user Boxchain: March Against Crime in New Orleans, with some very large and very angry crowds.
In my own life, my housemate's car was stolen, someone got mugged on the street right in front of our house, a co-worker's car was broken into, two more cars on the same lot were broken into this week, and my own car has been rifled through twice in the last few months (lost my MP3 player, the only time I've left anything valuable in the car in years. Damn!!) A lady was punched in the face by a random guy a few blocks from my girlfriend's Chicago apartment. Over in Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood (analogous to West Philadelphia, or to a lesser extent, Old North St. Louis), a group has started a foot patrol to help keep some eyes on the streets during peak bar hours.
People want to flee from it, run away to the suburbs, move further and further and further out, as if running away will solve the problem.
It won't. The problem always catches up, no matter how far you run.
You look around and suddenly your 1950s suburb is going down hill, the "wrong people" are starting to move in, and oh crap, it's time to leap outwards to the next ring of the peripheral exurban rim. (And hey, guess what? Scientists have just informed us that we can't afford to keep running anymore.)
The whole system is broken, just unbelievabley broken. We've created an entire underclass of unemployed people who see no prospects, no hope, no future, who have become culturally engrained to oppose anything that might resemble progress or self-improvement. Guns get tossed around like candy and fired off like firecrackers. People are just crazy out there.
And it all spirals onwards because we allow our animalistic craving for revenge, for punishment, override our human sensibility, our rational thought processes. We're locking up more people now than ever before, and can we really say it's working? Of course not. We aren't doing jack to improve these people, to give them hope, treatment, training, a path to follow once they're released, a plan, prospects, a place to go. They get back on the street and they're right back at it. What else do we actually expect them to do??
And it's killing my cities, the places that I love, the all-too-rare man-made places in America that are truly beautiful and humanizing -- not to mention the places that are our best hope for the future, the kind of places that we all need to be re-compacting ourselves into if we're ever to curb our auto-based carbon emissions so we don't wreck the entire goddamn planet and wipe ourselves out in the process. It doesn't matter if we manage to dig up any more oil or not, because the atmosphere simply can't handle our current carbon output. Technology will. not. save us. Urban, non-auto-centric living will, but don't count on our *expletives deleted* president to tell you that. Hell, no politician is ever likely to; it's not a very popular thing to say. It would actually challenge people to change their life styles.
The cities are our future -- as a nation, as a civilized society, as a species. They must be fought for, defended, with both determination and intelligence. They must be rebuilt to accomdate all our population, not just the rich or the poor or the people inbetween. I'd really hope that we might be able to save a few old buildings in the process, because so much of what we build today just isn't very nice to look at compared to what we built a hundred years ago... but in the end that's less important than heading off a global catastrophe and maybe building some cities that are actually good places to walk, work, play, and live in... without a space-consumptive, carbon-spewing automobile.
I took the law in my hands
USA Today: Cities see crime surge as threat to their revival
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Violent crime leaps in city
Time Magazine: The Next Crime Wave
From an interview with outgoing Milwaukee chief of police Nan Hagerty:
First of all, it’s important for people to realize that, as a police department, we end up with problems that are many times created because of society. You’re talking about a lack of jobs. Years ago, there were people who could get good, family-supporting jobs in factories with very little education, work for 25 years and retire with a retirement benefit. That is when Milwaukee was the safest city in the nation. All of those jobs have left.
With those lack of jobs has come an increase in the rate of poverty, a teen pregnancy rate in Milwaukee that’s just out of this world, and, of course, all of the other things that come with that.
Same issue, the Milwaukee Shepherd-Express's response to the Time story.
From Flickr.com user Boxchain: March Against Crime in New Orleans, with some very large and very angry crowds.
In my own life, my housemate's car was stolen, someone got mugged on the street right in front of our house, a co-worker's car was broken into, two more cars on the same lot were broken into this week, and my own car has been rifled through twice in the last few months (lost my MP3 player, the only time I've left anything valuable in the car in years. Damn!!) A lady was punched in the face by a random guy a few blocks from my girlfriend's Chicago apartment. Over in Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood (analogous to West Philadelphia, or to a lesser extent, Old North St. Louis), a group has started a foot patrol to help keep some eyes on the streets during peak bar hours.
People want to flee from it, run away to the suburbs, move further and further and further out, as if running away will solve the problem.
It won't. The problem always catches up, no matter how far you run.
You look around and suddenly your 1950s suburb is going down hill, the "wrong people" are starting to move in, and oh crap, it's time to leap outwards to the next ring of the peripheral exurban rim. (And hey, guess what? Scientists have just informed us that we can't afford to keep running anymore.)
The whole system is broken, just unbelievabley broken. We've created an entire underclass of unemployed people who see no prospects, no hope, no future, who have become culturally engrained to oppose anything that might resemble progress or self-improvement. Guns get tossed around like candy and fired off like firecrackers. People are just crazy out there.
And it all spirals onwards because we allow our animalistic craving for revenge, for punishment, override our human sensibility, our rational thought processes. We're locking up more people now than ever before, and can we really say it's working? Of course not. We aren't doing jack to improve these people, to give them hope, treatment, training, a path to follow once they're released, a plan, prospects, a place to go. They get back on the street and they're right back at it. What else do we actually expect them to do??
And it's killing my cities, the places that I love, the all-too-rare man-made places in America that are truly beautiful and humanizing -- not to mention the places that are our best hope for the future, the kind of places that we all need to be re-compacting ourselves into if we're ever to curb our auto-based carbon emissions so we don't wreck the entire goddamn planet and wipe ourselves out in the process. It doesn't matter if we manage to dig up any more oil or not, because the atmosphere simply can't handle our current carbon output. Technology will. not. save us. Urban, non-auto-centric living will, but don't count on our *expletives deleted* president to tell you that. Hell, no politician is ever likely to; it's not a very popular thing to say. It would actually challenge people to change their life styles.
The cities are our future -- as a nation, as a civilized society, as a species. They must be fought for, defended, with both determination and intelligence. They must be rebuilt to accomdate all our population, not just the rich or the poor or the people inbetween. I'd really hope that we might be able to save a few old buildings in the process, because so much of what we build today just isn't very nice to look at compared to what we built a hundred years ago... but in the end that's less important than heading off a global catastrophe and maybe building some cities that are actually good places to walk, work, play, and live in... without a space-consumptive, carbon-spewing automobile.
Monday, January 29, 2007
Late and unlamented
I gotta admit.... I've always been awfully hard on that poor old Modernist building that used to sit in front of the State Hospital.
Looking back at it now, I can see it was actually kind of an interesting building, in that Mid-Century Modern kind of way which has come to intrigue me over the last few years. It had a pattern of various brightly colored tiling on its spandrel panels, and a bold grouping of bay windows on the top story. Stone-clad stair towers connected to the main building by bright blue metal panel corridors. The row of square windows on the one-story hallway wing, surrounded by stone lintels, surely made a beautiful pattern seen up close.
But 12 years ago I didn't really appreciate any of these relatively subtle gestures. All I saw was a big ugly orange thing blocking the intended view of a grand old Classical building. It really was put in the wrong spot, and maybe sheathed in the wrong color of brick for its location. But those were its only real crimes.
I don't regret the restoration of State Hospital's commanding front elevation... but I wish I had more photographs of the building that once obscured it. Would it have killed me to spare one negative to properly photograph the front elevation?
Looking back at it now, I can see it was actually kind of an interesting building, in that Mid-Century Modern kind of way which has come to intrigue me over the last few years. It had a pattern of various brightly colored tiling on its spandrel panels, and a bold grouping of bay windows on the top story. Stone-clad stair towers connected to the main building by bright blue metal panel corridors. The row of square windows on the one-story hallway wing, surrounded by stone lintels, surely made a beautiful pattern seen up close.
But 12 years ago I didn't really appreciate any of these relatively subtle gestures. All I saw was a big ugly orange thing blocking the intended view of a grand old Classical building. It really was put in the wrong spot, and maybe sheathed in the wrong color of brick for its location. But those were its only real crimes.
I don't regret the restoration of State Hospital's commanding front elevation... but I wish I had more photographs of the building that once obscured it. Would it have killed me to spare one negative to properly photograph the front elevation?
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
A New Orleans survey
On the Road in New Orleans
I grew up in Shreveport, just five hours up the road from New Orleans, but it was a completely different world -- suburban, bland, vaguely Southern, with only the most distant hint of the Creole culture at the opposite end of the state. I visited New Orleans probably four or five times in high school -- mostly for swim meets, which meant I didn't see a whole lot of the city.
It wasn't till years later, on a 2002 visit, that I came to realize what a great city it was. I went back in 2004, and photographed heavily... but not in the outlying neighborhoods, which we only passed through briefly. It was a fantastic trip, a great time, a wonderful experience. There's no place like New Orleans!
Then came the hurricanes. From Milwaukee, I watched with anxiety and fury as the city was pummelled, as the levees fell, as the news media took their damn sweet time to realize and expose the magnitude of the calamity.
And to this day, I find myself dissatisfied with the mass media coverage of the disaster. What state are the neighborhoods in? Where are the photographs? How is the recovery effort going? What are the plans for the city? The first question, at least, I could answer for myself. News media, even in the Internet age, are incredibly stingy with their photographs (I'm not -- there's over 500 on this tour.) I wanted to see what was left, what was damaged, to photograph the places of the city before some of them disappear forever.
Myself and three companions headed south the day after Christmas, and spent Wednesday and Thursday roaming the city. There were some restraints, of course; while my appetite and energy for urban exploration is virtually limitless, other people's is not. I didn't get to do everything I wanted.... but the same can be said of any trip to St. Louis.
I've always seen St. Louis as a kind of younger sister to New Orleans -- both river cities, both rooted in French history and Catholic culture, both with architecturally rich cores of red brick buildings, both with old souls, both with a history of jazz and blues music. Like St. Louis, it's a place that draws me back again and again -- a surprise around every corner, always something new to see. It's a city worth fighting for, a place that should be cherished and nurtured.
Up close and afar, I've fallen in love with this old, meandering city on the river; and having seen more of it than ever before, I've come to realize how much of it I still have yet to see.
I grew up in Shreveport, just five hours up the road from New Orleans, but it was a completely different world -- suburban, bland, vaguely Southern, with only the most distant hint of the Creole culture at the opposite end of the state. I visited New Orleans probably four or five times in high school -- mostly for swim meets, which meant I didn't see a whole lot of the city.
It wasn't till years later, on a 2002 visit, that I came to realize what a great city it was. I went back in 2004, and photographed heavily... but not in the outlying neighborhoods, which we only passed through briefly. It was a fantastic trip, a great time, a wonderful experience. There's no place like New Orleans!
Then came the hurricanes. From Milwaukee, I watched with anxiety and fury as the city was pummelled, as the levees fell, as the news media took their damn sweet time to realize and expose the magnitude of the calamity.
And to this day, I find myself dissatisfied with the mass media coverage of the disaster. What state are the neighborhoods in? Where are the photographs? How is the recovery effort going? What are the plans for the city? The first question, at least, I could answer for myself. News media, even in the Internet age, are incredibly stingy with their photographs (I'm not -- there's over 500 on this tour.) I wanted to see what was left, what was damaged, to photograph the places of the city before some of them disappear forever.
Myself and three companions headed south the day after Christmas, and spent Wednesday and Thursday roaming the city. There were some restraints, of course; while my appetite and energy for urban exploration is virtually limitless, other people's is not. I didn't get to do everything I wanted.... but the same can be said of any trip to St. Louis.
I've always seen St. Louis as a kind of younger sister to New Orleans -- both river cities, both rooted in French history and Catholic culture, both with architecturally rich cores of red brick buildings, both with old souls, both with a history of jazz and blues music. Like St. Louis, it's a place that draws me back again and again -- a surprise around every corner, always something new to see. It's a city worth fighting for, a place that should be cherished and nurtured.
Up close and afar, I've fallen in love with this old, meandering city on the river; and having seen more of it than ever before, I've come to realize how much of it I still have yet to see.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Inside the Arcade Building
The ruins of a typesetting machine, which created the raised letters which pressed ink onto paper.
What will the equivalent ruins of our society be like? Will the shrouded shells of our inkjet printers be so stark and compelling when they lay as outdated ruins.
These decades-old machines are to today's printers what the steam locomotive was to the diesels that replaced it: an expensive, complex anachronism... but far more interesting to look at.
Monday, December 11, 2006
The Industrial City
It is with great satisfaction that I post The Industrial City. It's the first new tour on the site in almost two years, and brings together a lot of sites that I've been interested in for many years with some that are almost brand new to me. I first photographed the gasometers of Shrewbury in 1995; I did not discover Granite City Steel till last summer.
There was no strict criteria for inclusion; I simply documented the sites which impressed me most -- be it with scale, complexity, design, or state of decay. Many have historical value; most are many decades old. The golden age of St. Louis industry, as with most of the country, is long past.
The information on the tour is vastly incomplete, of course; I could make a small career out of digging up the full histories of these sites, the companies that built them, the persons who shaped them, their prospects for the future. I have culled what I could from my limited resources and the Web; perhaps some future trip will allow me time for more intensive research. For now, though, my greatest intent is to document -- to share my findings, to show what's there now and, in many cases, what may not be there much longer. Any additional information is a bonus.
Sometimes even my own information gathering is incomplete, limited by time, knowledge, and the frequency with which industrial sites are gated and fenced. No close approach to Cahokia is possible without passing a manned entry gate. Granite City Steel is only photographable by walking along a fairly busy two-lane highway with no sidwalks, with plant security cruising back and forth suspiciously looking at the guy with the camera. And entry to the extremely deteriorated Armour and Hunter plants is not for the faint of heart.
These sites are standouts to me; though some are among the city's most prominent landmarks, they barely scratch the surface of manufacturing and other industrial concerns throughout the city (most prominently, I have almost nothing related to the intensive barge traffic on the Mississippi River.) Much has already passed away; I barely caught the Belcher building as it came down in 2001.
So, there's a lot more I could have done, and more that will be done, but for now, I hope my readers will find some measure of illumination in seeing some of St. Louis's great industrial sites brought together in one place.
There was no strict criteria for inclusion; I simply documented the sites which impressed me most -- be it with scale, complexity, design, or state of decay. Many have historical value; most are many decades old. The golden age of St. Louis industry, as with most of the country, is long past.
The information on the tour is vastly incomplete, of course; I could make a small career out of digging up the full histories of these sites, the companies that built them, the persons who shaped them, their prospects for the future. I have culled what I could from my limited resources and the Web; perhaps some future trip will allow me time for more intensive research. For now, though, my greatest intent is to document -- to share my findings, to show what's there now and, in many cases, what may not be there much longer. Any additional information is a bonus.
Sometimes even my own information gathering is incomplete, limited by time, knowledge, and the frequency with which industrial sites are gated and fenced. No close approach to Cahokia is possible without passing a manned entry gate. Granite City Steel is only photographable by walking along a fairly busy two-lane highway with no sidwalks, with plant security cruising back and forth suspiciously looking at the guy with the camera. And entry to the extremely deteriorated Armour and Hunter plants is not for the faint of heart.
These sites are standouts to me; though some are among the city's most prominent landmarks, they barely scratch the surface of manufacturing and other industrial concerns throughout the city (most prominently, I have almost nothing related to the intensive barge traffic on the Mississippi River.) Much has already passed away; I barely caught the Belcher building as it came down in 2001.
So, there's a lot more I could have done, and more that will be done, but for now, I hope my readers will find some measure of illumination in seeing some of St. Louis's great industrial sites brought together in one place.
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Photo dumping ground
http://www.flickr.com/photos/repowers/
I've become quite the Flickr.com addict in the last few months; it's an easy-to-use forum that allows quick organization of photographs. They can be sorted into sets and sent to group "pools" on an almost infinate number of topics. The last few times I've been in St. Louis, the first thing I do upon getting home is upload a trip sampler to Flickr. It also lets me show off the best of my photography, something that the subject-contrained nature of Built St. Louis doesn't always allow.
I've been setting up albums on a variety of topics that interest me:
- Milwaukee's industrial architecture, especially the Cream City brick variety;
- Mid-Century Modernism around Milwaukee;
- Louis Sullivan's buildings across the country;
- 1950s-era signs;
- the buildings of Philadelphia architect Frank Furness;
- the Milwaukee Art Museum;
...and whatever else grabs my eye. The easy-to-use format means I can update it quickly and frequently, without the painstaking effort that goes into a normal web page.
Come by and check it out!
I've become quite the Flickr.com addict in the last few months; it's an easy-to-use forum that allows quick organization of photographs. They can be sorted into sets and sent to group "pools" on an almost infinate number of topics. The last few times I've been in St. Louis, the first thing I do upon getting home is upload a trip sampler to Flickr. It also lets me show off the best of my photography, something that the subject-contrained nature of Built St. Louis doesn't always allow.
I've been setting up albums on a variety of topics that interest me:
- Milwaukee's industrial architecture, especially the Cream City brick variety;
- Mid-Century Modernism around Milwaukee;
- Louis Sullivan's buildings across the country;
- 1950s-era signs;
- the buildings of Philadelphia architect Frank Furness;
- the Milwaukee Art Museum;
...and whatever else grabs my eye. The easy-to-use format means I can update it quickly and frequently, without the painstaking effort that goes into a normal web page.
Come by and check it out!
Monday, November 27, 2006
Long St. Louis weekend
I just had a spectacular weekend in St. Louis...
...but then, I always do.
More shots on my Flickr account -- bear in mind that's just a sampler of my weekend, just the highlights.
This weekend marks my fifth trip to St. Louis since May. With the chaos of the holiday season, the onset of winter, various personal concerns, and the need to plow through several thousand photographs and many many site updates, I probably won't be back in town till the spring.
Heh. I say that now, but the town always pull me back. I start to go a little crazy if I'm away for more than a few months.
...but then, I always do.
More shots on my Flickr account -- bear in mind that's just a sampler of my weekend, just the highlights.
This weekend marks my fifth trip to St. Louis since May. With the chaos of the holiday season, the onset of winter, various personal concerns, and the need to plow through several thousand photographs and many many site updates, I probably won't be back in town till the spring.
Heh. I say that now, but the town always pull me back. I start to go a little crazy if I'm away for more than a few months.
Monday, October 16, 2006
Wilmore Park revisited
Lately I have been sorting my old photos from south St. Louis, home of richly beautiful streets where my love for the city was first kindled over a decade ago.
It is with some amusement that I noticed how many photographs I took in Wilmore Park, which was a favorite biking destination of mine in college. I spent many sunny afternoons wandering its grassy fields and curving ponds, and apparently I found quite a bit of aesthetic interest in its trees, fields and waters.
I look at them now and my reaction is: jeez, it's just a park, isn't it? It's pretty ordinary compared to Tower Grove, Carondelet, Francis...
But it says a lot about where I was coming from. Before coming to St. Louis, I'd never been in such a lovely park, such a delightful and relaxing place. Yet by the standards of St. Louis, it's ordinary!
I wonder how many natives of the city realize what a collection of gems they have in their midst?
It is with some amusement that I noticed how many photographs I took in Wilmore Park, which was a favorite biking destination of mine in college. I spent many sunny afternoons wandering its grassy fields and curving ponds, and apparently I found quite a bit of aesthetic interest in its trees, fields and waters.
I look at them now and my reaction is: jeez, it's just a park, isn't it? It's pretty ordinary compared to Tower Grove, Carondelet, Francis...
But it says a lot about where I was coming from. Before coming to St. Louis, I'd never been in such a lovely park, such a delightful and relaxing place. Yet by the standards of St. Louis, it's ordinary!
I wonder how many natives of the city realize what a collection of gems they have in their midst?
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
On reams of photographs
I've had occasion to dig through my enormous volumes of St. Louis photographs from the last decade or so this evening, searching for a few particular negatives. In doing so, I can trace certain paths of awareness back through the years.
I visited the Page Boulevard Police Station and Homer Phillips Hospital a few times in '96-'97 (the last year I lived in St. Louis), but I never really plunged deep into the city's northern half until 1999, when I made a New Years' trip there for that purpose. Even then it was a cursory survey; not till 2001 or so did I really begin exploring the region in depth, tracking buildings across time, coming to feel a personal brand of concern over particular blocks and houses. Not till about that time did I systematically catalogue portions of downtown. Not till several years later did I begin to notice all the fantastic churches in town.
My connection to the city has changed as well. Virtually all my college friends have moved away, yet I now know enough people in the city that I never get to see them all when I'm in town. Through St. Louis I've become acutely aware of the plight facing so much Mid-Century Modernism in America. I've visited more churches in St. Louis -- probably 40 or 50 by this point -- than in all the other cities I've lived in put together.
It's an ever-growing circle of information, concern and awareness. Once you find yourself in it, it's impossible to let any of it go.
I visited the Page Boulevard Police Station and Homer Phillips Hospital a few times in '96-'97 (the last year I lived in St. Louis), but I never really plunged deep into the city's northern half until 1999, when I made a New Years' trip there for that purpose. Even then it was a cursory survey; not till 2001 or so did I really begin exploring the region in depth, tracking buildings across time, coming to feel a personal brand of concern over particular blocks and houses. Not till about that time did I systematically catalogue portions of downtown. Not till several years later did I begin to notice all the fantastic churches in town.
My connection to the city has changed as well. Virtually all my college friends have moved away, yet I now know enough people in the city that I never get to see them all when I'm in town. Through St. Louis I've become acutely aware of the plight facing so much Mid-Century Modernism in America. I've visited more churches in St. Louis -- probably 40 or 50 by this point -- than in all the other cities I've lived in put together.
It's an ever-growing circle of information, concern and awareness. Once you find yourself in it, it's impossible to let any of it go.
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
Continental and Life
It's funny... I used to photograph the Continental Building every chance I got. I have a several-inch-high stack of photos of it as it stood in abandonment in the late 1990s. I was driven by the conviction that it wouldn't always be there, that its days were numbered and the numbers were getting very small.
But now that it's renovated and brought back to life? I hardly have any shots at all. Maybe a dozen or so -- and only one or two that could really serve as a good before and after comparison.
There's a lesson in there somewhere, about not taking for granted what you see everyday...
But now that it's renovated and brought back to life? I hardly have any shots at all. Maybe a dozen or so -- and only one or two that could really serve as a good before and after comparison.
There's a lesson in there somewhere, about not taking for granted what you see everyday...
Friday, June 23, 2006
Mother of Good Counsel Church, Lisbon at 70th, Milwaukee Wisconsin. Built 1966-68.
How have I never seen this place before???
It's a beautiful massing of a curved brick screen wall, capped with limestone and studded with protruding bricks, behind which stands a diamond-shaped sanctuary with narrow bands of stained glass.
Next to it is a small parish office building, which brings together a number of fairly typical Mid-Century design elements (the vertical pier intersecting the horizontal plane, the rectangular cutouts, the limestone surrounds), but in an unusually high density -- and with a couple of elements I've never seen before.
Most flabergasting is this original doorway:
I can't believe they designed this -- let alone that it's still here 40 years later. Magnificent!!
Click the images for more photos.
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