Heard you can't find Mill Creek anywhere

I've been reading a remarkable document called Mill Creek Valley: A Soul of Saint Louis. It gives a thorough history of the last days of the Mill Creek Valley area, a large, entirely black neighborhood near Midtown that was completely destroyed beginning around 1959 in the name of urban renewal. Today it is home to SLU's sport fields and the corporate campus of AG Edwards.

It's not really a book; there's no publisher, and apparently it grew out of the author's Masters thesis. It has a homespun aura to it. Some typos remain, as does a certain redundancy in format and occasional lapse of academic rigor. But it makes its case with devastating systematicness, in plain language that's easily grasped. The author interviewed over a dozen former residents of the neighborhood (no mean feat considering the community was destroyed 50 years ago), and plumbed dozens of books, articles, and documents in the course of his research.

The fundamental question the document asks is: what is poverty? Did the government really have the right to look at this neighborhood, declare it impoverished, and decide that destroying it was the best thing to do?

Mill Creek Valley was run down. The houses were old, and they were often overcrowded with residents. Many didn't have indoor plumbing, and they needed maintenance and upkeep.

What the neighborhood did have, however, was a powerful social network and an incredibly rich array of stores, restaurants, and other enterprises: social capital. The author lists the businesses that were located on one city block, and it's astonishing: literally over a hundred businesses on one city block. Grocers, hairdressers, dry goods, restaurants, the list goes on and on. All of life's needs could be met by a short walk. The only possible modern-day comparison *might* be some areas of New York City.

Today, the same block contains one huge AG Edwards building, and some parking lots. Nobody lives there. Nobody shops there. Nobody but AG Edwards employees eat there, and certainly nobody goes there for recreation. It's a monoculture -- the exact opposite of what a functioning city must be.

Rather than funneling money into repairing and upgrading the physical apparatus of the neighborhood, the powers-that-were decided it must be obliterated (there's a tragically hilarious declaration in the original 1940s study that one of the reasons the neighborhood is so awful and blighted and obsolete is that the buildings are more than 50 years old.) And in doing so, they forced thousands of black residents into true poverty. They pushed the deterioration elsewhere, rather than relieving it; and they destroyed a functioning neighborhood.

Mill Creek Valley was the primary neighborhood that blacks were shunted into as they entered the city in the migration of the 1940s and 1950s. When it was destroyed, they were relocated to housing projects like Pruitt-Igoe, or else fanned out across the city, taking up residence in neighborhoods across the city as wealthy whites moved out. Their social networks disintegrated. Businesses lost their customer base. The residents moved into places that were designed for wealthier residents. You drive down the 5000 block of Page Boulevard, and you can see it: it's solid free-standing houses. No stores, no businesses. These were suburbs; they were places were made for people who owned cars, had servants, or at least had access to a good streetcar system. There's no way to get the resources one needed to live. When they were driven to these places, the real impoverishment began.

The author further makes the case that "slums" are in reality nothing more than the free market's provision of a necessary good: affordable housing for low-income citizens. In this, they are neither good nor bad; it is the individual circumstances of each particular neighborhood that determine whether they serve their residents well. Mill Creek Valley, with its rich array of businesses, schools, churches, and social webs, served its residents exceedingly well -- perhaps to a degree unknown to us today.

The document is a powerful case against the governmental power of eminent domain, which is used to force massive ("traumatic" might be a better word) change on an area, as opposed to the more gentle impetus of incremental change. As the author puts it, massive change carves out the accumulated, organic, nearly limitless wisdom of the thousands of people who make up the city, and replaces it with the very finite knowledge of a handful of planners and officials. The author further paints with painful detail the crushing blow of being forcibly torn from one's neighborhood and having an entire way of life destroyed.

Compounding the tragedy is the utter powerlessness of the black residents to resist these changes that were forced on them by a white power elite. Having grown up in the South, I have often heard white people comment on how blacks surely have nothing to be outraged about by this point, as slavery ended well over a century ago, and hey, hasn't everything been hunky-dory since then? Yet this kind of civic violence has occurred in living memory, and who's to say it couldn't happen again?

The book doesn't touch on it, but another level of tragedy is this: if Mill Creek Valley were standing today, it would be gentrified as anything you've ever seen. Property there would be the most valuable in the city -- more than Soulard, more than downtown. It would be the city's own French Quarter (much as the Arch grounds might be if they hadn't also been bulldozed flat.) And it would solve one of downtown's most looming problems, which is its total disconnect from the city's residential neighborhoods. Instead, we have the monolithic, lifeless economic engines of SLU and AG Edwards -- gaping voids in the city's fabric.

Mill Creek Valley: A Soul of Saint Louis can be ordered directly from the author at this web site. It's also for sale at area book stores; I got my copy at Left Bank Books in the Central West End.

Making It Expensive in the Lower 9th

In an amazing convergence of fame, money and humanitarianism, Brad Pitt is sponsoring a rebuilding project in New Orleans' devastated Lower 9th Ward. The northern half of the Lower 9th was directly in the path of a break in the Industrial Canal, with many houses being crushed by an errant barge that drifted through the breach. 2 years after the hurricanes, most of the house remains have been removed, but there's virtually no rebuilding going on.



Pitt's project is named Make It Right 9, and there's a good writeup about it at the Poverty News Blog. As part of the project, a range of architecture firms were invited in to create prototype house designs for the neighborhood.

I had the chance to view the house designs this week. I applaud the intent behind the undertaking, but some of the designs really made me wonder what the architects were thinking.



Many of the houses feature crazily angled walls and roofs, bizarrely bent forms that would require a master carpenter to build (or a computerized factory.) One looks like it was picked up by a flood and smashed in the middle, its back broken as though a bus (or a barge) had landed on it -- ho ho, oh, ironic commentary! What wit! If I were a survivor of the post-Katrina catastrophe, I think I'd feel insulted.



Several of the designs, however, seemed to show true interest in economy (ie, ease and speed of construction, the use of common and widely available methods and materials, not to mention use of common design elements that have made New Orleans buildings survivable for a century or more), which is what's truly needed to bring back an entire neighborhood. I particularly liked the one that featured a house whose walls are largely made of premanufactured modular storage cabinets, with a straightforward roof dropped on top. Simple to design, easy to erect in the field.

The green features are also of interest, though I wonder what the startup costs vs. long term savings are.



Ultimately, the problem is not a lack of design concepts. You can wander New Orleans and find a dozen or so tried and true house designs that have weathered a hundred years of the city's notorious heat and humidity and torrential rains. The problem is that hundreds or thousands of new houses are needed, right now. This means they have to be done quickly and affordably.

So again, I wonder -- what were some of the architects thinking? Was their intent to construct houses on a tight budget as a reproducible precedent, or merely to show off their bleeding-edge designs capabilities? Is theirs a humanitarian effort, or just jumping on a chance to jerk off, to experiment at the possible expense of the poor?

The full roster of designs can be seen here. Most of the projects featured descriptive text on their display boards, but sadly that text is not reproduced on the web site.

Notes from New Orleans

So all that snow that fell Friday and Saturday? Sorry, sorry, that was me. I came through town with my bicycle in tow, thinking I might get out and do a little bit of riding. Ha! I still had a pretty great weekend in St. Louis, though. Photos to come in January!

The weather in New Orleans has been much kinder, fortunately, and I just finished the first of several days riding around town. A few thoughts:

New Orleans' flat topography and warm climate may make for easy bike travel, but otherwise the city is one of the least bike-friendly places I've been. There are no bike lanes to be found in the Garden District, French Quarter, or downtown. The streets are narrow, pinching bikers between racing traffic and parked cars. Despite it being a pleasant 65 degrees or so, I saw almost nobody biking today. It's a bit inexplicable considering how accommodating parts of the city are for the pedestrian.

Even disregarding the memory of what happened there in September 2005, the Superbowl and its environs are a horrible and inhuman place. The building itself is a mammoth superblock, with low-rise wings and parking garages taking up a vast area of downtown. Surrounding half of it are Interstate overpasses, cutting off roads and funnelling westbound traffic from downtown onto a limited number of routes. It's a classic example of the awful "urban" planning of the 1960s, all plopped down on the edge of what is otherwise a delightful downtown. The building itself, seen from ground level, looks like an arena of doom. I can't imagine how it must have looked to the poor souls who dragged themselves there on foot across a flooded city, with no idea what they might find within.

The Garden District and the surrounding neighborhoods are astonishing in their endless delight and vast architectural variety. And the neighborhoods just to the north are abuzz with construction and rebuilding activity.

Tomorrow's travels: Charity Hospital, Canal Street north of downtown, Marigny, Bywater, and more!

You too can fly

I would just like to reiterate to everyone out there what an astonishing tool Maps.Live.com is, especially the Bird's Eye View. Some examples:

- The exact point where the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers merge.

- US Steel's Granite City works.

- Metro East Industries' locomotive salvage works at Alorton

- Cahokia Power Plant

- Just across the river, the ruins of the minesweeper vessel Inaugural.

- Ruined neighborhood in Wellston, now demolished.

- Tidy streets by O'Fallon Park in north city.

The combination of birds-eye and map/satellite hybrid lets you soar over the land like a god, peering into the hidden worlds of industry and abandonment, granting you an overreaching vision of the lay of the land. In the case of recent demolitions, it grants the user a window into the recent past, as the photographs date from around early 2006. And it has let me identify the exact locations of photographs that I took with only the barest idea of where I was.

Sadly, a huge swath of western St. Louis is missing from the Birds Eye feature -- basically anything west of Midtown and south of University City.

On Washington Avenue, a remarkable transformation

St. Louis has a long and not-so-proud tradition of bad Modern architecture.



Bad Modernism is so pervasive, in fact, that I blame St. Louis for making me hate Modernism for many years. It took a trip to Europe, and the roadside enthusiasm of several friends and acquaintances, to make me change my attitude.

And even after re-evaluation, much of St. Louis's more prominent Modernism doesn't hold up. Washington University has so much bad Modernism (Busch Labs, Monsanto, Mudd Hall, Compton Hall) that it's no wonder they've opted to scrap the idea entirely. It's enough to drive a body to Postmodernism.

What a shock it was, then, to drive past the old Days Inn at Washington and Tucker.



From a kitschy bit of weak 60s roadside Modern, an elegant and classy building has emerged... and with only a minimal bit of aesthetic tweaking. The basic form is still there, the angled window panels that distinctly dated it to the 1960s. But now, with a few simple wise choices in materials, the once-tired building steps into synch with its many renovated neighbors, while still not hiding its heritage. The ground floor is opened up a bit with partial glass facades, and a garage entrance on Washington has been eliminated, making a more pedestrian-friendly environment at the sidewalk.

The renovated building looks fantastic. Kudos to the owners for not tearing it down!

Chicago Job Search

I'm currently seeking architectural/preservation employment in Chicago. If you know of firms that are hiring, or have contacts in the Chicago architecture/preservation sphere, I'd be grateful to hear from you.

More details here.

The Changing Face of the South 40

If you're a 1990s Wash U alum like myself, there's growing odds that one of the dorms you lived in no longer exists.

The two high rise towers, Shepley and Elliot, were demolished in the late 1990s. More recently, low-rise dorms Koenig and Liggett were torn down in 2005, having been replaced by a new building. The other four low-rise dorms (Lee, Umrath, Beaumont and Rubelmann) are likewise slated for replacement, as is Wohl Student Center.



Washington University's old dorms are a somewhat chintzy variant of Modernism, with cheap orange brick in a harsh contrast with the white-painted concrete. Individually, there's not too much that's special about them. The intended elegance of their open, glassy ground floors, with the upper floors floating above on arcades of white columns, gets a bit lost when you're up close, with the ground floor rooms largely empty and unused. Meanwhile, the upper floors lack any sort of communal space, aside from the shared bathrooms.

But in the time I knew them, the dorms were an unaltered example of 1950s planning, completed by 1965 and not touched for over three decades. They were a rare example of "towers in the garden" that actually worked. Much of that planning has been reworked with a contemporary sensibility, and while the result are certainly fine, it's a little sad to see the purity of the original plan diluted, faults and all.



The old low rises are being replaced because they can't be effectively remodeled to meet the University's standards for room configuration and bathrooms, in part because of window placement. The rigidly marching rows of windows certainly don't lend themselves to a flexible arrangement.

Like the grounds, I'm sure the new dorms are nice. In fact, testifying from spending my senior year in the early 1990s Wydown House (now Mudd House), they're likely rather posh. I remember wondering why we needed so much space in our suite; I felt a bit guilty living in such luxury.

By my senior year, I'd kind of adopted the idea that you go through some rough times in college: you scrimp and save a bit, struggle to make ends meet, curtail your spending, learn to live on the cheap. You don't expect luxury on campus or off. If you live off-campus, you're in some run-down old apartment building. You certainly don't have money to throw around. That's what college is, right? That's just a standard rite of passage, isn't it?

Not anymore, apparently, and maybe not even in my own time. I was always suprised that some of my classmates had cars in college -- how on Earth do they afford that? I recall my Junior year as I was moving into Shepley, some girl came into her room and marched out 30 seconds later, declaring that she couldn't possibly live there; I never saw her again.

The notion that the old South 40 dorms were somehow inadequate, with their shared bathrooms and worn finishes and relatively small size, never once crossed my mind. That was what we got, and you learn to deal with what you've got, and at any rate it certainly seemed good enough to me. It's not a hotel; it's college!

But college today is more and more shaped to be a luxurious commodity, no different than your folks' home out in Town & Country. The idea of "hard knocks" doesn't sell; "safe, pretty and comfortable" does. Meanwhile, we gripe when the price of tuition keeps going up. Tearing down buildings and putting up replacements don't come cheap, y'know.



There's been no mention of plans to replace the 6 1950s suite buildings (Rutledge, Hurd, etc.) But I wouldn't be surprised if it comes down the line eventually. That would be especially sad -- the buildings are less interesting, but the suite arrangement is especially nice, with sunnily lit common rooms and pleasant balconies.

The Case of the Vanishing Links

In reworking the East St. Louis tour last week, I was disappointed to find that ESLARP had revamped its web site... and in doing so, removed a large and valuable archive of information and photographs, much of it primary sources.

I don't know the reasoning behind the purge, but I can speculate on reasons: the information no longer fit the school's "mission". It was "old" or "outdated". It gave a backwards-looking impression. It consumed valuable server space. An individual student or faculty member left and their server space was deleted.

I hope none of them are right; they're all pretty bad reasons.

But this is why I often hesitate to link to off-site information -- it's so prone to vanishing, whether handled by a corporation, institution, or individual. It leaves me wondering years down the road where I got certain information, and if it's correct at all; I find myself more and more prone to saving copies of entire pages and sites to my hard drive so I can at least re-check my sources. Sometimes it seems that in the rough-and-tumble of the web, the only person you can really rely on is yourself.

The hits just keep on comin'

Anyone concerned with the future of St. Louis's urban environment should be reading Steve Patterson's Urban Review StL blog. But in particular, this post is a devastating compendium of the innumerable mistakes made by those who have built the city over the last ten years.

Does silence equal sinister?

I have recently had an interesting and informative conversation by email with a building owner who was rather distraught by my incorrect posting that his building was being torn down without a thought, as the owners have apparently labored and spent in vain to repair it over the years. After several back and forths, we got the situation settled, and I've updated my pages accordingly.

It points out one of those ways that business has tended not to keep up with the times, however: owners of landmark buildings would be well advised to be more public with their intentions for their properties.

With the rise of the Internet in general, and blogging in particular, the public now has a practically unlimited voice. This is generally a good thing; the more public input can be brought to light, the more likely that plans for cities and buildings can be made humane, accomodating, and beautiful.

But there is a danger, as well. It is indeed possible for well-intentioned persons -- myself included -- to rush to print with incomplete or inacurate information. I only know what I know, and if the people who know the most -- the developers themselves -- remain silent, it's hard to do anything but speculate.

And in St. Louis, speculation is often fueled by pessimism. Too often, silence has been the tool of developers and businessmen who know their plans will meet with harsh criticism, or who simply don't care about public opinion. When the survival of our historic architecture and urban environments are at stake, that sort of intractability should be met and fought at every turn.

If that silence leads to incorrect assumptions, it is up to the building owners to correct it -- not by attacking outspoken members of the public, but by put ting out accurate information. There's very little reason not to do so -- blogging is easy, fast, and free. A few simple posts, a few short but accurate paragraphs, can do wonders for a building owner's street cred.

Too often, I suspect, this doesn't happen because businesses are held back by the need for bland corporate perfection: nothing can be said till it's been vetted a hundred times, watered down by meaningless business buzzwords, and reduced to saying virtually nothing so that nobody will have any expectations.

But those days are done. If the "exciting new development opportunity" will mean tearing down a historic building, someone's going to call you out for it, even if you don't mention it in your press release. There's no way around it, and rather than continue an adversarial relationship with the public whose domain is affected by developers' decisions, it's high time those developers became more proactive about announcing their intentions, if not their exact plans.

Nobody expects to know every detail, nor to "save every building" -- witness the recently deceased Switzer Building, whose demise was unfortuate, yet widely accepted as unavoidable after the damage it sustained. If the public knows a building owner is making a good-faith effort to save a building, they might be a lot more accepting when it doesn't happen in the end. And if the public is met by silence, what reason do they have to think that good faith exists at all?

Church fire

St. Alphonsus Liguori, aka the Rock, was damaged in a fire Thursday evening. The fire was primarily confined to the roof, but water damage from battling the blaze likely caused more widespread damage to the interior.

Ecology of Absence has links to more coverage.

SLU's Long, Slow Mistake

The photo below shows the physical form of an ordinary but proper urban street:



This is Locust Street, looking east in Midtown. It's lined with buildings. They're built out to the sidewalk. They stand tightly packed together, and they're multi-story. When buildings like these are put to proper use, these design aspects provide a number of benefits including density, the resultant diversity of businesses, functions and persons within the neighborhood, and the pleasing aesthetic of being in a gently enclosing room.

The street has a number of other notable elements, as well. A line of street trees helps soften the feeling of the place. The buildings are mostly old; some have been renovated, while others stand empty -- but none of these are inherently necessary to such a streetscape. It could also be achieved with newer buildings, in places where gaps in the street wall have appeared.

Speaking of which....



Turn a mere 90 degrees to the left, and you'll see the absolute opposite of the previous photo: a streetscape that has been utterly decimated by demolition and parking lots. It's a visual and functional wasteland, a forbidding and uninviting place to be, acres of land that serve only one narrow and extremely limited purpose.

The rubble at left is the remnants of the old livery building -- the latest victim of Saint Louis University's ongoing efforts to flatten anything that doesn't directly serve them. SLU's ambitions don't end here; they extend across the street to include two of the buildings that comprise the integrated and intact streetscape along Locust:



The desire to flatten these buildings, the urge to transform the city from the first photograph into the second, is utterly incomprehensible to me. Do they really think that the second photo is what's going to attract students? How many prospective students have been turned off from attending SLU by the de-urbanized wasteland that it has created around it?

SLU needs to wake up and realize that they are a city campus in an urban environment, and that -- far from being an evil to be fought against -- this is in fact one of their greatest potential strengths. Midtown and St. Louis at large will continue to suffer so long as Saint Louis University continues to act as though tearing down enough buildings will put them in the countryside. It never will -- it will only create more of the desolation seen above.

Deli St. Louis

Fresh back from a short weekend in St. Louis, and I just gotta ask those of you living there full-time:

Where the hell are the delis in this town?!

Saturday AND Sunday, I'm hankering for a good cold cut sandwich. I find Mom's Deli on Saturday, still open after all these years, and all's well. This afternoon I'm up around Benton Park, so I swing by Blues City Deli - CLOSED!! Aug! What's a guy supposed to do? I cast my mind all over Soulard and downtown, trying to remember any other place that'd serve me a decent turkey sandwich on a Sunday.

I finally wound up at City Grocers, and snagged a tasty roast beef that I devoured while driving out of town. So my needs were met... but it sure seems like there's a shortage of delis in St. Louis.

Or else I just don't know where they are, which is quite likely...

Brick Rustlers in Action

Photos from the 1900 block of Montgomery Avenue, just east of St. Louis Place Park:



I took these shots yesterday -- about 5pm on a Sunday afternoon. That's when most legitimate contracting work goes on, right?



The guy in white was hacking his way back to front across the side wall. Obviously, as old brick walls are load-bearing, this would eventually cause a huge portion of the wall above to collapse. Then the guys just have to walk up and pick up the bricks.... assuming nobody is killed when the wall falls down.

But what about the house? The beautiful, historic, till-recently-partially-occupied house?...



Fuck the house, apparently.



When I came back for another pass a few minutes later, some of them were driving away. I wasn't quite quick enough to get a good shot of their truck as they passed; the license plate isn't quite legible. Damn. On the side, it said something along the lines of "E J Snow Removal" or "Easy Job Snow Removal".



I have to wonder who's paying these guys, who commissioned them to start attacking the last survivors of this block.... and if there's any relation to the ongoing encroachment of Blairmont, an organization that would probably be very happy to see many blocks swept clean of their historic houses. Surprise surprise, that's exactly what's happening.

A Fun Toy

From local.live.com, bird's-eye views of most of the St. Louis area:

Cahokia Power Plant, for a starting point.

The level of detail is incredible. And since the photos are all taken on an angle, buildings and landmarks are easily identifiable. It's a phenomenal resource, and a fascinating new way to look at familiar places.

The photos appear to date from about 2005.