Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
St. Louis is a city enthralled by urban planning: the 2005 Strategic Land Use Plan, the Gateway Mall Project, the Arch grounds overhaul. Yet the last time St. Louis officially adopted a comprehensive plan was more than six decades ago, when engineer Harland Bartholomew created one in 1947.
At the time, Bartholomew—the nation’s first full-time urban planner—made a range of recommendations. He suggested swaths of “obsolete” land be “cleared and reconstructed,” plotted a detailed map of bus and streetcar lines, and anticipated the city’s population would grow to 900,000 by 1970. Instead, the clearing of Mill Creek Valley in the late ’50s displaced thousands, St. Louis’ last streetcar ceased operation in 1966, and the city’s population began a steep decline, from nearly 857,000 in 1950 to about 319,000 by 2010. The metro area as a whole, however, grew to 2.8 million by 2009—though recent census figures indicate the population in St. Louis city and county is declining. (For more on that matter, see this column.)
When Bartholomew died in 1989, at the age of 100, The New York Times labeled him the nation’s “dean of city planners.” Some called him a visionary, given his advocacy for widening roads during the age of the automobile. Others, like local urban-planning expert Steve Patterson, believe his suburbia-fueled vision was shortsighted.
In the decades since Bartholomew’s death, much has changed in St. Louis. This month’s cover story highlights some of that transformation—sweeping and gradual, commercial and residential—in more than 20 neighborhoods. You can imagine, while flipping through these pages, how frustrated Bartholomew would have been at the losses—and how jubilant he would have felt about all of the neighborhoods and business districts that have coalesced and are thriving.
While we’re on the subject of urban planning, we should mention one other Midwesterner: Daniel Burnham. In 1909, a few years before Bartholomew moved to St. Louis, Burnham published his Plan of Chicago, more commonly known as “The Burnham Plan.” The plan guided civic leaders for decades to come. In 2009, Chicago celebrated the plan’s centennial with programs and exhibits that, in turn, inspired additional projects.
Maybe it’s time for St. Louis to draft a new set of blueprints, wiser than Bartholomew’s but just as comprehensive, for our future. “Make no little plans,” Burnham warned. “They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.”
