Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat
St. Louis’ downtown was once pronounced the dullest in the nation. Now, thanks to Missouri’s piggybacking of state and federal historic restoration tax credits, the city has attracted $4.5 billion in investment, financing 503 projects—a building boom unlike any in our lifetime. Neighborhoods long abandoned riff on the happy ostinato of rehabbers at work, residents at play. Registers ka-ching sales in storefront retail districts left for dead decades ago. Tax rolls are growing, civic leaders are crowing ... so what’s not to like?
Plenty, according to the foot soldiers in a growing grassroots movement of citizens committed to sensitive planned development and historic preservation. Deeply engaged in city-building years before it became trendy, they worry that in our headlong rush to achieve what could become one of the great urban-revival tales of our time, we risk losing what makes our city unique: its treasure trove of 100,000 architecturally distinct houses and other structures built before 1939.
The Roundtable:
Michael Allen, researcher, Landmarks Association of St. Louis researcher
Marti Frumhoff, real-estate agent and founder of the Rehabbers Club
Joseph Heathcott, assistant professor of American studies at Saint Louis University
Steve Patterson, real-estate agent and editor of UrbanReviewSTL
St. Louis Magazine: Why should the thousands who left the city decades ago care what happens to its old buildings?
Frumhoff: The architecture, the cultural amenities—everything that identifies us as “St. Louis” is in the city. The city is a destination spot. Ballwin is not.
Patterson: The region needs a strong core to attract employers, employees and tourists—and to compete economically.
Heathcott: It makes a lot more sense to invest where there’s already been 100 years of major investment in infrastructure that you can build on. It costs incredible amounts of money when you extend infrastructure to places where there is none whatsoever. It’s vastly inefficient.
SLM: Missouri’s historic-rehabilitation tax-credit program—one of the most successful in the country—has proven that historic preservation can spur economic development, yet we keep seeing great old structures go down. Why?
Patterson: I don’t consider myself a strict preservationist. I don’t want to preserve Hyde Park; I want to revitalize Hyde Park. You don’t have to tear things down to do that. But we still have the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s mentality of “Oh, in order to revitalize the city, we’ve got to put more parking everywhere”—and buildings go down for cars. Other cities are putting maximums on parking. They’re not anti-cars—they’re just pro-people.
Heathcott: We should want a parking problem in St. Louis! That would be the best thing that could happen to our city—a parking problem.
Frumhoff: Something else happens here, as many of us who tried to save the Century Building found. We put hundreds of thousands of dollars into plans and then ignore them when someone comes along with a whole lot of money to throw around. So much of what happens here has nothing to do with common sense. It’s also a matter of who’s connected to whom. Every city wrestles with the power of old money, but here it exercises more power.
Patterson: If the political “machine” here would allow for good street grids and high-density urbanity, I wouldn’t have any problem with it—but what they’re doing is encouraging suburban-level development.
Heathcott: The planning office has never had any teeth. Its function is purely advisory. We are at a point where our government has effectively been taken over by people who see through the lens of real estate. Historic preservation is supported as long as it pays the bills and allows real estate to go forward—but the moment preservation stands in the way of a real-estate deal going down, forget it.
Allen: The aldermanic system is very good for developers, because in effect it creates 28 competing cities, and the aldermen are like little mayors. They can veto legislation; they can throw things out the window. Case in point: the proposed McDonald’s on South Grand. The redevelopment ordinance says you can’t get tax abatement for new buildings with drive-through lanes—but “aldermanic courtesy” eventually allowed certain interested parties to go back and rewrite the ordinance to make an exception for that location. [The deal in question fell through.]
Patterson: Historic preservation is trendy for some and not for others. It’s fine for Lafayette Square but not the North Side. It’s OK to level North City.
Frumhoff: We have aldermen actually getting in the way of progress. Instead of enabling people who want to come in and do something right, they’ll team up with a developer, and beautiful buildings will come down for new construction.
Heathcott: New design is severely hampered, too, by this lack of vision.
Patterson: The 1947 codes encourage bad design. I can think of a few developers who do a great job when they come into an old building and make new lofts or offices inside it—but when they start with an empty site and try to put in something new, they don’t know what they’re doing. At the Sullivan Place development, in the 5th Ward, the design and the materials aren’t so objectionable, but the site plan is awful. They cut off nearly two city blocks and leveled the site—and then named it after the street they closed.
Heathcott: And yet there are some good examples of new construction and design here. The Six North Apartments set the first multiunit universal design precedent in the region. Six North is scaled superbly for its urban site, with shallow setbacks, at-grade entrance and an L-shaped plan that defines and anchors the corner. Its contemporary design respects—but doesn’t try to replicate—St. Louis vernacular styles, particularly the city’s rich industrial architecture. Then there’s the South African architect Jo Noero, whose infill housing on Bohemian Hill used a new design idiom that was in conversation with the old structures of Soulard. He’s since returned to Africa [and one developer wants to raze part of the area], but the Red Brick Community Land Trust and YEHS [Youth, Education and Health in Soulard] are collaborating on a plan to extend Noero’s designs to new affordable housing.
Allen: But these are only isolated examples of good design practice. And anyway, for the kind of thing Jo Noero is doing, you’ve got to get a variance, an exception—and that means going through your alderman and nurturing the “right” relationships.
SLM: St. Louis has spent a lot of money on outside consultants, but whatever their recommendations, few strike sparks. Why?
Heathcott: Maybe it’s their tendency to bring in imported notions of what makes a great city. St. Louis has got to develop its own sense of greatness … People here seem to gravitate to extremes: They either have no concept of our history or they’re besotted with our history. This notion that the World’s Fair was our great moment is pathetic. I’d like to shift the “greatest moment” from the World’s Fair to the 1923 bond issue. The biggest bond issue in the history of St. Louis, it paid for an incredible amount of infrastructure—streets, viaducts, sewers, bridges we still have today. Most of the fair’s remnants have disappeared.
Patterson: People who want to tear buildings down do a very successful job of painting preservationists as people stuck back in the early 20th century, while they are all about “progress.” They’re controlling the language, using it to clear advantage—and winning.
Frumhoff: Remember when the city planned to demolish Soulard? Because it was abandoned, looking war-torn, it was proclaimed “obsolete.” Where would the future value of housing be in Soulard if they’d done reconstruction there? It wouldn’t be the destination spot it is now. Hyde Park could be a destination spot if certain people got out of the way. Those are
economic realities.
Heathcott: I would argue that by 1965 it was a better idea to have the Arch downtown than to have those old riverfront buildings. Some will disagree with me, but the Arch is one of the most recognizable symbols in the country, the world. It’s us, and nothing else could have done that for the city.
Patterson: Hold on. Had they not cleared those 40 city blocks in 1940 for the Arch, and had we instead invested that money in revitalizing that area, could that area not have become a symbol of St. Louis? New Orleans is known for its French Quarter—not a huge symbol but a collection of storefronts, buildings and streets.
Heathcott: There are many conglomerations of interesting buildings like that around the world, but there is nothing like the Arch.
SLM: What do we need besides the Arch?
Allen: What seems lacking downtown is growth in jobs. Anheuser-Busch just moved about 600 jobs from downtown to Sunset Hills. That’s a huge move, but it has been underreported. Downtown’s strength in the past has faltered because it was too exclusively tied to office and warehouse uses without the residential population needed to keep small businesses alive and the streets vibrant. What could happen in the future is the reverse tilt, which would make downtown as fragile as it was before the housing boom started.
Patterson: The problem in St. Louis is not lack of vision. There are plenty of people here—grassroots types and intelligent developers like the Gills [Amrit and Amy], the McGowans and Craig Heller—who have a vision beyond the scope of their own projects. It’s the political and big-business leaders who, whether out of ignorance or certain interests, continue to make stupid mistakes that hurt not just the city but the entire region. Allowing any development for the sake of development has disastrous long-term results.
Heathcott: We need good policies—arts and culture policies, gay-friendly policies, affordable-housing policies, policies that bridge racial divides in neighborhoods. One thing the city could do is create a live-work ordinance for development. Right off the bat you would create a new class of housing. And protect the community garden network! When aldermen see community gardens as assets rather than lots that could be turned into tax-producing houses, we’ll have achieved something significant.
Patterson: Look at zoning. If someone wants to build a strip mall in the city, set back from the street with parking, they can do that—but if they want to build storefronts, right up to the street, with multiple living units above, they’re going to have a hard time. Ironically, we can’t build what we have now. But our zoning laws work for the mayor and the aldermen; they have no incentive to change them.
Frumhoff: They did get out of the way and support a green rehabbing project up near the old Hyde Park that’s totally out of the box. In that case, City Hall made the decision.
Heathcott: That’s why the community gardens are so important—because the moment you try to develop those lots, the city’s going to freak out. It can’t be just allowing experiments like that to happen under the radar; it has to be protecting experiments and projects that make the city a better place to live.
