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Photograph by Scott Rovak
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Image of the St. Louis Arch
Like the boy who cried wolf, downtown boosters have exhausted us all with their endless optimism, their glorious pronouncements, their unrealized hopes.
But this time, something is different. Sleek new restaurants are drawing crowds, the residential loft market is booming and plans are under way to finally, finally, do something to integrate the Arch grounds with downtown proper.
Dare we believe?
St. Louis isn’t alone. With malls, cars and highways leaching populations out of downtowns and into the greener pastures of suburbia, almost every city core in the country has experienced some level of decline. Yet, somehow, we became a poster child for the epidemic.
“Over the years, we have disinvested in our downtowns and massively subsidized suburban sprawl,” says Chris Leinberger, professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan and a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It’s not some nefarious conspiracy; it’s been a public policy. This is something we all wanted.”
Perhaps St. Louisans took to the suburban life with extra enthusiasm. Maybe our city center was especially vulnerable. Whatever the reason, suburban sprawl and subsequent downtown decay in St. Louis were worse than in most cities. In a few decades, St. Louis transformed from a vital turn-of the-century trendsetter into a dangerous and depressing collection of abandoned buildings and disreputable characters. And need we mention the whole Escape from New York embarrassment?
Ironically, city leaders were well aware of what was happening. As early as the 1920s, they enacted plans to save the urban core. Alas, though the road was paved with good intentions, the destination was the same.
“The fascinating thing about St. Louis was that they were worried about this change for decades—they were really anxious that they were losing their upper middle class,” says Alexander von Hoffman, senior fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. “You can look at the history of St. Louis as one attempt after another. They did not succeed. Among major cities, St. Louis has the lowest proportion of downtown residents in relation to the metro area.”
“St. Louis has a long history of tripping over its own feet,” says Eric Sandweiss, associate professor of history at Indiana University, author of St. Louis: The Evolution of an Urban Landscape and a former director of research at the Missouri Historical Society. “All cities change and have to adapt, and St. Louis has been trying to do that for a century or more.”
Unfortunately, in case after case, St. Louis’ attempts to adapt had the opposite result.
After decades of failed attempts to resuscitate the region (timeline below), in 1996 the International Downtown Association pronounced St. Louis’ downtown “near disaster.”
We may have found the formula, though, and if the plan championed by the city and groups like the Downtown St. Louis Partnership is realized, St. Louis may be on the road back. During a briefing in advance of the 2008 IDA conference to be held here, the organization’s president, David Feehan, praised the city for the progress it has made. On a walking tour of the downtown area, he was amazed by what he saw.
“The last time I was in St. Louis was four to five years ago,” Feehan says. “While I saw some glimmers of hope then, I was absolutely stunned with what I saw this most recent visit. It seemed like around every corner there was another building being converted to lofts. I saw street retail that I thought was absolutely terrific. We ate in a couple of restaurants and walked by a couple more that are new since I was there last, and they were remarkably good and seemed to be busy. I went from being hopeful about our conference in 2008 to being very confident that we’re going to have a great conference and that the audience, which will be filled with people skeptical about downtowns, are going to see much to be impressed with.”
Locals are more cautiously optimistic. “We’re making serious progress,” says Richard Ward, CEO of Development Strategies, a St. Louis based economic and community-development consulting firm. “We have to make sure we’re diligent and make sure things don’t backslide,” says Jim Cloar, president and CEO of the Downtown St. Louis Partnership. New businesses will be watched with anticipation until they survive beyond the crucial first few years. And with the residential market doing well, downtown advocates are turning their attention to the all-important office market, which hasn’t seen growth in years.
Much remains to be done. A plan to revitalize the riverfront and integrate it into the fabric of downtown is in the early stages, and the city plans to convert some open space into parks and other user-friendly areas.
But downtown is on its way back. Gone is the air of desolation, the feeling of futility, the aura of doom.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in downtown St. Louis,” Ward says. “It’s a new era.”
St. Louis’ Saving Grace
In the 1950s and ’60s, when other cities were knocking down historic buildings and erecting shiny new structures, St. Louis, with a few notable exceptions, let the lust for modernity pass it by, allowing its historic edifices to languish, grow dusty and deteriorate. It wasn’t a calculated move, but it was the best thing St. Louis could have done for its future.
“Poverty preserves,” says Chris Leinberger of the University of Michigan and the Brookings Institution. “As long as you keep a decent roof on a building, you can preserve a lot of historic character that gives downtowns a major asset—it evokes memory of what it used to be, and that memory is so important. St. Louis was one of the wealthiest cities in the country years ago. Detroit was even wealthier, but they’ve ripped out a lot of it. St. Louis didn’t do that.”
“We would have killed for the architectural character in Denver that we have here in St. Louis. It’s one of a kind,” says Dick Fleming, president and CEO of the St. Louis Regional Chamber and Growth Association. Before moving to St. Louis in 1994, he was instrumental in Denver’s downtown revitalization. Here, he says, “It was painful to have so much vacant space, but the good news is, it was there when the market finally kicked in. Most cities don’t have that, essentially preserved over quite a long period of time.”
Denver, You’re Our Hero
Approximately two-thirds of U.S. cities are in some stage of revitalization, and some have already done what St. Louis is trying to do now: transform burned-out urban cores into hip and booming new neighborhoods. Some of the best examples of revitalization over the last 15 years: Denver; Portland, Ore.; Seattle; San Diego; Chattanooga, Tenn.; Washington, D.C.; and Philadelphia. Other neighborhoods—the Back Bay area of Boston, midtown Manhattan, the Gold Coast of Chicago and the Nob Hill area of San Francisco—never saw decline at all.
What’s The Secret?
You know you’re dealing with a complicated issue when you can’t find two experts who agree. When asked what was the one key element to a successful downtown renaissance, everyone pointed to something different.
The biggest question: Which comes first, the workers or the residents? “Everything goes back to residential,” says Tamara Door, president and CEO of the Downtown Denver Partnership.
“In cities in which employment has grown downtown, the number of residents will increase,” counters Alexander von Hoffman of Harvard University.
“Residential and office go hand in hand,” says Jim Cloar of the Downtown St. Louis Partnership. “The mistake of the early ’80s was to focus only on office.”
Many say safety is the key. “If people don’t think it’s safe,” says Judith Martin, director of urban studies at the University of Minnesota, “they won’t go there.”
“There was nothing in the Denver plan to address safety or crime,” Door points out. “It sort of came along when the area was activated.”
Others emphasize historic architecture. Or pedestrian traffic. Or convenient stores. Or active community groups. The secret’s in the mix—and the timing.
Downtown Timeline
1920: From Barges to Cars
In the 1920s, convinced (correctly) that cars would revolutionize the way people lived, and certain (mistakenly) that the way to keep the city alive was to make it easily accessible by car, the city tore up the riverfront and made it into parking lots and highways.
Cars proved to be the bane of downtown’s existence. We were so eager to make the city car-friendly that “whenever a building would become obsolete,” says Eric Sandweiss of Indiana University, “St. Louis would build a surface parking lot.”
Until St. Louis has workable public transportation (that people actually use), we’ll be cursed with the continuing problem: Where do we put all the cars?
1956: White Flight and White Elephants
St. Louis (along with Detroit and New Orleans) was hard hit by so-called white flight, the mass migration of the lily-skinned in the face of a rapid influx of black residents looking for postwar work and affordable housing. In an effort to win back some of the residents it had lost in the 1930s and ’40s, St. Louis conceived of a plan that turned out to be Exhibit A in the case against public housing: Pruitt-Igoe. Completed in 1956, Pruitt-Igoe was a massive high-rise apartment complex built over the razed slum of DeSoto-Carr. With middle-class whites and blacks unwilling to move into the forbidding new structures, Pruitt-Igoe quickly turned into a crime-infested blight. It was demolished in 1972.
1965: Gateway to What?
Build it, and they will come. That was the idea, anyway. A huge world-class sculpture resting on the shore of the Mississippi—surely that would bring people flocking to downtown. Not exactly. People came to see the amazing structure, but because the original plan to connect the Arch grounds to the rest of downtown was never realized, the Arch didn’t do much to help the area across the highway.
1966: Baseball Fantasy
“Baseball stadiums are great—they belong downtown,” says Chris Leinberger of the University of Michigan. Even so, despite the sea of red that flowed in and out on practically a daily basis during the season, Busch Stadium did little more than the Arch to reinvigorate downtown. The new Busch Stadium has downtown backers excited because of the adjacent Ballpark Village, a five-block mixed-use development that, they hope, will encourage Cardinals fans to stick around after the game.
1982: The Old Post Office
In 1982, St. Louis tried again. After $16 million in renovations, the Old Post Office reopened with space for retail, restaurants and court offices. A few businesses moved in, but most quickly failed, and by the mid-1990s the building was looking like its familiar dusty self.
Now that project, too, is finally taking off. Restored once again, this time in ways that open its moated entrance to street life, the Old Post Office has an impressive roster of tenants moving in this spring.
1980s: Dance, Dance, Dance
In an attempt to drive out the crime and prostitution that haunted Washington Avenue in the 1970s, a few brave souls began opening nightclubs along the infamous strip. It worked ... sort of. The kids came, drank and had a good time, but at the end of the night they staggered back to the suburbs. If anything, the booming beats and late-night revelry made that key area of downtown an even less desirable place in which to live and work.
This time around, Washington Avenue’s nightlife is mixed with grownup restaurants, cool loft spaces and amenities for young families—and the new approach is working. There’s enough investment, enough critical mass and a good mix of residential properties for various incomes and lifestyles to give downtown what it has needed for decades: a residential life.
1985: The Mall
Perhaps it’s understandable that the city, desperate to share the success of the thriving suburbs, would try to wear a suit meant for someone else. The best example of such failed mimicry, a blunder so colossal that you can almost hear a comical game-show strike-out buzzer when you look at it, was St. Louis Centre.
“I’m an urban planner, and I admired St. Louis Centre and Union Station when they opened,” admits Jim Cloar of the Downtown St. Louis Partnership. “That was the panacea du jour—replicate a suburban shopping mall downtown—but, in hindsight, it was the wrong thing to do.”
Why? One of the keys to a successful city is pedestrian traffic, and a mall is exactly the wrong way to accomplish that. There was nothing to differentiate St. Louis Centre from any suburban mall, nothing to invite suburbanites to make the trip downtown, no way for the mall to benefit other downtown businesses with old-fashioned street addresses.
1993: The Lonely Convention Center
The convention center was another project that St. Louis hoped would inject some business into downtown, but conventioneers arriving at the new America’s Center found a shiny structure on a street filled with abandoned buildings, no convention hotel and no decent places to eat. Far from the magic bullet St. Louis hoped it would be, the convention center—in the early days, before the Renaissance Grand and the recent influx of fabulous restaurants—probably ended up hurting the city more than it helped by showing visitors just how deserted downtown really was.
1997: Danforth to the Rescue
He didn’t singlehandedly save St. Louis’ downtown or set off a building boom with his own two hands, but most agree that former U.S. Sen. John Danforth got the ball rolling. In 1997, he founded St. Louis 2004, giving structure to the effort to rebuild downtown. “I have to give Jack Danforth an awful lot of credit for his vision and his impatience and his desire to turn things around and get things done,” says Richard Ward of Development Strategies. “Creating St. Louis 2004 was the beginning. When he did that, people listened.”
1997: Extra Credit
St. Louis had no shortage of historic buildings. What it lacked was developers willing to shoulder the cost of transforming them into the city’s future. The turning point came in 1997, when Missouri added state historic tax credits to those already offered by the federal government. “With the Missouri tax credit piggybacked on the federal tax credits, all of the sudden you have about 50 percent of the cost of renovations being paid for by the government,” Ward says. “It made things feasible that were not feasible before.”
1999: We Have a Plan
There’s one key aspect of the most recent revitalization that makes it different than all of St. Louis’ previous efforts: a comprehensive plan.
The biggest mistake cities make, say experts, is to pin their hopes on one big project. “Prior efforts—and this is not simply in St. Louis—tended to try and find the silver bullet in a new convention center, office complex or sports center,” says John Hoal, principal of H3 Studio, who teaches architecture and urban design at Washington University and was the prime framer of the 1999 plan. “The object of our plan was to have all of those in balance.”
St. Louis had been in the silver-bullet mindset since the early 1900s, throwing money and simple solutions at a complex problem. In 1993, the city finally got smart. Downtown advocates, politicians, planners, business owners and residents worked out a strategic plan for downtown, with a plan for implementation following in 1999.
“It’s the first time I know of in modern history that downtown St. Louis had prepared a plan,” Ward says, still amazed at the consensus that emerged.
2005: The Right People in Place
You can plan all you want, but if you don’t have the right people in the right positions, nothing will be accomplished. Downtown St. Louis has had its champions over the decades, but it finally has, according to Ward, “a perfect storm of talent—people doing the right thing at the right time.”
Ward has kudos for all the major players. Mayor Francis Slay: “He has done a magnificent job as a political leader carrying the ball forward.” Jim Cloar: “He ran the downtown organizations in Dallas, Tampa and Tulsa. He knows downtown management, and he has brought a layer of background experience that has meshed very well with the other pieces.” Tom Reeves, who runs Downtown Now: “Another perfect fit for the job. He works very well with the rest of the players.”
