“You know, downtown St. Charles is actually pretty nice,” I said to myself, as I sipped an “Aztec Cocoa,” looking out the window of Picasso’s Coffee House on Main Street last Friday. Yes, there are other places besides Starbucks to buy coffee in the city of St. Charles (Crooked Tree on First Capitol is nice, too). This whole stretch of Main Street is doing really well, but it wasn’t always like this. Back in the 1980s, it was struggling and practically abandoned, the victim of a terrible fad in American urban planning: the pedestrian mall. Main Street was blocked off for several blocks, and it was choked to abandonment. While pedestrian zones thrive around the world (I’ve observed them work wonderfully in Europe), they just don’t work in America. Americans need to see cars parked along the street. St. Charles ripped out the pedestrian mall decades ago, and we now have a thriving Main Street.
Yes, yes, I know. St. Charles County has a lot of tax dollars, and I fully acknowledge that. Things are much, much easier to accomplish when you have the tax money to do it. But I do know, that just like last week, when I examined downtown Clayton, there are many things that downtown St. Charles is doing right that we can learn from. As already seen with the timely removal of the pedestrian mall, city leaders learned from a serious mistake and acted to correct that mistake. Tax revenue-generating businesses have replaced the vacant storefronts. Also, they restored the cobblestone streets, which are great for discouraging speeding and traffic. There are also some other important lessons to learn as well.
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First off, St. Charles preserves its urban form, which has served it so well since its founding. There is some dispute about whether or not we should consider the construction of I-70 just to the south of the downtown to be the first interstate, but one thing is certain, that huge swath of concrete passes a nice, safe distance from the urban core of St. Charles so as to not disrupt the quality of life of the historic French settlement. Conversely, interstates crash through and disrupt the historic core of St. Louis. I-70 serves St. Charles without destroying it. I cannot hear nor smell the traffic of rush hour while walking Main Street. And with it, we have one of the best-preserved collections of 19th century architecture in Missouri.
Likewise, because no interstates disrupt the historic street grid, a critical aspect of St. Charles urban form is preserved: the ability of residents to walk to their downtown. The beautiful residential neighborhoods surrounding the commercial and government center are easily reached in five to ten minutes. The weather was nice on Friday, and I witnessed people walking to and from their homes, meeting neighbors on the sidewalks of Main Street cafes. Likewise, there are no bloated, ridiculously wide traffic arteries that have split neighborhoods apart like so much of St. Louis (and of course many of which have been ironically replaced by nearby parallel interstate highways). As Suburban Nation also remarks, and I paraphrase, Americans crave the ability to be able to walk a short distance to buy a cup of coffee or just a candy bar. And here’s another crazy idea: on side streets, St. Charles traffic engineers alternate stops signs at every other intersection, preventing four-way stop fatigue.
But surely there are whole blocks of historic buildings that have been demolished for acres of parking lots, right? Again, I investigated, and visual inspection and examination of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps reveals that downtown St. Charles has suffered very little demolition for urban renewal for massive parking lots. The exceptions are for some churches, whose identities will remain anonymous. St. Charles County government buildings don’t even really have much surface parking, in marked contrast to St. Louis County or St. Louis City. Downtown St. Charles does have some large surface lots, behind the buildings on the east side of Main Street and in between Riverside Drive. I looked at the Sanborn Maps and discovered that these lots were always empty, probably serving as areas for the loading of riverboats and railroad cars. The parking lots flood, and passive use as storage of parked automobiles is the best use. Amazingly, people are willing to walk a block or two from these riverside lots to shop on Main Street! I sometimes hear people say, with a straight face, that every business needs a parking lot contiguous to it or it will fail.
Downtown St. Charles has also diversified economically. There has also always been history, including the log cabin church dedicated to St. Charles Borromeo and the First Capitol, which on their own, are not enough to sustain a tourist economy. People need a reason to stick around after they spend an hour in those two sites. I remember the “knick-knack” shop days, and it was just not economically sustainable. While the ones with real business plans survive, there is a much wider number of businesses, including a microbrewery and other restaurants, and real fine art workshops. But meanwhile, it seems like every decade or so, downtown St. Louis hops on another trend; right now, we’re on the “new hotel trend,” with over a half-dozen opening in the next year. Enough with the trend—just look for slow, even-keeled development that brings in steady income. Yes, even St. Charles has something to teach mighty St. Louis.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at [email protected].
