“You know, downtown Clayton is actually pretty nice,” my dining companion remarked to me Monday, as we ate sushi on Forsyth Avenue, looking out the window at the Pierre Laclede Center. Despite being a passionate backer of the City of St. Louis, and longing for the further rebirth of its downtown, I had to readily agree. Downtown Clayton is nice, and despite some city backers likening it to being something akin to the Antichrist, I don’t really believe that helps St. Louis, or the region, to view the suburban county seat with such hostility. Downtown Clayton is successful; it possesses millions of square feet of office space; dozens of really great restaurants in a small area (though I still think St. Louis City produces more innovation in cuisine), real residential density, and a healthy, safe pedestrian environment.
It made me begin to think about what makes a downtown, or central business district, and its accompanying city successful in the first place. Clayton is a good example of a successful, thriving downtown area that really shouldn’t be successful, according to logical, common sense criteria. For example, it is a small, landlocked area. Depending on how you count the blocks in what is considered downtown, it is only a couple dozen blocks hemmed in by low-density residential neighborhoods that so far Clayton has no interest in rezoning. The office buildings are unremarkable, architecturally. On the south, Forest Park Parkway, which I don’t think anyone would consider best-practices in automobile circulation, forms an inadequate traffic artery and wall, cutting off much of the rest of the city from its downtown. The Parkway then connects to the horribly antiquated Interstate 170, whose obsolescence has become all the more obvious with the rebuilding of all of the other interstates in the region. It backs up horribly at rush hour. The other option is Hanley, which connects to the same interstate that 170 feeds into, I-64/40. But nonetheless, Centene is building a new skyscraper in downtown Clayton, not downtown St. Louis, which is served by four interstates.
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Downtown Clayton, just like downtown St. Louis, has a Master Plan (they’re always capitalized). Urban planning is an interesting field, one that goes back far into human history, and different versions of it can be found throughout the world. Teotihuacan, in Mexico, has a certain urban plan to it, as does Nara in Japan. Our American cities perhaps show the greatest influence of the rational ancient Greeks and Romans, who loved their right angles. The Renaissance further developed the idea that rational thought can create successful cities; Palmanova in the northeastern corner of modern Italy is perhaps the best illustration of those ideals manifested in the real world. But I’m a little concerned about some of the goals of urban planning today; too often, I feel like it tries to perform open-heart surgery using the tiny plastic instruments from the board game Operation, attempting to fix distressed old cities, instead of trying to build successful new cities.
Perhaps that is why I liked the Master Plan for Clayton’s downtown. It does not try to perform urban alchemy on a leaden environment, but only seeks to improve what is already an economically thriving streetscape. In fact, Clayton would be perfectly fine even without implementing any of its recommendations, which, after reviewing the plan, are actually fairly progressive. It calls for increased pedestrian safety, more accessibility, making the area around the office buildings more of a downtown than just a “business district,” and in general, implementing what we nowadays call “new urbanism.” Of course, Clayton has the money from the taxes coming in from the fully leased office buildings to do all of this. It reminds me of one of the most important lessons from the famous book Suburban Nation: no amount of park benches, ornamental plants or decorative flags hanging from lamp posts will revitalize a downtown if people aren’t already walking around the streets. I walk and drive throughout the City of St. Louis, and I often come across surreal streetscapes of abandoned storefronts sitting forlornly behind shining new “old-timey” lampposts and brand-new concrete sidewalks. Save the money for small business loans, please.
In fact, as I think back over Western Civilization, and Clayton and St. Louis are a part of it, I actually wonder how much the field of urban planning has actually mattered. The city of Rome, even at its height as the center of a vast empire, had absolutely no urban plan, and only a couple of major streets. The Roman Forum was a hodgepodge of shrines and historic buildings, whose locations were chosen by hunter-gathers hundreds of years before. I also think of the city of Florence, which admittedly was founded as a colony by the Romans so it has a nice street grid in the central city, and how urban planning probably had little to no impact on the Italian Renaissance artists who made it such a cultural behemoth. Are we to believe that Michelangelo was inspired to sculpt David because he had nice straight rectilinear streets to walk on in downtown Florence? Heck, do you realize the traffic arterial system of St. Louis County was designed by farmers in the 1850s?
I will tell you why Clayton is doing well. People with power and influence tell other people that Clayton is where they should locate their offices, where they should buy a house and where they should go out to eat. Clayton, even with its weird Parkway cutting right through it and its awkward 1970s office building architecture, has cache. It has something that you cannot put a monetary value on. Downtown St. Louis, back when the Wainwright Building was being built, or when Union Station was the busiest railroad station in the world, had cache. If St. Louis is to be successful again, we need to save the money we’re wasting on commissioning Master Plans and studies. Instead, let’s work on getting our cache back. It’s worth more than even four interstates.
I also wanted to alert readers to “De-Segregation by Design in Divided Cities,” a panel organized by Creative Exchange Lab (CEL), happening this Sunday, April 29 at .ZACK, 3224 Locust. Speakers include poets, architects, historians, city planners, and documentary filmmakers; the event happens between 11 a.m.–5:30 p.m., and is free.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at [email protected].
