In MoDOT’s plan to kill I-64/Compton interchange, the devil is in the details

You can add Saint Louis University to the list of organizations and business owners speaking out against the Missouri Department of Transportation plan to rip out the Compton/I-64 interchange.

In a statement, the Midtown university said it has shared concerns with MoDOT about the potential removal of the westbound entrance ramp at Compton Avenue and was encouraged that MoDOT was taking another look at the plan. “Students, faculty, staff and the hundreds of thousands of people who visit SLU each year rely on dependable access and reasonable convenience to get to and from campus and the surrounding area,” the statement said. 

The plan in question would see the removal of the Interstate 64 interchange at Compton Avenue near Chaifetz Arena. That interchange has been referred to by numerous people as right now looking like “spaghetti”; even a quick glance shows a mess of overlapping lanes eating up a lot of land just south of Chaifetz. 

But opponents to the plan say that, absent the Compton interchange, even more traffic would get routed through one of the city’s worst intersections: Grand and Forest Park Avenue. People leaving Chaifetz or the businesses on Locust currently have an easy egress at Compton. Midtown Alley business owners noted to SLM earlier this month that MoDOT’s plans would send many of those drivers to Grand and Forest Park, likely at the same time that people leaving the Fox Theater or Powell Symphony Hall are trying to squeeze through there, too. Those business owners want to stop MoDOT from going through with its plan.

MoDOT has, however, received support from a perhaps surprising constituency: urban planners. They say that highways have been a ruin to St. Louis and, while they are often critical of the agency’s plans, they’re cheering for a small slice of one interstate to be eliminated.

“We should all be excited that MoDOT is working to remove the mess of a highway that has cut up our city for decades,” says Catherine Hamacher, an urban planner who also sits on the city’s Preservation Board. “MoDOT is not traditionally very good at thinking about pedestrians and cyclists, but they’re really trying to think here about how they could make a big impact rethinking intersections, rethinking how much real estate and footprint highways are using in our city.”

Hamacher and others say that fears about people not being able to rapidly leave a sporting event or a musical are overblown. St. Louis, after all, is hardly afflicted with the sort of soul-crushing traffic common to fast-growing cities. Hamacher says highway plans can’t be designed just for special events—and the goal can’t be helping people get out of the city quickly after cultural activities.

“If the goal is really to get them in and out to the theater and that’s it—then why support or endorse a theater in this location?” she asks. Hamacher acknowledges the real pain that major highway work causes nearby businesses during construction. But, she says, if it leads to more, denser development in the area around those businesses, patrons will have more reason to linger before or after the show or sporting event, leading to better outcomes in the long run.

“If that means they spend 15 more minutes in their car getting out, I think that’s the goal,” she says. “The goal is to get people to spend time here, as opposed to making each one of these places an individual destination that sort of makes the outside environment they exist in irrelevant.”

MoDOT is not in the game of developing mixed-use or residential buildings, but its plan for the current spaghetti area once the interchange is eliminated would include expanding Theresa Avenue into something more like what has gone onto Tower Grove Avenue near the Missouri Botanical Garden—a street and a separated pathway for pedestrians, cyclists, and other non-vehicular traffic. It would run from an area that’s walking distance from Chaifetz Arena south to Spruce Street, as well as from nearby Chaifetz west to Forest Park Avenue, a MoDOT spokesperson says.

This would undoubtedly be an asset for any developer that wanted to come in and build atop the site that is the current spaghetti interchange. 

One big issue, however, is that MoDOT’s new Theresa Avenue would stop abruptly at a set of railroad tracks short of the new Midtown Target or the Top Golf and way shy of SLU Hospital. It would cost about $25 million to continue Theresa across those tracks and, because Theresa is a city road, that cost would fall on the cash-strapped city. 

The Midtown Redevelopment Corporation would almost certainly be involved in any development of land opened up by what is now the spaghetti interchange. The MRC is sponsored by SLU and SSM Health and oversees development in the 400 acres falling roughly between Highway 44 and I-64, Spring Avenue, and Compton Avenue. 

Reached for comment, the MRC referred to the statement issued by SLU.

And while theories are rampant that a developer may have their eye on the area now covered by the spaghetti interchange, MRC executive director Brooks Goedeker has attended multiple meetings with MoDOT representatives and community members. At those meetings, he’d made it clear that he’s not aware of any developers interested in the acreage. He also said that access to and from Compton is vital to businesses like Top Golf, the university and to SSM. 

The upshot seems to be that removing the Compton interchange is not a bad idea per se, but the specifics of MoDOT’s current plan are a non-starter for many entities. Even the planners who cheer the plan acknowledge that Grand and Forest Park Avenue needs work before it can take on significantly more traffic. 

That includes Hamacher, who professes zero love for Grand and Forest Park Avenue. “I think it would be bananas for MoDOT and the city to not come together and create a plan for how to improve that intersection,” she says.

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