St. Louis Streets Are Morbidly Obese
{it's Oklahoma City, but it might as well be Tucker or Market}
St. Louis streets are fat, obese, HUGE! They are literally squeezing the life out of downtown. When 900,000 people were driving their 1954 Fords to and from work in the CBD each day I understand the pressure to provide capacity. Today? It's simply ridiculous. Much the same way that WalMart parking lots are purposely built to accommodate Black Friday crowds, our downtown streets are built and maintained to cater to suburban drivers on Cardinals game days.
Nearly all downtown streets are too wide and the pedestrian experience needs to be improved in many places, but I'm going to focus on the Gateway Mall as this is supposed to be a destination. Walking east to west along Market Street from Tucker to Union Station a pedestrian is required to cross 36 lanes of traffic in eight blocks. These 36 lanes account for 533 feet of the total 1,996 foot distance. Why the hell would anyone want to take that walk?
Urban planner Jeff Speck is currently consulting on improving the pedestrian experience in Oklahoma City might as well be talking about St. Louis: "To be walkable, a street needs to be safe, comfortable and interesting,” Speck reported to OKC. "You guys lose it at safe.” "Then you look at the traffic counts, and only a few carrying 10,000 a day. And 10,000 cars a day is easily handled by a two-lane road.”
The St. Louis Gateway Mall Master Plan released by the City of St. Louis features some good ideas and seems to recognize the need to make the pedestrian experience better, but it fails to make any change that would significantly alter that experience. The focus appears to be on things like an "urban trellis" and similar props. Very few people are going to be drawn across 500 feet of asphalt because there's an "urban trellis" on the other side.
(1) Let's make downtown a nice place to walk. (2) People will walk there. (3) Pedestrians will need amenities. (4) If pedestrians want an urban trellis we can build one.
Including parking and turn lanes Market Street should be no more than six lanes; North-south streets should be no more than five lanes and every block should have a bump-out, further decreasing the distance between blocks. North-south streets should have raised crosswalks and be entirely eliminated wherever possible. With a pedestrian bridge over 18th Street there could be an uninterupted 1.5 mile walking/jogging loop.
{Gateway Mall west of Tucker as it exists today}
{a view with expanded parks, sensible streets}
{the Gateway Mall as a usable park}
Gentrification: "... welcome by some and feared and loathed by others, and even dreaded and welcomed at the same time by the same people." Lance Freeman's pursuit of this duality makes the book strong-he's willing to admit that gentrification is both a pleasure and a problem, rather than setting up camp on one side.
Awesome! The lower view looks like a city someone might actually want to buy a house in. Now for your next rendering, just imagine that park ringed by 50 story luxury towers.
Wait--removing the cross streets is ideal to you? I think narrowing them significantly and providing clear crosswalks is a better solution.
^ Fair enough. We bemoan the closing of streets, altering the traditional grid. It's a bit extreme, but none of us would advocate running Gustine through Tower Grove Park to join up with Lawrence. My point is only that to have a functional park downtown, somewhere that someone could run, take an somewhat uninterrupted walk, etc. the only option is to close a number of cross streets. Otherwise, the Gateway Mall is much more ornamental than useful. Secondly, we simply do not need the cross streets given the amount of downtown traffic.
You should come to City Affair.
I understand your point about making the mall more park-like, but I'm afraid that removing those streets will further sever the southern portion of downtown from the rest of downtown.
There is a major difference between the Gateway Mall and Tower Grove Park. TGP was originally created to be a park before much of the surrounding neighborhoods and street grid were developed. The GM was originally a group of city blocks filled with high density buildings. This "park" has been created in a piecemeal fashion allowing the original uneven city block edges to create a lack of cohesion between the GM blocks. Even the new sculpture garden design treats its block as an independent entity with little relationship to the other blocks.
Actually, closing 13th street and eliminating the E-W length of Chestnut (eastbound traffic could be carried by Market) in order to actually capture a 'usable' park-scaled green space wouldn't be a tragic trade-off... If this area were to be delimited to 4 square blocks, logic would almost dicate the closure of any intervening streets. This would, however, force the soldier's memorial into the NW corner of the 'park', and present an imbalance to what could otherwise have been a finely axial park with the ediface terminating the E-W axis at the monumental stair. If parks are formal, and a square park bounded by orthogonal streets certainly is, then a highly ordered and symmetrical plan featuring a focal piece like the memorial is not such a bad thing. Boston's Copley Plaza has such a relationship with M,M,&W's gorgeous beaux arts public library facade. Sometimes a monument deserves the foil that an open and axial space provides. The squirrels, pigeons and hobos would agree.
...doubtless much better examples can be offered, but that one came to mind right away.
^^^ In this post I've treated the Gateway Mall as a park since the city appears committed to this idea. I say if it's going to be a park at least make it a usable park.
I see the appeal of building on the Mall - say built west of 20th and reconfigure the interchange to provide a terminus to the Mall, then build out 15th-18th. The Mall isn't perfectly linear as it bends a bit south once west of Tucker and Gateway One has already been built - maybe build out that block as well.
As some have noted the "park" will continue to be underutilized and unwelcoming unless there is density at its edges. I think that either making it an attractive park and luring development to its edges or building on a few blocks to add density and users for more focused parks may be the way to go.
I say, and as I said on Urban STL, we need to demand that the Gateway Mall be removed west of Tucker. There should be a huge median in the middle of Market to slow traffic and provide the green space that will be lost through developing on the current Gateway Mall.
A Downtown West Master Plan should hinge on redeveloping the 22nd Street Interchange so that new blocks can be created (I posted on this a week ago or so on Dotage) and so that Union Station can once again become the centerpiece of a human scale neighborhood. Therefore, all the way from 23rd to Tucker, there could be a midrise buildings (eventually), with the large median in the middle of Market that would have benches, chess tables, sculptures, a walking path, historic markers, etc.