Urban Prairie becomes Urban Farm

A couple of years ago I wrote about a large expanse of Urban Prairie in the St. Louis Place neighborhood.  While I’ve driven through a few times since, I haven’t really taken the time to stroll around the neighborhood again until this afternoon, when poor road conditions on North Florissant prompted me to park my car and inspect it for damage.

St. Louis Place Park – Plenty of green space was planned into the neighborhood.

Luckily my car was fine, and without anything on the calendar decided to let my feet and camera guide me around the neighborhood to the west.  This led me through St. Louis Place Park to St. Louis Avenue (St. Louisans have always been proud of the city), where a homeowner wondering why I was photographing her property directed me to revisit the prairie only a block or two away.  As I took her advice and started walking south, I was shocked to see large cornfields filling up many of the vacant blocks.

Urban Scarecrow and Farm in St. Louis Place

Over the course of the next hour or so that it took me to explore the 10+ blocks of mostly demolished city, I chatted with numerous people who live or work in the neighborhood and pieced together some of the story.  A local firefighter and resident each credited the crops to the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation (which has an urban farm in East St. Louis).  Some saw the city maintaining them.  Others thought that corn looked pretty out of place, that rebuilding a mixed use neighborhood should be the priority and that Paul McKee would probably continue his track record – in the tradition of previous developers – as a serious disappointment at best.  The consensus was that none of the crops are intended for human consumption.  Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find any additional information on the internet (please share if you know more).

Freshly Planted

Although I agree that new urban buildings would be much much better than cornfields, I think that the conversion to farmland is a positive.  While visiting the town of Valmeyer, Illinois a few weeks ago (devastated by the flood of ’93 and mostly relocated to a nearby hilltop), I saw that many blocks of the former downtown – street grid still in place – are now soybean fields.

Downtown Old Valmeyer, Illinois

A strange sight, but I imagined it  at the intersection of 23rd and N. Market.

August 2010

August 2013

Old North St. Louis also has a program to open up vacant lots for projects like this sunflower garden:

Sunflowers in Old North

Below are more photos from today of the urban farm in St. Louis Place:

Soybeans near 22nd Street

Fire Hydrant and Manhole Cover

Abandoned Home and Cornfield

Corn Growing in St. Louis Place

Fire Hydrant on Urban Farm

Downtown over a Cornfield

Corn on the Corner

Red Corn Silk

Visit my St. Louis Place flickr set for more.

The 10th Street Mall in LaSalle Park

A few weeks ago I had the day off and needed to take my car to the shop, so for the first time in a while I was able to do some St. Louis Exploring.  For lack of a better idea, I simply took the bus downtown and starting walking toward Soulard, knowing that I didn’t really have a good grasp of what lay in between.  The dead zones between our “destination neighborhoods” are one of the biggest problems St. Louis has to tackle.

LaSalle Park

Crossing under Highway 40 on Broadway I entered LaSalle Park, a hidden gem nestled between Soulard, Layfayette Square and Downtown.  The neighborhood is cut off from the rest of the city by highways, and the damaged street grid leaves its few surviving blocks particularly isolated.   A Pedestrian Mall replaces Tenth Street from Hickory to Park Avenue, effectively separating the renovated historic homes to the east, from the mess of urban renewal to the west.

Tenth Street Mall in LaSalle Park

Dead-end streets north of Park on Ninth Street have been turned into cul-de-sacs, but they are shady, quiet, relatively dense, and feel great to walk down.  Large bushes visually separate the cul-de-sacs from the pedestrian mall, but the sidewalks merge into it.  The mall itself is both devoid of life and overgrown.

10th Street Pedestrian Mall from Park

In many ways, the Tenth Street Mall reflects St. Louis urban planning in general.  It has preservation on one side and auto-centric modern development  on the other.  It has glaring successes and failures.  It is cool and attractive but also lacks maintenance and use.  For many, however, it seems that LaSalle Park has the best of both worlds.  It is in the middle the city, but feels suburban in many ways.  It’s both old and new.  It has a totally random pedestrian mall running through part of it; and apparently that’s what people like because LaSalle Park is one of a small handful of St. Louis City neighborhoods to have gained population in 2010.  If you haven’t been, go check it out – the experience is quite pleasant.

More photos of LaSalle Park can be found here.

Urban Prairie

The only thing worse than this city’s abandoned buildings and surface parking lots, is the Urban Prairie that accounts for far too many blocks in North St. Louis.  One of the largest expanses of Urban Prairie that I have come across is in the area of North Market and 23rd Streets.  This area is just North of the Pruitt-Igoe site and is hardly better off than the rubble that remains from the housing project there.  At least the street grid is intact.

Looking South from N. Market and 23rd

It’s almost too depressing to try imagining what this intersection once looked like, but the task is made easier (but no less depressing) by the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of the area in 1909.

N. Market and 23rd in 1909

This intersection was home to a 5-story building that housed “Moving Pictures” in a neighborhood made up mostly of 2 or 3 story flats.  Just around the corner on 23rd was a “Beer Depot”.  Although this area was clearly not extremely dense (at least not in 1909),  I can count over 20 homes that faced the alleys on either side of N. Market between 25th and 22nd.  These alleys are still in place, but only a handful of buildings remain within eyesight of 23rd and N. Market.  A look back to 1875 shows another picture that stands in sharp contrast to the current condition of 23rd and N. Market (in 1875 23rd Street was 19th).

N. Market and 23rd (then 19th) in 1875

For me, these historical documents are just ideas of what could be here next.  Currently, the slate is all but clean.

Urban Prairie

Although this expanse of Urban Prairie is particularly large and depressing, it is by no means strange to stumble across a similar sight while traveling around St. Louis.  Demolitions that continue to occur around our city increase the amount of totally vacant land and decrease the stock of historic buildings with rehab potential.  One plus side to the current state of this land is that Paul McKee would have to really try hard to screw up its redevelopment.  A NorthSide project that narrowed its scope to the Pruitt-Igoe site and the Urban Prairie nearby would have hardly any current residents or legacy buildings to worry about and would serve the purpose of reconnecting neighborhoods that are intact enough to resurrect themselves.  Since McKee has announced that he will soon begin work on the Clemens Mansion, these deserted blocks nearby would be a great place for him to demonstrate his vision and possibly win support for his broader plan for the much larger chunk of North St. Louis he wants to redevelop.

For more on this area/subject matter see Built St. Louis’ Excellent tour of St. Louis Place and Slow Death of a City Block.

R.I.P. Hop Alley

Chinatown in Flushing, Queens

Main Street Flushing, Queens

I actually do think that Busch Stadium should never have been built.  I wish it was still on North Grand.  More photos of Flushing’s Chinatown here.