Quote of the day

"The contrast between the conditions of the city of St. Louis and its vast suburbs is stark, and stunning."
-Ray Suarez, The Old Neighborhood (1999).

Quote of the Day

"There are no city plans for the South Bronx, for North St. Louis, or parts of the South Side of Chicago. There are no plans because cities don't talk much about the places they aren't sure they can do anything for."
-Norman Krumholz (Professor at Cleveland State University), quoted in The Old Neighborhood, Ray Suarez, 1999.

Quote of the Day

"The argument here is not against the suburb, but against excessive suburban sprawl; not against dispersed living, but against aimlessness. The challenge is to make the metropolitan area a cohesive and efficient fabric, with a central core that will serve as a wellspring of urban nourishment and enlightenment."
-George M. Smerk, Urban Transportation: The Federal Role (1965).

Beautiful House of the Day

(Dubuque, IA)

Quote of the day

"Since at least the founding of the Republic we have been concealing failure from ourselves with newness."
-Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (1972).

Quote of the Day

"There is nothing economically or socially inevitable about either the decay of old cities or the fresh-minted decadence of the new unurban urbanization. On the contrary, no other aspect of our economy and society has been more purposefully manipulated for a full quarter of a century to achieve precisely what we are getting. Extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility and vulgarity. Decades of preaching, writing and exhorting by experts have gone into convincing us and our legislators that mush like this must be good for us, as long as it comes bedded with grass."
-Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

Beautiful House of the Day

(New Orleans, LA)

What I'm Reading Now

I recently finished Ray Suarez's book and started reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. I'm only a little ways in and I'm already blown away by this book. It's pretty clear why it's regarded as a classic, and it will certainly be influencing this blog in the future.

Quote of the Day

"Were China and India to increase their rates of car ownership to the point where per-capita oil consumption reached just half of American levels, the two countries would burn through a hundred million additional barrels a day. (Currently, total global use is eighty six million barrels a day.) Were they to match U.S. consumption levels, they would require an extra two hundred million barrels a day."
-Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, 11/05/07

Quote of the Day

"Today we look back on it all in hurt and wonder. How did this happen? Where did that good life go? When an accidental detour or missed expressway exit brings us into contact with the world we left behind, we can still place all the blame firmly and squarely elsewhere. The shuttered factories and collapsing row houses, the cavant storefronts and rutted streets are regarded with the same awe reserved for scenes of natural disasters. We look out on a world that somehow, in the American collective memory, destroyed itself."
Ray Suarez: The Old Neighborhood (1999)

Quote of the Day

"We're not going back to 2005. What was built then is not going to come back, and this is not a bad thing. What we were building was so unsustainable, and it didn't really meet our needs."
-Marianne Cusato (designer of the "Home for a New Economy"), The New York Times Magazine, 10/17/10).

Great Column from Post-Dispacth: St. Louis Needs More Immigrants

I completely agree with this column from the Post-Dispatch:

http://www.stltoday.com/business/columns/david-nicklaus/article_61ec7841-e0a9-5f90-9654-0aa2f91d5e88.html

Clearly, St. Louis has some assets it can leverage. The International Institute, which provides a variety of services to immigrants, sponsored 6,000 Bosnian refugees in the 1990s. They spread the word to friends and relatives, and now an estimated 70,000 Bosnians call St. Louis home.
They have bought homes and started businesses. They stabilized a broad swath of the city and have begun to move to the suburbs. In short, they've done what waves of German, Irish and Italian immigrants did before them.
But for at least 60 years, from the 1920s to the 1980s, St. Louis had no noticeable influx of foreign-born residents. It's no coincidence that the city lost population and, during the latter half of that period, the region's economy stagnated.

I recommend you read the whole column. While it focuses on the entrepreneurial aspects that immigration brings, I'd add another as well: adding cultural diversity. The reason South City is my favorite part of St. Louis is because the presence of Latin American, Asian, and Middle Eastern immigrants bring a little more variety - especially in terms of restaurants and grocery stores - to the world of St. Louis. Attracting immigrants to St. Louis would be a great thing for the city to pursue.

Quote of the Day

"The fruits of the multiplicity of local governments in metropolitan areas are inadequate, expensive, and inefficient services mixed helter-skelter with adequate urban services."
-George M. Smerk: Urban Transportation: The Federal Role (1965)

What I'm Reading Now

I'm currently reading The Old Neighborhood (1999) by PBS's Ray Suarez. It's a pretty fascinating look at what was lost when Americans left "the old neighborhood" for suburbia between the 1950s and 1980s. A lot of it focuses on the issue of "white flight." It's full of great information, and great quotes.

Beautiful house of the day

(Dubuque, IA)

My Goals for this Blog

With this blog, Renewed City (STL), I aim to highlight what is going wrong, and going right, in the interconnected issues of suburban sprawl and urban decay. While I'll focus on St. Louis, since it's where I'll live, I'll try to bring in other cities as well. I have no formal training in architecture or urban planning; my educational background is in history, with some law. When it comes to good, and especially bad, archictecture, however, to use a famous phrase, "I know it when I see it."
When I post pictures of abandoned old buildings and ugly sprawl, as I often will, it's not to put down St. Louis (or whichever city I'm posting from). It's to prod, to make the reader think "We can do better than this." Maybe if we spent more time looking at ugly buildings instead of driving past them we'd be more inclined to do something about them.
My background is rural, so many issues that are both urban and suburban still seem unusual to me. I'll be learning as I go. Half of my family, however, is from Detroit, so urban decay is quite familiar to me. It is my hope that St. Louis (and, indeed, Detroit) can be renewed - not in the sense of top-down federal urban renewal that has proven to be an almost complete disaster, but in the grassroots sense of regrowth from the bottom up.
It may seem unusual for someone who grew up in a rural area to be so concerned with the health of cities, but it actually makes a lot of sense. Urban and rural America share a common enemy in suburban sprawl. As far as suburbia goes, I'm not against it in principle. People have to live somewhere, and with a growing population, that means expanding outwards. The last time I checked, however, St. Louis City wasn't exactly running out of places for live. Also, if we're going to built new suburbs, we should be building them in ways that are not 100% car dependent. I'm also not against building new buildings. If I seem to show a bias towards older buildings, it's because so much of what we've built in the last fifty years has looked so awful. I'd love to see new construction that took into account an appreciation for aesthetics and placement - that is, something more than a concrete box in a parking lot.

Quote of the Day

"[T]oday's housing crisis of the slum is a product of yesterday's planning failure of the suburbs."
-Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (1972)

Quote of the Day

"We less and less meet our fellow man to share and exchange, and more and more encounter him as an impediment or nuisance: making the highway more crowded when we are rushing somewhere, cluttering and littering the beach or park or wood, pushing in front of us at the supermarket, taking the last parking place, polluting our air and water, building a highway through our house, blocking our view, and so on. Because we have cut off so much communication with each other we keep bumping into each other, and thus a higher and high percentage of our interpersonal contacts are abrasive."

-Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (1970).

Hiatus

I've been sporadically posting recently, and will continue to for the next two weeks, but the blog will be back and bigger after December 17.

Beautiful house of the day

(Manchester, IA)

Beautiful House of the Day

America's small towns are full of gorgeous old houses like this one:

(Manchester, IA)

Beautiful house of the day

(Dubuque, IA)

Quote of the day

Quote of the day:

“Cheap gasoline made it possible for the majority of Americans to live great distances from their workplace, which diminished their ability to care about either the place in which they lived or the place in which they worked – and especially the places in between.”

-James Howard Kunstler, Home From Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century

A Surreal Walk Down Lafayette Street Pt. 1

My recent walk down St. Louis's Lafayette Street, between Jefferson and Grand, was a rather surreal experience. The most striking aspect is the number of empty lots between buildings, like this one:

These new buildings have been added on what were presumably empty lots. While infilling is almost always a good thing, and the buildings at least were brought into harmony with the area with brick facades, I'm not a huge fan of their architecture, which is out of step with the neighborhood.

(More after the jump.)

Beautiful house of the day

(Dubuque, IA)

Quote of the day

Quote of the Day:

"It's amazing how terrible new houses look these days."

-James Howard Kunstler, Home From Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World For the 21st Century

Concrete boxes, part one

This is what passes for architecture today: a concrete box in a parking lot. (More ugliness below the jump.

(Jackson, MS)

Church of the Week

This is another feature I plan to have: Church of the week. I'll feature a church (usually in the St. Louis area) that is notable for having either beautiful or horrendous architecture.

(Birmingham, AL)

What's wrong with this picture?

(Jackson, MS)

Nice view, right? Mostly. What's missing is a sidewalk. The pedestrian can either walk on someone's lawn or on the street. Or in the gutter - an apt symbol for how America's carless are treated today.

Cool Buildings in Need of TLC

I plan to have a regular feature called "Cool Buildings in Need of TLC" - examples of beautiful, quirky, or otherwise notable old buildings that are in a state of disrepair or abandonment but that look redeemable from the outside (and, if they are, ought to be saved). Here are two from Lafayette Street in St. Louis:

Abandoned Sprawl

Some examples of what happens when ugly sprawl gets abandoned (more below the jump):

(Near Big Bend, Maplewood, MO)

Ridiculous Street Names

Ridiculous (or ridiculously pretentious) street names plague suburbia. A few examples from the Chesterfield, MO area suffice to illustrate: Graystone Manor Parkway, Manor Creek Drive, Royalbrook Drive, Towercliffe Drive, Chateau Village Drive. (The obsession with manors and royalty is telling.)

This example from Memphis, TN, however, really takes the cake.

Boeingshire Drive. As in the airplane manufacturer and a quaint locality in Great Britain. Could anything be sillier?

Says it all, doesn't it?

(Des Peres, MO)

Ugly civic architecure

Contrast this City Hall (Ridgeland, MS): 

With this one (Philadelphia, PA):

(More below the jump).

One of these things is not like the other

(Lafayette Street, St. Louis)

Quote of the day

Quote of the day:

“Places like Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Memphis, Providence, Buffalo, and many other towns great and small represent fortunes waiting to be made. They contain large tracts of essentially empty land, or severely underutilized land, begging to be redeveloped.”

-James Howard Kunstler, Home From Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century

Beautiful house of the day

This is a feature I plan to have daily: a beautiful house that highlights that architecture is capable of producing more than concrete boxes and McMansions. If I seem biased towards older houses, it's mainly because so much that has been built in the past 60 years looks awful.

(Dubuque, IA)

First Post

Welcome to Renewed City, a St. Louis based blog documenting how sprawl and decay are damaging our country's urban and rural areas, and positive steps being taken against them. I will focus on what is going on the world of sprawl, urban renewal, city planning, "gentrification," land use law, and other related areas such as transportation and energy. As much as they interest me, I will avoid national politics except as they relate to these areas. Although I'm based in St. Louis, I will include as many posts about other cities as possible.