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.