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OT: Midtown Development


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3 hours ago, Old guy said:

I think you are dreaming theory SLU 72, as Bonwich said this has been proven not to be true. For example let's compare St. Louis downtown with Boston's downtown. Boston has professional sports teams in abundance (Patriots, Red Sox, Bruins, Celtics) but no stadiums or arenas, as far as I know, are downtown. The Patriots play in Foxborough 20 miles south of downtown, the Sox play in Back Bay, not the downtown area, I have no idea where the other teams play. The downtown area caters to businesses, and commerce primarily and it is really alive and vibrant (and very expensive). The only event area they have near downtown is the theater district which is a real problem getting into and out of but which  survives and attracts people to it. St. Louis likes to pile stadiums and sports arenas downtown creating traffic logjams and large areas that are unused for a significant portion of the year. Some of these arenas (Scottrade Center) have been successful holding music and performance events, but mostly they are empty off season. I think Bonwich is correct. 

You've never heard of or seen the Boston Garden?!?! (just giving you crap)

There are a number of cities much closer to St. Louis and with more comparable attributes that can be used as guides (look at the growth of Nashville based primarily on a massive investment in a new convention center or we hear about Indianapolis and other cities in our region trending up even Kansas City). There are positive things going on in the St. Louis region, but nothing that seems to have really improved downtown so to say. St. Louis is kind of an odd nut to crack in that everything is so spread out with many of our biggest companies sitting outside of the city and living downtown isn't necessarily convenient nor is it in the center of all of the action (I guess during the summer with the Cardinals, but with Ballpark Village monopolizing the fan experience, it has turned into a very corporate chain environment with most fans likely not leaving that immediate area and again not making downtown a much more desirable place to live). I consistently have coworkers traveling in town for the projects I manage and I go out of my way to take them to the different neighborhoods and areas of St. Louis, but I often wonder how a visitor in town for say a hockey game would view our city when tourists typically equate downtown with a city. It is a great place to live and grow up, but I can't imagine it is a real enjoyable city to visit. Can we just start over?

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Maybe I am a dreamer, but if the stadium is built near the union station, hopefully union station improves heavily since its really not much at all for a big city. 

Also maybe in the picture then if there becomes a Chicago fire rivalry we could see a high speed rail into the city from Chicago to Stl in the next 10 years which could be great for shopping and sports

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6 hours ago, cheeseman said:

The Red Sox and the BB and Hockey teams play in the city.  I have read all the studies on this topic also but honestly, the issue is not where the stadiums are built but that they are built.  There are benefits to these teams being in a city that often are not measured by these studies.  They also assume that everybody will just spend the money they spend on sports somewhere else in the city - this not necessarily true - for example the money I spend for Billiken tix and the donation I make each year would not just be spent on movies or eating out anyway.  Now whether tax money should be used or not is another discussion entirely which is really where most of these studies start their metrics of if it is worthwhile or not.  If not having these teams were of no or little benefit then see what would happen if the Cardinals left for another town or the Yankees moved - my point is those teams like many others would be sorely missed.

Yes, the Boston Garden is located downtown Boston, the Fenway is a the extreme West end of the city, in Back Bay right next to Brookline and the Harvard Medical Complex, kind of on the side in a fairly dilapidated section. The football stadium is 20 miles South in Foxborough. Downtown Boston is not much larger than downtown St. Louis (I am not counting the North or East Ends, Southie or Back Bay). Other than the Boston Garden which is downtown Boston, the downtown is purely business, commercial and resident areas, some of them with beautiful well preserved colonial era housing (Beacon Hill). The city is a very desirable place to live, very expensive and quite alive and vibrant.

Take the St. Louis downtown, in a similar area it contains a major baseball park plus associated commercial areas, the Scottrade Center, the (now unused) football stadium, a major Casino, the renovated Kiel, and now they are planning a soccer park. All of these places other than the casino are not used year round, they stay vacant for variable periods of time every year. The downtown area is de facto a transient place where people go to attend sports games or see shows and then head back home. These largely empty stadiums need many parking lots to accommodate the flow of fans and cars coming to the games and events. In the off season the parking lots are largely vacant too. All of these parks and stadiums take a large amount of space. There is little commerce left downtown, no supermarkets are open there (you have to go to the Central West End to find one), and businesses are fleeing the place and relocating to the county. People, even people living in St. Louis City, do not go downtown unless they happen to work downtown or wish to attend a sports event or like. The loft area in Washington Ave is not very big and has stopped growing. When the young people living there have kids they relocate elsewhere seeking better school systems. Downtown is just not designed to work in a way that fosters sustainable development.

A new soccer stadium will make the St. Louis downtown even more of a place filled with largely empty structures and empty parking lots for long stretches of time during the year. The rest of the city is a fine place to live with nice neighborhoods, downtown is not, and the more sport parks and venues that get located downtown, the worse it will get. Why not locate the soccer stadium away from downtown but accessible by roads? The sad thing is that St. Louis could be every bit as alive and vibrant as Boston is, if they developed it to attract business and commerce, not sports and events venues. Ikea is a major plus for St. Louis, so is Cortex and the areas around it. But these are not located downtown.

By the way Yankee Stadium is in the South Bronx. This is not a place I would consider safe enough to go to. If the Yankees moved elsewhere, well the Bronx would still be the Bronx...

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14 hours ago, Old guy said:

Yes, the Boston Garden is located downtown Boston, the Fenway is a the extreme West end of the city, in Back Bay right next to Brookline and the Harvard Medical Complex, kind of on the side in a fairly dilapidated section. The football stadium is 20 miles South in Foxborough. Downtown Boston is not much larger than downtown St. Louis (I am not counting the North or East Ends, Southie or Back Bay). Other than the Boston Garden which is downtown Boston, the downtown is purely business, commercial and resident areas, some of them with beautiful well preserved colonial era housing (Beacon Hill). The city is a very desirable place to live, very expensive and quite alive and vibrant.

Take the St. Louis downtown, in a similar area it contains a major baseball park plus associated commercial areas, the Scottrade Center, the (now unused) football stadium, a major Casino, the renovated Kiel, and now they are planning a soccer park. All of these places other than the casino are not used year round, they stay vacant for variable periods of time every year. The downtown area is de facto a transient place where people go to attend sports games or see shows and then head back home. These largely empty stadiums need many parking lots to accommodate the flow of fans and cars coming to the games and events. In the off season the parking lots are largely vacant too. All of these parks and stadiums take a large amount of space. There is little commerce left downtown, no supermarkets are open there (you have to go to the Central West End to find one), and businesses are fleeing the place and relocating to the county. People, even people living in St. Louis City, do not go downtown unless they happen to work downtown or wish to attend a sports event or like. The loft area in Washington Ave is not very big and has stopped growing. When the young people living there have kids they relocate elsewhere seeking better school systems. Downtown is just not designed to work in a way that fosters sustainable development.

A new soccer stadium will make the St. Louis downtown even more of a place filled with largely empty structures and empty parking lots for long stretches of time during the year. The rest of the city is a fine place to live with nice neighborhoods, downtown is not, and the more sport parks and venues that get located downtown, the worse it will get. Why not locate the soccer stadium away from downtown but accessible by roads? The sad thing is that St. Louis could be every bit as alive and vibrant as Boston is, if they developed it to attract business and commerce, not sports and events venues. Ikea is a major plus for St. Louis, so is Cortex and the areas around it. But these are not located downtown.

By the way Yankee Stadium is in the South Bronx. This is not a place I would consider safe enough to go to. If the Yankees moved elsewhere, well the Bronx would still be the Bronx...

Not sure what your point is -all I simply said is that in Boston the hockey, bb, and Sox played in the city.  I never said they played downtown.  Apparently the people in NY don't feel the same way as you do about the location of Yankee Stadium and yes I have been to that stadium as well as Fenway.  As I said, where the stadiums are located is not that important just that the city has the teams available to them.

 

 

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4 hours ago, bonwich said:

If you're talking about the private cars, they're already running in and out of there. If you're talking about Amtrak, ain't happening in our lifetimes. 

Yes. I am talking about Amtrak.  The current transportation center is embarrassing.  Remind me again why we moved the trains out of the train station and then decided to resurrect Union Station in the 1980s with downtown shopping, restaurants and a singing fudge shop along with a movie theater in back.  The theater soon closed, hotels and restaurants came and went and with the latest hotel hanging on by its fingernails.  Inside Union Station, the retail  has long dried up and there has been nothing to buy except for Cardinals spirit wear in every window... Anyone been to Union Station in Washington DC?   Why is that not our model?  Instead, we then build a transportation hub which is small and hard to find and makes us look less than a small town.  Now, we will resurrect Union Station, yet again, with foot traffic from an outdoor soccer stadium?  Really?

 

 

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24 minutes ago, Clock_Tower said:

Yes. I am talking about Amtrak.  The current transportation center is embarrassing.  Remind me again why we moved the trains out of the train station and then decided to resurrect Union Station in the 1980s with downtown shopping, restaurants and a singing fudge shop along with a movie theater in back.  The theater soon closed, hotels and restaurants came and went and with the latest hotel hanging on by its fingernails.  Inside Union Station, the retail  has long dried up and there has been nothing to buy except for Cardinals spirit wear in every window... Anyone been to Union Station in Washington DC?   Why is that not our model?  Instead, we then build a transportation hub which is small and hard to find and makes us look less than a small town.  Now, we will resurrect Union Station, yet again, with foot traffic from an outdoor soccer stadium?  Really?

 

 

Through stations are much more efficient than terminal stations like Union Station was. It saves a lot of time, which is something that Amtrak needs all the help it can get. Also, it's disappointing that the new station is just stuck under the freeway, but the station actually works pretty well. It connects Amtrak, Greyhound, Metrolink and Metrobus all in one location. It's pretty useful as someone who has used it occasionally.

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59 minutes ago, BigMouthBilliken said:

Insider scoop is that SLU purchases Humps and Diablitos. Will be turning Diabs into an actually bookstore/coffee area. To me this is a wasted opportunity 

Well seems like the corner of Spring and Laclede will be a parking lot if this is true. 

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On 2/13/2017 at 0:12 PM, cheeseman said:

Not sure what your point is -all I simply said is that in Boston the hockey, bb, and Sox played in the city.  I never said they played downtown.  Apparently the people in NY don't feel the same way as you do about the location of Yankee Stadium and yes I have been to that stadium as well as Fenway.  As I said, where the stadiums are located is not that important just that the city has the teams available to them.

Cheeseman NYC is approximately 3 times the size of the St. Louis Metro Area, and that is the city proper, not  counting the urban sprawl that goes almost without interruption into NJ, CT,  and RI. The discussion about the  new soccer stadium has been centered about locating it downtown St. Louis, which is a relatively small area full of other sports venues and parking lots. If you do not care where this new facility it is located, then it could go into St. Charles, or South St. Louis and still be available to the city. That might not be a bad idea and it would keep downtown St. Louis' number of large ( and largely empty) sports type complexes and parking lots at the current level which is a plus. This is the point I am trying to make, St. Louis downtown is choking with sports complexes and this makes the downtown area largely a transient area. Most cities that have facilities for multiple professional sports do not pile the complexes close to one another but tend to space them.

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13 hours ago, BigMouthBilliken said:

Insider scoop is that SLU purchases Humps and Diablitos. Will be turning Diabs into an actually bookstore/coffee area. To me this is a wasted opportunity 

You've got to be kidding??  Wasted?  I'd love to know the source for this story of Diablitos becoming a bookstore so I can shout it from the rooftops to my other pinko radical tenured socialist friends on campus...

Last I heard, major universities have actual bookstores nearby.  And some of us actually like books, and hanging around in bookstores, browsing, sipping coffee, and so on.  Even some who are not socialists.  Many of us have been whining about having a decent bookstore near campus since I've been here, and they were supposedly building one on the lot that is now a dog park with regurgitated monstrosities that somebody believed was art.  There are actually no bookstores in the city besides Left Bank; so this would be just swell by me... YAY!

 

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4 minutes ago, DoctorB said:

Many of us have been whining about having a decent bookstore near campus since I've been here, and they were supposedly building one on the lot that is now a dog park with regurgitated monstrosities that somebody believed was art. 

Best dog park in the city.

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26 minutes ago, DoctorB said:

You've got to be kidding??  Wasted?  I'd love to know the source for this story of Diablitos becoming a bookstore so I can shout it from the rooftops to my other pinko radical tenured socialist friends on campus...

Last I heard, major universities have actual bookstores nearby.  And some of us actually like books, and hanging around in bookstores, browsing, sipping coffee, and so on.  Even some who are not socialists.  Many of us have been whining about having a decent bookstore near campus since I've been here, and they were supposedly building one on the lot that is now a dog park with regurgitated monstrosities that somebody believed was art.  There are actually no bookstores in the city besides Left Bank; so this would be just swell by me... YAY!

 

Yeah that's great. I enjoy reading cat in the hat and drinking cappuccino every now and then but SLU campus is seriously lacking a place for Students to Get up and blow off steam also I feel like there's no longer a campus pregame option besides fieldhouse 

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