OT: Midtown Development

[brianstl]

I guess nextSTL is dead now.  That is a shame.

[bonwich]

What do you hear? It's been pretty slow since the new kid took over, but it's been tweeting as recently as Tuesday. 

[brianstl]

1 hour ago, bonwich said:

What do you hear? It's been pretty slow since the new kid took over, but it's been tweeting as recently as Tuesday. 

Haven't heard anything besides that Inhen moved and was selling the site to the Nebula guy.  No new content has been posted on the site in almost a month.  

[SShoe]

Just now, brianstl said:

Haven't heard anything besides that Inhen moved and was selling the site Nebula guy.  No new content has been posted on the site in almost a month.  

Can't imagine the site was worth much.  You're right, not much has been posted despite a lot of recent development news.  Alex was the lifeblood of that site.

[Slu let the dogs out?]

20 hours ago, brianstl said:

Haven't heard anything besides that Inhen moved and was selling the site to the Nebula guy.  No new content has been posted on the site in almost a month.  

That's unfortunate. I assume Inhen is moving to another city? 

 

EDIT: Just read he's moving to WKRP in Cincinnati 

[White Pelican]

5 hours ago, Slu let the dogs out? said:

That's unfortunate. I assume Inhen is moving to another city? 

 

EDIT: Just read he's moving to WKRP in Cincinnati 

He'll get tired of packing and unpacking...

[Compton]

It was a great site while it lasted. Alex did a helluva job. 

[Bills_06]

Video walking through the new dorm.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/walk-through-st-louis-university-s-new--story-dorm/html_dcd4b264-67d1-514d-af2b-e8da5e11c90a.html

[Box and Won]

Pre-/post-game pizza spot opening soon...

http://www.feastmagazine.com/the-feed/st_louis_news/article_00d3f1f4-837e-11e7-b44e-a7bb29e88213.html

[thetorch]

On 8/3/2017 at 7:46 AM, brianstl said:

I guess nextSTL is dead now.  That is a shame.

3 new stories in the last 2 days.

[TheBand]

Piece on the new SLU hospital.  Picture of exterior certainly makes it look suburban 

http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/staff-opinions-front-and-center-in-new-slu-hospital-design/article_05e9dacd-6745-50a2-a54c-4d4ed6cf035f.html

[Cowboy]

1 hour ago, TheBand said:

Piece on the new SLU hospital.  Picture of exterior certainly makes it look suburban 

http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/staff-opinions-front-and-center-in-new-slu-hospital-design/article_05e9dacd-6745-50a2-a54c-4d4ed6cf035f.html

-what makes the exterior look suburban as opposed to another look? 

[Box and Won]

10 hours ago, Cowboy said:

-what makes the exterior look suburban as opposed to another look? 

Low density.

[brianstl]

23 minutes ago, Box and Won said:

Low density.

Isn't this kind of the norm for hospitals?  Even old City Hospital was built in what today would be considered a suburban set up.  Desloge Tower is set a 1/4 block back from Grand.  Just by being a hospital they aren't a pedestrian friendly location. 

[hsmith19]

The setback, the wasted green space, and the positioning and visibility of the parking structures all look pretty suburban. Not sure I follow on how the old City Hospital could be considered suburban. No huge setback, no wasted space (before they started demolishing outbuildings anyway), and no parking structures to dominate the complex.

The design of this one could certainly be worse, but I think it's fair to say it's got a suburban feel to it.

[Box and Won]

2 hours ago, brianstl said:

Isn't this kind of the norm for hospitals?  Even old City Hospital was built in what today would be considered a suburban set up.  Desloge Tower is set a 1/4 block back from Grand.  Just by being a hospital they aren't a pedestrian friendly location. 

I suppose so, but I was kind of hoping for something more along the lines of the BJC complex.

[brianstl]

9 minutes ago, hsmith19 said:

The setback, the wasted green space, and the positioning and visibility of the parking structures all look pretty suburban. Not sure I follow on how the old City Hospital could be considered suburban. No huge setback, no wasted space (before they started demolishing outbuildings anyway), and no parking structures to dominate the complex.

The design of this one could certainly be worse, but I think it's fair to say it's got a suburban feel to it.

Most of the out buildings at city hospital were built after the original complex.  City Hospital's main entrance sat back 1/4 block from Lafayette on a circle driveway.   Both the corners at Lafayette were green space.

[brianstl]

2 minutes ago, Box and Won said:

I suppose so, but I was kind of hoping for something more along the lines of the BJC complex.

Even that complex has multiple parking structures on Kingshighway and I think it only has one entrance on Kingshighway while it occupies 4 city blocks.

[hsmith19]

9 minutes ago, brianstl said:

Most of the out buildings at city hospital were built after the original complex.  City Hospital's main entrance sat back 1/4 block from Lafayette on a circle driveway.   Both the corners at Lafayette were green space.

Yes, the hospital was originally one building, but my point is that even with the extra buildings the complex was not suburban in character. It was a quite dense complex before the outbuildings were demolished. Even the outbuildings predated WWII, interstate highways, and suburban style hospital complexes as we know them today. When the City Hospital finally closed in the 1980s it was still a very good example of an urban complex interconnected with its surroundings, or at least as much as it could be with highways tearing the surrounding neighborhoods apart.

In none of the several iterations of the City Hospital I've seen was there empty suburban-style park space between Lafayette and the entrance like the one with the bike trail in the rendering above. Those kinds of designs just didn't exist until after WWII, which is why they're called suburban in the first place. That's very different from a multi-story building fronting directly on a circle drive. Comparing the two side by side is actually an excellent illustration of the difference between early 20th Century urban design and contemporary suburban development.

[hsmith19]

32 minutes ago, Box and Won said:

I suppose so, but I was kind of hoping for something more along the lines of the BJC complex.

Cathedral Hill in San Francisco and the GW Hospital in Foggy Bottom are good examples of contemporary hospital complexes that still manage to be highly urban and embedded within the existing neighborhood. The SLU design above is a long way away from those.

[brianstl]

36 minutes ago, hsmith19 said:

Yes, the hospital was originally one building, but my point is that even with the extra buildings the complex was not suburban in character. It was a quite dense complex before the outbuildings were demolished. Even the outbuildings predated WWII, interstate highways, and suburban style hospital complexes as we know them today. When the City Hospital finally closed in the 1980s it was still a very good example of an urban complex interconnected with its surroundings, or at least as much as it could be with highways tearing the surrounding neighborhoods apart.

In none of the several iterations of the City Hospital I've seen was there empty suburban-style park space between Lafayette and the entrance like the one with the bike trail in the rendering above. Those kinds of designs just didn't exist until after WWII, which is why they're called suburban in the first place. That's very different from a multi-story building fronting directly on a circle drive. Comparing the two side by side is actually an excellent illustration of the difference between early 20th Century urban design and contemporary suburban development.

Large amounts of green space surrounding a hospital in the city isn't something new.

Old City Hospital

The Old City Asylum (now run by the state)

Homer G Phillips

Deaconess Hospital

[hsmith19]

19th and early 20th Century green space was almost always true greenfield, not infill development. Look at your first and third pictures. That's undeveloped land, not park land designed into a new "urban" development within an existing neighborhood.

Here is a view of the entrance to Homer G. Phillips. Compare that to the rendering for the new SLU development and ask yourself if they really look equally "suburban:"

Here's one more way of looking at it: if/when the new SLU hospital closes, can you imagine it being redeveloped as "urban" residential as both the City Hospital and Homer Phillips have been?

[brianstl]

56 minutes ago, hsmith19 said:

19th and early 20th Century green space was almost always true greenfield, not infill development. Look at your first and third pictures. That's undeveloped land, not park land designed into a new "urban" development within an existing neighborhood.

Here is a view of the entrance to Homer G. Phillips. Compare that to the rendering for the new SLU development and ask yourself if they really look equally "suburban:"

Ask me that 80 years from now after additions are made to the building. The front is a addition built long after it opened.

Homer G Phillips was built in the middle of the Ville.  It was a well established neighborhood. They tore down houses and businesses to build it.

[hsmith19]

13 minutes ago, brianstl said:

Ask me that 80 years from now after addition ma are made to the building. The front is a addition built long after it opened.

Homer G Phillips was built in the middle of the Ville.  It was a well established neighborhood. They tore down houses and businesses to build it.

As I said, your first and third pictures are examples of hospitals surrounded by undeveloped land. There was a reason I excluded Homer Phillips, which came along several decades later and was not surrounded by green space at all. But all three are examples of true urban hospital complexes that bear almost no resemblance to the new SLU design.

How exactly do you think any of these hospitals are similar to the new SLU design? All you've come up with so far is City Hospital's circle driveway, which again is about 180 degrees removed from the vast swatch of empty lawn and bike paths that separates the SLU entrance from the streetscape.

[brianstl]

Deaconess wasn't built in an undeveloped  area either.  It was built in 1930 in the Oakland/Dogtown neighborhood.