This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 29, 2013: Henry Shaw was only 19 when he purchased parcels of land in a swath of St. Louis prairie in 1840. The French called the natural, unpopulated habitat on the western edge of the city Prairie des Noyers, after one of the original settlers of St. Louis.
It was a rural landscape on the fringes of the urban, and Shaw’s ideal spot for a garden and the city’s first suburban developments, marked by Shaw’s country retreat.
Shaw’s gardens are still there, as the landmark Missouri Botanical Garden, and the Tower Grove House inside the present-day Garden’s walls still bears the look of a country home. But outside the garden’s walls, the suburban developments have become decidedly urban. Within blocks are multi-family apartments, single-family manses, Tower Grove Park and an industrial corridor lining railroad tracks that follow what was a river in Shaw’s days.
“The great asset that we have as a city is that the existing infrastructure and layout of our neighborhoods do lend themselves to a walkable, dense environment and that's highly desirable,” said Brent Crittenden, the managing principal for Urban Improvement Construction, an architect-led development company based three blocks north of the Garden.
Five neighborhoods – Forest Park Southeast, Tiffany, Botanical Heights, Shaw and Southwest Garden – make up the Garden District. That area is roughly bounded by Interstate 64 to the north, Grand Boulevard to the east, Magnolia and Connecticut avenues to the south and Hampton Avenue and Kingshighway to the west – a large area, but one that shares aspirations and focus.
Central location
Lisette Dennis, a grants manager and literary arts programmer at the Regional Arts Commission, has lived in a shotgun house south of Manchester Avenue in Forest Park Southeast for the past 10 years. A native of St. Louis and former Benton Park resident, Dennis moved to the area because of “renewed interest and renovation” and central location.
“It’s very, very convenient,” Dennis said, noting that the Grove, the Central West End and neighborhoods south to Tower Grove Park are within walking or biking distance. The neighborhoods of the Garden District “are like cousins,” she said, and her network of neighborliness extends well beyond Forest Park Southeast.
“I will often bike over down Tower Grove Avenue to Tower Grove Park from here, it’s really a hop, skip and a jump. And on my way I often run into people I know, because our neighborhoods are so close together,” Dennis said.
Still, the neighborhood boundaries are important -- ”urban planning things like the highways and really large streets have a tendency to separate neighborhoods,” Dennis said.
A place for youth
Jeanette McDermott, vice president of the Shaw Neighborhood Improvement Association, knew she had found a home upon seeing the Garden District’s leafy streets and proximity to the Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park.
“There’s only one place to live in St. Louis, and that’s within spitting distance of Tower Grove Park,” McDermott said.
Two and a half years ago, McDermott moved to St. Louis after spending several years in Central America, including three years living off the grid in Costa Rica. A teacher and multimedia artist, McDermott is spearheading her neighborhood’s recently restarted Youth Committee.
The committee’s first meeting was this past Wednesday. Attending were “neighborhood leaders, parents, teachers, artists and people who have worked in the youth development field." Their knowledge was supplemented with dozens of “ad hoc interviews” McDermott conducted on the streets of Shaw with area youth.
McDermott said the Youth Committee may spark neighborhood collaboration that had been lacking before. Residents from the five neighborhoods included in the Kresge’s Garden District area met initially to discuss the potential identified in this project, and continued to meet weekly from then on.
During those meetings, “the conversations have been about a Garden District, and finding a way to integrate the arts scene and the artists and the youth around all of that, that mix,” McDermott said.
The Youth Committee plans to move meetings to different areas in the neighborhood to cast a wide net. McDermott said the scope would be more challenging, but ultimately more rewarding.
“We’re really ready to move on it, we’re really ready to get started, so we are looking for people with innovative ideas, strategies, best practices, if they’ve lived places that have already done something similar to this, if they have a particular passion with youth or art or landscaping or beautification or history, we’re looking to bring the whole mix together, to bring people together to really discuss and dialogue these things so that we can come up with something pretty spectacular.”
And the difficulties in bringing this large area together include the structural.
Vandergrove
Even though all five of the neighborhoods that make up the Garden District lie within, at the most, two miles of each other by the way of the crow, a bevy of physical barriers tend to divide: Streets can dead-end at Interstate 44; ways across the railroads are in short supply, and one-way streets and street-blocking barrels restrict flow. But recent pushes by area residents and organizations such as Urban Improvement Construction are trying to dismantle the physical barriers, hoping that a more unified area will follow suit.
Rebuilding blocks
The St. Louis Beacon has been following the Kresge Arts Community Grant for several months, reporting independently. Four areas in St. Louis City and County were selected by the grant's steering committee: Old North St. Louis, Midtown, The Garden District and The Delmar Loop. These do not necessarily conform to the city's neighborhood map; indeed, the Garden and Loop areas are significantly larger.
The Kresge committee, with DiCentral Client Solutions consultant Kris Lewis, has set up focus groups consisting of neighborhood leaders, long-time residents, artists and interested parties to define needs, desires and general boundaries of each area. With input from these groups, the local group will apply for a Kresge grant to support specific arts and health and human services programming.
This article is part of a four-part series profiling each neighborhood. See: Kresge articles, including Old North: A web of artists, rehabbers and general characters; Midtown: Beneath the glimmering lights, grassroots take hold; Artists at work in neighborhoods around the Loop; St. Louis experiment hopes to use 'embedded arts' to build neighborhoods. Open mics were held in Old North, Midtown, the Loop and Garden District.
The Beacon's reporting is supported by the Kresge grant.
UIC is the developer of new and renovated homes and apartment buildings as well as the City Garden Montessori School and the Olio and Elaia restaurants. Its commercial interests in Botanical Heights no doubt help inform its push for greater accessibility.
UIC’s Crittenden pointed to “unfortunate divides … some heavily manmade, some more natural.” Last summer his group released its own study of the Garden District that includes a plan for new development and a reconfiguration of infrastructure.
Titled Vandegrove, a nod to the intersection of Tower Grove Avenue and Vandeventer, the proposal calls for the opening streets and increased emphasis on walkability and bikeability, redistributing traffic away from Tower Grove Avenue and Vandeventer.
It would combat the railroad’s division of the area by trying to improve north-south connections. And a key element of that is opening Thurman north of Shaw.
The company’s vision of bike lanes and improved pedestrian elements – dubbed the Thurman Underpass Project – won a crowd-sourced competition last year and work has begun.
Annie White, a UIC architecture intern, said the area’s artistic community would be involved down to improving “the basic infrastructure of the street” bringing “creativity to these mundane objects such as crosswalks, and light poles, and benches, and bike racks, and way-finding signages and all these things that don’t need to be white stripes on the street.
“They can be much more; they can bring a really unique quality to the neighborhood that would create a sense of identity,” White said.
On the other side of the Interstate, Sherri Koehm has lived in the Tiffany neighborhood for more than 20 years. Koehm said that as a member of the Tiffany Neighborhood Association, recent collaboration had opened up "lines of communication" between the neighborhoods within the district. Koehm said that she hoped other neighborhood's events, pointing to Shaw's popular annual Arts Fair, could help connect the area if neighborhoods moved toward sharing events and organizations.
"That's one of the main reasons we'd really like to see the Thurman Underpass opened, because that would help connect the neighborhoods: We see the garden as the anchor that joins all the neighborhoods together."