Great Rivers Greenway broke ground Monday morning on the north connector section of the Brickline Greenway that traverses north St. Louis and will connect Fairground Park to Midtown.
Over the next two years of construction, the project will transform portions of North Grand Blvd. and Spring Ave., adding dedicated bike and pedestrian paths and reducing the traffic throughput.
“It’s a total overhaul. We’re going to have to rebuild everything: new greenway, new roadway, new sidewalks,” said Great Rivers Greenway CEO Susan Trautman. “We’ll be going down from five lanes to one lane in each direction and a center turn lane.”
While the official groundbreaking was Monday, Trautman said construction will begin in earnest in May.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones said she was pleased to see the plans move forward to connect the city with safer options for pedestrians and cyclists.
“Biking around Saint Louis will make you fall in love with the city all over again,” she said. “I am so thrilled that more people will get to experience that as we make it safer and easier to get around on bike and on foot.”
And Jones stressed the importance of new roadway infrastructure for North St. Louis communities.
“Too often, north city and its residents have been forgotten when transformational projects like this have rolled through St Louis,” she said. “This part of town has been left on the sidelines for far too long, but those days are over.”
Trautman said the design responds to concerns and incorporates desires raised by community members immediately adjacent to the project. Things like pedestrian safety or lighting, as well as elements that add to the experience of the neighborhood, like public art, native plants, trees, and others, she said.
“You’ll feel safe in ways that you don’t right now, and that really changes how people view a place,” she said. “We all want to live in a place that’s beautiful, that feels safe. That’s the goal here, to make north St. Louis city, a place where people really want to go and live.”
Trautman explained that the goal is for new hard infrastructure in pedestrian and bike paths and a calmer roadway to lay a foundation that attracts economic development to a part of St. Louis in need of it. But she adds that is beyond the scope of Great Rivers Greenway and part of why the organization helped establish a community development corporation in neighborhoods adjacent to the forthcoming greenway.
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“We’re not looking to own economic development,” Trautman said. “We are looking to help the community grow wealth, grow opportunity.”
That goal is inherently challenging given the history of population loss, housing deterioration, vacancy and other economic conditions working against this part of North St. Louis, said Jeremy Main, who directs community development at Mission St. Louis and is a Jeff-Vander-Lou resident.
“We’ve had a tough go,” he said. “The cards are often stacked against even really good ideas. The real estate market is completely upside down in this neighborhood, [which] makes construction projects really difficult.”
Main added he’s excited and encouraged by the way the new greenway project has come together, pointing to the way Great Rivers Greenway staff gathered community feedback from a part of St. Louis that has “been over-promised and under-delivered for so long.”
“They were patient, kind, careful, persistent and willing to [have] the hard conversations about the fears as well as the aspirations,” Main said. “That went a long way. We were able to have those explanations and a deeper understanding of the project [and] come away with a deeper understanding of how responsive the project could be.”
North Newstead Association Executive Director Constance Siu agreed.
“Oftentimes, when we talk about infrastructure projects, we don't talk about the future displacement, we don't talk about the gentrification, we don't talk about the people that may not be here to benefit,” she said, adding Great Rivers Greenway staff worked to engage on these issues and concerns.
The new greenway can offer a foundation for economic revitalization in the neighborhoods it runs through, like Jeff-Vander-Lou or Covenant Blu-Grand Center.
“When my family moved to this community, Grand was a place where you could literally get everything,” said Ward 11 Alderwoman Laura Keys. “This neighborhood, once again, will become a vibrant strip.”
Keys shared how decades ago, the area along north Grand had abundant retail options and services like a DMV, cleaners, food and clothing stores. Covenant Blu Grand Center Neighborhood Association president Audrey Ellerman also noted this history and said she’s excited by the potential that the new greenway can bring.
“It’s time to bring life back into the neighborhood,” Ellerman said. “It’s really feeling relief that the forgotten neighborhood is finally being looked at, and it’s finally going to happen.”
Mayor Jones also reflected on this point.
“Every investment we make in this area will be even more effective because of the Brickline Greenway,” she said.
There are still residents who are skeptical and concerned about how the new greenway may affect the surrounding neighborhoods in the future, Main said. But he added the new Brickline North Community Development Corporation, which he’s a board member of, puts the area in a stronger position to guide development that’s inclusive of residents’ needs.
“Part of what’s exciting, and part of why some really good ideas have really not come to fruition, either on the scale they could have or at all is because there were major missing pieces to the civic or organization infrastructure along the Brickline alignment,” Main said. “As we start filling those gaps, ideas start becoming more actionable by default because there's more capacity to execute.”
He also said that allows building on other successful developments in the area, like Tabernacle Community Development Corporation’s work to bring services and new housing stock to the area.
This part of the Brickline in north St. Louis is part of the larger $245 million project by Great Rivers Greenway to connect Forest Park to the Gateway Arch with dedicated bike and pedestrian paths. Trautman said the project is 62% fully funded, and all but one section of the greater project is in planning, design or construction.
She expects the portions connecting St. Louis University to Cass Ave and the Grand Metro stop to Cortex will go into construction next year, with the section from Energizer Park to the Gateway Arch launching in about two to three years.
“By 2030, that’s the goal; we’ll have it all linked, and then you’ll go, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize all these were connected,’” she said.
This story has been updated with comments from Tishaura Jones, Constance Siu and Laura Keys.
