The Missouri Botanical Garden’s Green Homes Festival is this Saturday, and don’t forget that, in addition to all the eco-friendly fun they have planned, you can drop by and help paint the bus! (Space is limited, but fun is a sure thing!)
In the meantime, check out this video that the Hoover Boys & Girls Club put up regarding their bus painting event a few weeks ago:
(Click here if you don’t see the video embedded in this post.)
Photo by Dan Donovan
On Thursday (September 10), Metro’s Arts in Transit will be hosting the dedication ceremony for artist Janet Lofquist’s new sculpture. The piece was commissioned by Metro for the Delmar Loop Transit Plaza. The ceremony is open to the public, so if you’ve ever been curious about public art, Metro’s Arts in Transit program, or just want to see a fascinating new work with a chance to talk directly to the artist, feel free to come out.
The piece is called “Hive.” To see why, check out this video clip of the artist discussing her piece with former Metro intern Matt. (Also this week’s Featured Video in the sidebar!) Ms. Lofquist’s artist statement says that her work on this piece was inspired by the regeneration of the urban community:
As an understood symbol for the collective spirit of the community, [the beehive] has a cultural, political, and religious history. What starts out as a beehive shape, the hexagonal geometry transitions into a spiral of growth and ends in an abstracted question mark.
The ceremony will take place at 6p.m. at the Regional Arts Commission, 6128 Delmar Blvd., followed by viewing the piece and one-on-one Q&A with the artist at the site, Delmar Transit Plaza across from the Delmar Loop MetroLink Station. Feel free to send us your photos of the sculpture so we can share them on the blog.
UPDATE: The Post-Dispatch publishes a nice article about Hive.
The chatter on all the urban blogs today is about Culinaria, the new mini-Schnucks that is opening downtown today on the corner of 9th & Olive. Steve Patterson of UrbanReviewSTL already has a few complaints, but overall the buzz seems to be pretty positive. The coolest thing I’ve read is that they will hold your groceries for you if you shop at lunchtime, so you can pick them up on your way home. I don’t see that information on the website, though – does anyone know if this is true?
Either way, it’s definitely an advance for downtown and I’m glad that City Grocery will still be around too – they are switching focus to gourmet foods. I doubt the residential growth downtown would have been possible without someone filling in the gap til a larger store was willing to relocate.
UPDATE: Matt at St. Louis Investment Realty points out that there is also a 12,000 square foot grocery opening up in Benton Park. Hooray!
This story about the sleek modern bike racks in the transit mall downtown Portland got me to thinking. One thing that I’ve noticed since I started my tenure at Metro is that I have a much greater appreciation for civil engineering and urban planning than I did before. Previously, I passed over bridges and roads, seeing them as a tool to get me from A to B, but never really seeing them. If I thought about them at all, it was only to hope they were safe and not too congested to delay me for long.
But bridges can also be beautiful works of art, of course, and there’s a lot more that goes into planning a roadway than the casual eye appreciates. Curb height, signal timing, pedestrian planning – these are all aspects of civil design that we only notice when they aren’t done well, and even then it’s just a sort of “ugh” feeling about a particular space. Urban planning is a fascinating study that treats roadways, bikeways, sidewalks, and transit as cogs in an intricate machine. The most successful uses of space should be functional, obviously, but they can also be lovely. Steve Patterson explains here why the new style bike racks are much more functional than the traditional “dish drainer” kind we are all familiar with.
Which brings me back to the bike racks: Portland is a lovely city, and a heavily transit-using city. If the bus shelters and the bike racks (or the buses themselves, for that matter) look grungy and industrial and generic, that unnecessarily inserts an unlovely element into an otherwise lovely space. It’s nice to consider form when you’re thinking about function.
While searching through the Post-Dispatch’s Building Blocks blog, I ran across an old but interesting post about job sprawl, a term I’d never heard until today. According to Tim, a study from the Brookings Institute looked at job density and ranked cities in order of highest to lowest. St. Louis, as you might imagine, is pretty close to the bottom of the list, i.e. has less job concentration and more job sprawl.
We could rehash all of the old arguments about sprawl here, but what I actually found interesting about the article is how it highlights another reason why planning public transit in St. Louis is a real challenge. Metro’s official mission is “Regional economic development through excellence in transportation,” which is one reason that Metro is very conscious of serving job centers. That’s hard enough in any city, but what happens if, as they say, the center does not hold? As job centers deteriorate and companies locate willy-nilly across the region, it becomes more and more difficult to identify (and thereby structure transit around) job “centers.” You can see, by looking at the job sprawl phenomenon, that planning for transit needs to be just one part of a regional plan that should address not just roads and buses and trains, but also serves to coordinate development of job and industry centers.
One final note: I, too, will be interested in seeing the follow-up study on whether the jobs are sprawling because the people are.
