Change for Good
Date Posted: June 4, 2014
Posted In: Discussion, Ideas,
by Tom Finan, executive director, Construction Forum STL
“St. Louis is where trends go to die.” – Joe Pollack (1931-2012), critic and reviewer of all things St. Louis
Recently I feel like I’ve been a witness to a head-on collision: the collision between the old way and the new way of implementing change in the St. Louis area and in our construction industry. Since 1976 I have written just over 400 Perspective columns for St. Louis CNR magazine. More of them than I care to count have dealt with the resistance of our area to change.
On recent day my exposure to change began with my morning coffee. Recently my wife and I moved from Webster Groves, where I lived for 33 years, to the Highland Lofts at I-40/64 and Hampton. Webster is very beautiful, but the pace of change is glacial. The Lofts are sort of in the middle of a lot of change that is remaking our area: BJC Kingshighway, Cortex, The Grove, The Loop. The vibe is young and very receptive to new ideas.
In the first floor lobby of our loft building is one of those designer coffee machines with little brewing packets. I usually stop there on my way back from my morning walk in Forest Park with Asha, our Stray Rescue Lab mix. A few times lately I have run into some young construction workers who are being housed in our building by an executive rentals company.
One morning I got their backstory. They work for a non-union hotel renovation company out of Orlando and are renovating a hotel in St. Charles. I also met the foreman for a non-union painting contractor out of Atlanta working on the same project.
From my balcony I can see the beautiful new Cortona Apartments, funded by the AFL-CIO and being built union by Holland. Just to the south are a Mercedes dealership being built by Paric and the demolition of the old Deaconess Hospital for the Zoo expansion project, on which HBD is CM. I pointed out to the painter the irony of non-union crews being housed in such close proximity to so much union work.
“I’ve been traveling the country doing (hotel renovation) work for 20 years,” he said. “It’s a niche.” Maybe so, and maybe this incursion of non-union into our labor mix is an anomaly, but you never would have seen non-union here when I wrote my first Perspective for this magazine in July, 1976. You also never would have seen some of our mainstay contractors performing some of their work non-union.
The vibe driving change that I’m feeling in my new neighborhood comes from St. Louisans of all ages and all tenures of living in our area. As I write this I have a meeting scheduled for coffee with Alex Ihnen. the young (at least in my world) owner and editor of the website NextSTL.com. Alex is the director of development for the Contemporary Art Museum and spent six years at Washington University in development. He earned a B.A. in Journalism and Masters in Public Affairs at Indiana University and has studied in Adelaide, Australia and Perugia, Italy. Alex’s website is a voracious aggregator of articles photos and other materials chronicling change, development, preservation, new ideas, and urban planning in the St. Louis metro area.
I spent some time recently visiting with real estate and development veteran Phil Hulse of Greenstreet Development. We met in his new offices, which are still very much a construction site as he renovates the former Mini Cooper dealership on Ladue Road. I met Phil a few years ago and have been tracking his under-the-radar approach to rebuilding St. Louis sustainably, one project at a time. His method is to locate buildings with good potential in lower income communities, ranging from the Ladue site to massive industrial complexes and to envision environmentally friendly repurposing for those properties.
One of the most prominent Greenstreet-developed projects is Chouteau Crossing, developed with Sheet Metal Workers Local 36 at Chouteau and Jefferson. Just south of that project on Jefferson is a radically architecturally dramatic Sav a Lot and Dollar General store in what was a derelict shopping center. Greenstreet has also developed property from North Hall Street on the Mississippi River. It’s not just one big “home run” project, but they’re all significant projects with big impact to their neighborhoods
Currently Green Street is redeveloping the former Carondelet Coke plant, a 42-acre brownfield site near River City Casino that has been on the land clearance rolls since 1994. It takes vision and the ability to work through obstacles to realize such projects.
I also spent some time with another young guy, Casey Thurman, marketing manager, for Paric. Casey, who grew up in Columbia, MO, moved Downtown when he first arrived here. He moved to Creve Coeur for a brief while, but then moved to U. City to be closer to the energy he’s seeing taking place in our area. While he is enthused with recent development, Casey is impatient to see change in such areas our region’s fractured political environment. He feels the St. Louis area throws more roadblocks in the way of development and renovation than any other city with which he is familiar.
In 1970, when I was a college undergraduate, I bought a paperback copy of Future Shock, a book by Alvin Toffler. Toffler’s thesis – which had broad play in those days, was that people were becoming overwhelmed by the rate of change in all aspects of society. Even Toffler, who was a visionary focused on the future, would have had a hard time imagining the change that took place in the ensuing years, or the rate of change we are encountering now.
He would, however, have recognized the traditional resistance to change in St. Louis. “Our psychologists and politicians alike are puzzled by the seemingly irrational resistance to change exhibited by certain individuals and groups. The corporation head who wants to reorganize a department, the educator who wants to introduce a new teaching method, the mayor who wants to achieve peaceful integration of the races in his city – all at one time or another face blind resistance,” Toffler wrote.
The neighborhood which I consider to be most symbolic of the positive change in the climate for change in St. Louis is The Grove. Building by building, block by block, the collective community — a mélange of ages, ethnicities and sexual persuasions – have built a vibrant new area from decay. They didn’t dither, fight, or ask permission: They just changed things for the better.