DC's Forgotten River

Excellent piece by my co-worker.

Revitalizing DC's Forgotten River with Parks and Trails

View of the falls in downtown Minneapolis

Living Downtown in River Cities

 

I have now had the privilege of living downtown in two of the Mississippi River’s defining cities, St. Louis and Minneapolis. Both cities are shaped by their relationships with the rivers. Both sit at the intersection of the Mississippi and a major tributary (the Minnesota and the Missouri Rivers). Both have just held a major design competition with international participation. http://minneapolisriverfrontdevelopmentinitiative.com/design-team and http://www.cityarchrivercompetition.org/the-design-concept/ And both are looking to make themselves more livable to attract new residents.

I have grown to appreciate both cities, but the connections each one has with its riverfront are very different. The river in St. Louis is still defined by the barriers between it and the city. Massive highways, industrial complexes, and poor connections for pedestrians and bikers have kept in mostly inaccessible and unattractive for people.

While Minneapolis has its own issues with the river, its successes are much more significant than its barriers. Beautiful parkways line both banks along with trails for walking and biking and connecting a string of greenspaces along the water to the city street network. Many major institutions are located close to the river, and as Minneapolis’s downtown has experienced growth in recent years, it has also incorporated numerous cultural attractions into the urban waterfront districts. For instance, the Guthrie Theater and Mill City Museum now anchor an area alongside the historic Stone Arch Bridge (http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/about/stonearch.asp) that carries people and bikers across the river.

St. Louis is also going through a downtown resurgence right now, although some years behind Minneapolis. They have recently opened a new baseball stadium, the fantastic CityGarden, added more restaurants to Laclede’s Landing, and worked with the National Park Service to create an “attraction district," the Core of Discovery to promote the qualities of the downtown area. While almost every one of these sites is only blocks from the river, they do not allow people to eaily move between the sites and the water. Their own historic bridge, the Eads Bridge, provides a 5-foot pedestrian crossing, but is poorly connected to downtown, making it significantly underused and less of a connection than something to look at from the top of the Arch.

In many ways, these problems arise because St. Louis is still treating the riverfront as the extent of the land that comprises the Gateway Arch grounds. The Arch grounds create a magnificent urban park, but extend only about 10 blocks along the river. By treating the riverfront as a singular destination, rather than a continuous amenity like Minneapolis is doing, the attraction of the entire waterfront and the various destinations in the area lose a lot of the potential for creating a people-filled city. St. Louis needs to look beyond river-adjacent sites to consider connections across the river and to other parts of the city, both along the river and further inland. While some trails do exist that travel along the river  St. Louis Riverfront Trail the connections to the urban fabric of the city are poor and inconsistent. Without more effort to consider this urban riverfront as a connected, citywide feature, the small-scale progress being made will not contribute to a vibrant waterfront.

For further work being done to “Reopen the Door to the River” in downtown St. Louis, check out the City to River website.

Photos from Rotterdam and the RDM Campus

http://mlanl2011.posterous.com/wednesday-march-16-2011

Day 8 in the Netherlands-Trip to Hoge Veluwe National Park

http://mlanl2011.posterous.com/sunday-march-13-2011-hoge-veluwe-national-par

Photos from Day 5 in the Netherlands

http://mlanl2011.posterous.com/thursday-march-10-2011

From The Netherlands Day 1

http://mlanl2011.posterous.com/sunday-march-6-2011-utrecht

Buildings and the Built Environment.

I walk/bike past this building on my to school each day.  Its an addition to the U of MN Medical Center on the West Bank and will house the Amplatz Children's hospital by early 2011.  I think its a beautiful building, the green and purple panels on the building change color as you walk past them and the stairwells light up with different colors at night (visible from the street).  Obviously, the inside of the building is the most important when its a hospital, but if the inside is as creative as the outside, then this may turn into a fantastic facility for a children's hospital.  I used to work in the St. Louis Children's Hospital which was filled with moving electric trains, a miniature hot-air balloon that flew around the cafeteria and numerous murals and sculptures of wild animals both inside and outside the building.  They also had a fantastic garden on the roof of the 8th floor with binoculars to look over the city and Forest Park, ponds with fish in them and beautiful plants.  Buildings made with this conscious effort to integrate the physical structure and the use show just how much better we can do with construction standards and placemaking.  Buildings aren't just passive features, they create spaces for social interaction, impact the natural environment, influence our daily activities and travel and much more, in this case making it a more comfortable place to stay, and thus heal faster.

My example of the hospitals came up in this urban planning blog because I assumed that this new facility, in spite of the creative design, would succumb to the norm regarding the space to the right of the building (in the picture above) and turn it into parking.  I was way off.  Over the last two weeks, they have turned it into a giant plaza with trees, terraced levels of patio space and walled in garden plots.  I have yet to get a good picture of the changes, but I will be the first to admit I assumed the worst and I'm happy to have been proven wrong.  This space will bring people outside, give families and employees a space to gather and integrate the hospital with the surrounding community.  I'll do my part by continuing to walk by each day and enjoy the space.

Downtown Minneapolis

I took this picture from the Franklin Ave LRT station looking towards downtown during one of the last snowy days in January.  Its hard to see from this view, but the buildings of downtown looked like they were growing out of the clouds and mist.  Somehow that made them look more natural and it contrasted with the various utilities and other misc. built features closer to the station.

Washington DC

I'm writing from a coffee shop near 13th and G streets in Washington DC, watching the buses drive by outside and feeling the trains rolling directly beneath me. More importantly, I'm watching the bike lane painted on G St. and after 90 minutes here, I have yet to see a cyclist using it. Now I admit it is cold here today (27 degrees) and I have a limited view, but it is sunny and there is little to no wind, perfect conditions for cold weather biking.

The thought occurs to me, which comes first, the cyclists or the ability to reach your destination via bike? Minneapolis, where I currently call home, seems to have reached a critical mass of bike interests so that it seems rare to hear of a project that does not account for bike paths or pedestrian safety concerns. I'm not saying bikes are prioritized over automobiles there but they do get higher priority than I see in many places. Anyway, this critical mass of bike culture in the Twin Cities means that recognition of issues surrounding bikes is much easier to achieve when redevelopment projects are proposed. Here in DC, it seems to be well below that critical mass and I'm trying to figure out how bike culture develops to that point and how best to support more appealing and safer biking.

If a certain level of bike-friendly infrastructure must occur before a cultural threshold is reached, then a large burden is placed on the relatively few bike 'pioneers' of a region to advocate for that infrastructure. If widespread desire to bike comes first, our cities are downright negligent regarding safety for not reacting faster to implement safety features to match the demand. This may be a pointless mental exercise resulting from too much coffee and free time, but I indulged myself anyway by conducting it.

DC is a very easy to navigate city. It's streets follow very regular grid patterns, it has a well-used transit system (trains at least) and a level of density that makes short distance trips possible and not car-dependent. To me, these are helpful indicators of a city's appeal to bikers, not necessarily direct factors but rough correlates. DC is a progressive place and the facts strongly indicate the need for smarter and stronger transportation and transit options (Transportation for America-DC). Why not start with the low-level improvements to create safer walking and biking? If Minneapolis can hold the #2 ranking for most commuters by bike while being the coldest major metropolitan region in the country, there is no reason that our capital city couldn't be more bike friendly.

P.s. I did just see a biker go by, but on 13th street, which has no bike lane.

Pocket Parks

So last week I presented my first major project of graduate school, a report on an underutilized pocket park in Hopkins, MN. Our group analyzed the relationship of parks to neighborhood revitalization and how redesigning this park could create a regional attraction out of the low quality existing park. All of the work I did on this project has got me thinking about the way people perceive parks in their neighborhoods.

Parks hold a special place in the heart of many urban dwellers. They often provide the closest place to experience the natural world. They are the social and cultural heart of many communities and even entire cities (Forest Park-St. Louis, Central Park-NYC). And they appeal to every age, ethnicity and income level. I have many gripes about St. Louis and the way the city is run (incompetently), but I love their parks. I've had the chance to live right next to both of the largest two, Forest and Tower Grove, and loved every chance I had to use them for running, biking, soccer, frisbee or playing with my dogs. My favorite part of the St. Louis parks is how much the city treasures them as well. If the weather is nice, every single use you can think of for a park will be going on across the city. From kickball leagues to cookouts and birthday parties. People use these parks every day and do a pretty impressive job of sharing them peacefully.

I grew up in rural Indiana, out in the middle of nowhere. We couldn't even see our neighbors and our house had ravines and woods on 3 sides. As a result, I spent much of my childhood playing outdoors in the woods, as well as camping, canoeing, hiking and digging in the dirt of our garden. When I told my parents I had gotten into and was going to be attending a graduate program for urban planning they both, especially my mom, found it very ironic (just to clarify, they were very supportive and happy for me as well), that this country boy was going to plan cities. I mention all this because I just read an article by Richard Louv for the Children and Nature Network on neighborhood "button parks," and after having done my work on the Hopkins pocket park project for school I found his points very relevant to my priorities for how I approach my future work. Its helping me realize how important to me my upbringing surrounded by nature is to the way I envision a well-planned world. Every child should have access to open greenspace and know what growing vegetables look like. I'm not just talking about parks, but tree-lined streets, schools with gardens and plants other than decorative flowers growing around public buildings.

Day One

Hello World,
Earlier this fall I realized that I was getting really tired of the stories the mainstream media chooses to show. It sounds like high-minded elitism or some principled stance but honestly, I was just tired of the hype, the drama, the celebrity focus and the sheer negativity. Over the course of the last few months, and as I began my first semester of graduate school, I slowly began exploring the previously overlooked(by me at least) world of blogging as a new way to stay connected to the world. In the process I found some really inspiring and interesting people who have put a lot of time into writing thought provoking and meaningful articles about things that both I and the authors care about. Thanks to Google Reader I was able to incorporate a few sites I've long been a fan of and combine my various other readings and new favorites into one spot.

More important than my fascination with Google and its array of web dominating applications has been my experiences with my first semester in graduate school that has caused me to start writing this. In August 2009 I dropped everything to move 500 miles and begin working towards my Masters of Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. Those who knew me in college were surprised at my choice as my career path in those years led me to pursue a variety of health professions and hinted more towards a career interest in sports or student affairs. Nonetheless, I think that I really have found a field that challenges me, inspires me and most of all, makes me believe that there are better ways to do everything and that LOTS of smart, hardworking people are out there trying to make them happen.

I've come to realize that the things I care about are all wrapped up in the way we design and plan the world around us. Our failure to protect our water, our air and our land as we built our cities is catching up to us. Our failure to address systematic racial discrimination, economic segregation and stigmatized poverty has divided every neighborhood in this country. I worked for the Obama Campaign in St. Louis City in 2008 as a filed organizer and it really put me on the path I'm on today. In the course of knocking thousands of doors and making thousands of phone calls, recruiting and training hundreds of volunteers, and generally working harder than I ever had in my entire life I realized just how important it was for me to feel like I was making a difference. In my time walking and driving all over St. Louis, I also realized just how messed up and divided this world is.

All put together with my childhood obsession of creating entire worlds out of Legos, my love of fixing and building things big and small, my innate curiosity and love of working with people and protecting the environment has made urban planning the right fit for me.

I'll be experimenting with this over winter break to find out what works best for me to write about but I'm happy to take suggestions or submissions from anyone.

-Linden