Tours

Members from the Garden District Commission and UIC (Urban Improvement Construction) will host a walking tour of the Botanical Heights neighborhood. We will provide you with a map of our route, along with key information unique to the the neighborhood. The tour will incorporate previous photos of the former properties accompanied by the specific financing tools we used to achieve success. New construction, renovation and the activation of green space have contributed to the revitalization of the Botanical Heights neighborhood.

The bus tour to the neighborhood north of downtown will begin with an orientation and showing of the EPA award video. Participants will walk down N. 14th Street at Crown Square, where a complete-streets approach to the sidewalks and streets was among the first in the city. Here 27 buildings have been recycled and repurposed from crumbling shells to a mixed-use “town center” with mixed-income apartments, businesses and community-serving nonprofits.

Members of the Crown Square development team will point out key elements of the project, which was recognized with a National Trust for Historic Preservation/HUD Secretary’s Award for Excellence in Historic Preservation in 2010. After decades of abandonment and disinvestment, the community banded together and rallied to save the buildings, turning them into a mix of affordable and market-rate housing, and neighborhood retail. The tour of this site will include an examination of how this was accomplished, the many challenges faced, the intricacies of a public-private partnership, and the challenges of transforming old building stock into modern, energy-efficient housing while adhering to the demands of historic tax credits.

Along North 14th Street, in the heart of Crown Square, participants will visit UrbArts, a platform for poetry slams and the spoken word; Building Futures, which teaches design and building skills to school-age youth; Central Print, which teaches the art of printmaking; and Zuka Arts Guild, which presents live blues and jazz. Participants also will visit a new, single-family home and learn about the many rehabbed homes, especially those transformed from rubble and updated with geothermal or solar.

This tour will introduce the history and current state of residential segregation across the St. Louis region, which in part led to the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. We will review the current status of challenges and the community-driven process that led to the creation of Metro’s North County Transit Center, which opened in Ferguson in March 2016. The tour will explore ways transit service can help solve, or exacerbate, disparate access to opportunity within the region.

The tour will also highlight the design of the North County Transit Center facility, which offers the highest level of customer amenities found in the Metro Transit System today, including an indoor waiting area, public restrooms, a café, 24/7 on-site security and MetroBus management personnel on-site. These amenities and the community-drive process have resulted in satisfied customers that feel safe, comfortable and valued.

This tour will provide an in-depth look at the history, current economic/demographic transformation and future prospects of one of the nation’s most handsome and intact downtown streetscapes. Washington Avenue today is a compelling microcosm of all the major forces currently reshaping American cities. The tour will paint a precise, detailed portrait of the street’s story and give you an opportunity to see which of its strategies and outcomes might be transferable to other communities.

The tour will be in three parts, beginning with a brief overview of the basic features of downtown Washington Avenue before its transformation, followed by a discussion to identify counterpart neighborhood(s) in other cities that most closely mirror St. Louis’ former retail/wholesale/hotel and garment/shoe district.

The second feature will be the 2-1/2 hour tour itself, which will include presentations by key players in the street’s transformation, at the site that best reflects the presenter’s successful tool, strategy or feature. Finally, we will identify parallels and differences between Washington Avenue and the most comparable districts we identified earlier.

On this walking tour, you will get a close look at the major reconstruction of part of north St. Louis around the site of the former Pruitt-Igoe housing project. Here, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and a private developer are working at a large scale, while historically the area developed through incremental speculative development. The area once was densely built but today has one of the city’s highest concentrations of vacancy. However, there were many steps along the way to the present. The tour will examine the contrasting scales of redevelopment, alongside the historic development patterns that shaped, sustained and depleted the neighborhoods. What can we learn from the past – urbanistically, ecologically, economically – as we make a future? At what scales do urban systems operate, and at what scales should they operate? Participants will learn about site history, examine site conditions and contemplate possible futures.

Aging combined stormwater and sewer infrastructure, deterioration of historic building stock and nearly 25,000 vacant lots and structures held by the private sector and the nation’s oldest land bank have left a landscape thirsty for revitalization. In partnership with community residents and stakeholders, the City of St. Louis has developed multi-scaled, green infrastructure strategies that offer solutions to restore social, environmental and economic justice across the city.

Guided by representatives from the City’s Planning and Urban Design Agency, the 100 Resilient Cities initiative and the Missouri Department of Conservation, participants will experience and follow the progression from innovative early single-site strategies, to a premier developer-led project at the city’s booming Cortex Innovation district and to the larger-scale efforts underway through the Urban Vitality and Ecology Initiative and 100 Resilient Cities public-private partnerships which will demonstrate green infrastructure as a catalyst for community development and illustrate the City’s triple bottom line approach to transform vacant land into a thriving community environment.