Great Music in St. Louis’ Grand Center

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Grand Avenue, St. Louis

           St. Louis’ Grand Center was one of the many ideas to revitalize St. Louis over the last three decades. It includes Powell Hall, the home of the St. Louis Symphony, the Fox Theater (Broadway), the Sheldon (chamber music) and the Pulitzer Museum (modern art). It is located between the downtown and the lively residential and retail center of the Central West End. Powell Hall recently underwent a $140 million renovation led by Snønetta. On a recent trip to hear the Symphony perform Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, the outdoor public spaces were empty before and after the concert. The neighborhood is essentially a collection of unconnected institutions that people drive to.

            But the headline is that the St. Louis Symphony is, under the leadership of Stéphane Denève, is one of this country’s finest. Like the Pittsburgh Symphony, it is the equal of any of the traditional “Big Five” American orchestras, except for the superlative Cleveland Orchestra (the other being Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and Boston), despite not being a member of that august group. The strings play with great warmth and cohesion and there appear to be no weak links among the wind and brass players. Even the often-problematic horn section went blatless during this monumental 90-minute work.

            I hear the SLSO every year in the pit of Opera Theater of Saint Louis and, particularly under the baton of Maestro Steven Lord, they were one of the great assets of OTSL. But it has been decades since I had heard them in Powell Hall, their 2,700-seat home since 1968 – an adaptively reused grand movie theatre. In the 80’s the orchestra drove to the front ranks of American ensembles and national attention under Music Director Leonard Slatkin, who stood out as an American conductor who highlighted American composers. More recently, American David Roberston has cut a somewhat lower profile. Denève has led the orchestra since 2019.

Jack Taylor Center

            The War Requiem calls for a large choir, a children’s choir and three soloists. All were superb in St. Louis and performed for a sold out, cheering audience. It is a demanding work for both performers and audience. Soprano, Christine Georke was scheduled, but withdrew and was replaced by Felicia Moore, who had not previously performed the work – and began learning the part on the Monday before the Friday opening (I attended the Sunday matinée). Moore’s voice effortlessly floated above the huge orchestra with an admirable absence of excess vibrato and pinpoint pitch. Ian Bostridge is the ideal tenor soloist in this work that features the savage poetry of Wilford Owen describing the horrors of the First World War battlefield with stark directness. The War Requiem is a shattering experience and with Bostridge, a noted scholar and writer, singing and declamation of text fully revealed Owen’s bleak, tortured world. Roderick Williams was a fine, dramatic baritone counterweight to Bostridge’s very English (reedy) tenor.

            The choirs were astonishingly made up of amateurs, but this was choral singing that was a match for a professional choir anywhere. It tells us something (although I’m not sure what) that St. Louis can muster not only hundreds of fine adult choral singers, but a near perfect children’s group of a couple of dozen young singers (which sang from a balcony). This was a community event of the best possible sort. And while the War’ Requiem’s devastating, humanistic anti-war message is always timely, as a civic event it seemed especially pointed and relevant now. It was an exciting, thought provoking, satisfying event.

            Denève’s work was admirably controlled and understated – in a piece that calls for wide contrasts of volume. The male soloists are accompanied by a chamber group of a dozen players. The choral sections, which set the extended form of the Latin requiem mass generally call on large forces, which Denève deployed with great restraint. As a result, moments of quiet reflection and passages invoking the colossal, swirling dark forces of hell had unusual impact. With all that was going on each of the sections, including the brass, played elegantly, rather than blaringly. Again, the emotional content of the string writing was especially moving.

            The hall renovation is particularly successful in the pre-existing public spaces – where the lighting is sparkling, and mirrors and crystals have been buffed to a high shine. The paint color chosen for the main auditorium struck me as dull by contrast and gave off something of an institutional feeling, as did the conventional orchestra shell over the stage. The pre-concert projections on a screen at the back of the stage were tacky and low tech. The auditorium also features new carpets and seats, which give it a well-cared for feel. The acoustic where I was sitting in the orchestra section was very fine – neutral, leaning towards the clear and warm. Apparently, traditionally, the prime seats have been regarded to be in the balcony. While the orchestra seats were lower than the stage platform, limiting visibility to the first row of players, otherwise the experience was first rate.

Powell Hall

            The Sønetta addition is odd. It appeared to me to be designed around addressing practical needs – more restrooms, elevators, backstage and educational spaces. The addition is shoehorned onto the side of the old theater facing a bleak plaza – why the squeezing with all that empty plaza space? There is a glassed-in oblong lobby with a compressed, open stair – again on the side, rather than in the back of the house. The ground floor elevator lobby is very narrow and also services a coat check and restrooms – creating a pinch point for patrons. I don’t get the logic behind the design of these cumbersome spaces.

            The biggest question is why the empty, windswept plaza? The building, which has a traditional entrance facing the street and narrow adjacent sidewalk, now faces from the side onto the plaza. It doesn’t do anything to activate Grand Avenue – as might a ground floor restaurant or other retail use. I had lunch in a place that was obviously Black owned (all Black staff, images of famous Black musicians on the walls) across the street from Powell Hall that was nearly empty before the concert. Why was this? The food was fine. The service was friendly. Locals took me for dinner after the concert to a place in the Central West End. St. Louis remains one of our most segregated cities. White St. Louisans clearly chose to take their patronage elsewhere than Grand Center, other than for the performances and art exhibits. But the St. Louis Symphony is clearly well worth the trip into the city for.

THE POWER OF QUEENS: Book Review

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Rural County, Urban Borough

A History of Queens

Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Rutgers, 2025 408 pp.

The County of Queens is now the center of power for both the city and State of New York. Today, it is unlikely that any candidate for Governor or Mayor can be elected to office without the support of the voters of the borough – and particularly those in its southeast quadrant, within the 114-zip code. The current mayor grew up in the area, the Speaker of the City Council represents it, the local member of Congress is the ranking minority member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and is the county Democratic Party chair. Even the itinerant current mayoral candidate, Andrew Cuomo, grew up in the neighborhood of Hollis.

Most non-residents or non-natives know little or nothing about Queens, its neighborhoods or its history. Few know that Southeast Queens is the largest community of Black homeowners in the country or that in recent censuses Queens was the only county in the United States where Black household income exceeded that of white families. A friend once gave a tour of the borough to a senior City Hall official who asked, when driving through either Douglaston or Forest Hills, why anyone would pay more than $1 million to live in a home IN QUEENS?!!!! It is hard to imagine another jurisdiction of 2.5 million people in the United States that about which outsiders know so little. Continue reading →

THE CULTURAL CONTRADICTIONS OF MINNESOTA

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An ensemble of modern office towers

Minneapolis and the Minnesota Orchestra

There is a loft apartment for sale for over $2 million in an adaptively reused industrial building in the Mill District with a river view, near but not in, downtown Minneapolis (https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/700-S-2nd-St-W70-Minneapolis-MN-55401/61624273_zpid/). Just try to wrap your mind around that, my elite, coastal friends. Let’s unpack this a bit. First, this means that some broker, who presumably knows the Minneapolis market thinks they can get over $2 million for an apartment, not a McMansion, not even a house – but an apartment in a dense-ish urban neighborhood in the mid-west. It also means that there are likely at least a couple of dozen people in the metro who have the capacity to come up with, let’s say $450,000 cash and the income to support a monthly mortgage payment (without taxes and operating costs) of roughly $13,000!!!!! And those are people want to live in a loft and not a single-family home. And, not in New York, or even Chicago. This is true, in a city where the conventional wisdom has given the downtown up for dead in the wake of the pandemic and the reaction to the murder of a Black citizen by a white police officer that became national news. At the same time, walking around the Nicolette Mall, once the 100% location in Minneapolis (and only a few hundred yards from that expensive loft), it is obvious that it is no longer the city’s commercial center.

What, my friends, is happening here?

The Mill District

It’s nuts. The forces of 21st century capitalism have arbitrarily abandoned the traditional downtown, while market preferences have moved slightly, and only slightly, elsewhere. This is the destruction of hundreds of billions of dollars of real estate value on what can only be described as a post-pandemic whim. The action has moved only blocks away – with a couple of adjacent neighborhoods booming with activity. Some of this is as a result of work from home – with bobos (bourgeois bohemians) not wanting to get out of their pajamas and go to work in proximity with other people. Some of it is racism, in the wake of the George Floyd reckoning – a modern incarnation of white flight.  What’s particularly interesting about downtown Minneapolis is the havoc real estate capitalism has wreaked on the historic downtown. There aren’t many office buildings downtown that date to before the 80’s. Most of the office building stock is quite modern (glass and steel). There are very few early 20th century masonry commercial structures left in the downtown. I would imagine part of the current market rejection of downtown is the characterlessness and soullessness of the efficient international style of commercial architecture from the period of 1980-2000. That emptiness of the exterior envelope is also reflected in the working environment contained inside these buildings – with most people employed in cubicles or open spaces. You certainly can’t blame middle management for wanting to abandon those white-collar industrial working conditions. Continue reading →

IT MAKES NO SENSE TO FALL IN BALTIMORE

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Crabs at the Lexington Market

With apologies to Audra McDonald https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isQr674sN1k

Why does everyplace claim to be “world class?” And what does that even mean? In introducing Wynton Marsalis’ tuba concerto, Aubrey Foard, its principal tubist, asserted that the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra was one of best in the world. Why did he feel the need to point that out? Why isn’t it good enough to be just a very fine ensemble. Baltimore is a really nice place, with some great neighborhoods and important legacy institutions – and it has clearly spent billions and billions of dollars on big projects trying to be a “world class” something. There is a sense it which the city elders appear to be trying way too hard, and don’t have confidence in the city’s virtues.

My first trip to Baltimore was probably in 1968 for Super Bowl III, in which the favored Colts lost to the NY Jets 16-7 (I remember being at the game, the details I had to look up). The business my dad worked for had printed the game tickets, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad tickets we used to get back and forth to the game. I felt like a 12-year-old big macher. In the 90’s, the Downtown Baltimore Partnership was an early adopter of the Grand Central Partnership downtown management model, of which I was a part, and we visited then. Inner Harbor and Camden Yards were breakthrough urban revitalization projects at that time. The innovating commercial development urban revitalization firm, Rouse Companies was founded in Baltimore.

Baltimore is known for its neighborhoods of row houses and as the home of Johns Hopkins University, which is, among other things, a bio-medical behemoth, and the largest beneficiary of the largess of one Michael R. Bloomberg. Hopkins has annual revenues of around $7 billion. Baltimore was historically the major mid-Atlantic port, with access to the nation’s interior via the mighty Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, through the Harper’s Ferry gap in the Appalachians. The downtown has a fine collection of the majestic former homes of long-gone financial institutions. A couple of major finance firms continue to be headquartered there. Its population maxed out at about a million souls in 1950. The subsequent decades were not kind to the city, which, in additional to experiencing the same urban traumas as other eastern cities, became a satellite to the metastasizing center of the American empire, Washington, D.C. Continue reading →

SWIM WITH THE FISHES

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Creating the Hudson River Park

Environmental and Community Activism, Politics and Greed

By: Tom Fox

Rutgers University Press 2024

The looming question about the Hudson River Park has long been obvious. Why isn’t it better? In his book, Creating the Hudson River Park, environmental activist, Tom Fox tells us why, in copious, gruesome detail. For those of us concerned about creating and maintaining great public spaces the issues are laid out clearly, fairly, and with specificity in this excellent volume. It is an absolutely essential contribution to the literature of public space-making in America. Tom has gone deeply into the archives to tell as much as possible of the now 70-year history of this highly visible project. Perhaps most remarkably, he fairly explains the subjects, giving the competing ideas of those over the years who have (fervently) not agreed with him their due. Most of those concerns are ones that face the development or restoration of any large and/or highly visible public space.

The answer as to why the park isn’t better is because it is the product of decades of comprises that were the result of endless fighting over the shape of the park and the adjacent highway. The amount of conflict involved in the creation of the park is both heartbreaking and depressing. It may sound naïve, but “why can’t we all just get along?” The park’s origin was in the conflict over Westway – a highway cum real estate development plan concocted in the shadow of the era of Robert Moses that proposed to replace the southern portion of the West Side (Miller) Highway with an underground expressway, topped with new construction and public space adjacent to the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side. So, controversy is unfortunately in its DNA. The project was stopped as the result of the early use of Federal environmental legislation and regulation enforced by legal action brought by private citizens and non-profit organizations. Continue reading →

A Walk in the Rain in Downtown Detroit

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Detroit has received lots of positive attention in the urbanist community for a wide range of positive developments. On my first overnight trip to the city post-pandemic I found lots of evidence of good thinking — but at the same time not many people. Yes, it was Friday and the weather was cold and wet, but the streets were empty

Here are some photos I took on my walk.

Yes, Detroit remains car-centric.

Walking down Woodward Avenue, there was no easy way to get to the Riverwalk. You came to a hardscaped park, with few amenities.

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TACTICAL HYPOCRISY

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Where is Charlie Brown?

It seemed great when the book “Tactical Urbanism” was published in in 2015. Here were a bunch of placemaking ideas that were easy to understand and implement. The first chapter was a promising summary of the principles of placemaking developed over the prior three decades. The rest of the book felt kind of skimpy – the case studies it described weren’t terribly impressive or interesting, but they were certainly a step in the right direction. And then tactical urbanism came to my block.

During COVID, New York City’s Open Streets program arrived on 103rd Street between Central Park and Riverside Park. Two metal barricades appeared at the end of each block each morning with signs noting that no through traffic was allowed, and that the speed limit was five miles an hour. 103rd came to a T intersection at each park – limiting its utility to through traffic. While no one was using the street bed to hang out in, and the street closing complicated bringing a Zipcar around from my local parking garage to my front door, I did enjoy the additional open space for walking the dog. I noticed over the years an occasional lame event advertised for the street being put on by “Park to Park 103/Open Streets.

 

          The Plan

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A SUCCCESS STORY IN DALLAS

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The park is full of people on a Friday afternoon.

Clyde Warren Park in Dallas works. A recent visit, more than ten years after its opening, showed it to be heavily used and reasonably well managed. On a weekday afternoon the park had quite a few visitors, including lots of children. The park has most of the elements that make public spaces successful:

  • Shade – essential in the southwest
  • Playgrounds. The one here is very cleverly designed and attractive – including fun water features
  • Lawns
  • Food kiosks and restaurants
  • Water features
  • Regular programming
  • Movable chairs
  • Adequate maintenance

As we have written ad nauseum, there are so many new public space projects, and so few of them are successful. Clyde Warren was built over a highway culvert – a category of assignment that has proved particularly challenging for public space planners over the last couple of decades.  Building over a highway cut can be an essential move in re-knitting a downtown together. But doing it right is a tough assignment. The designers of Clyde Warren, The Office of James Burnett, got what animates a public space on a deep level that seems to elude almost all landscape architects and public officials. After ten years, Clyde Warren is still performing well – attracting a broad swath of users. On the day we visited a large portion of the park was closed for a private event – but there was still quite a bit of space available to the casual visitor.

A good contrast with Clyde Warren is another public space in the southwest, Santa Fe’s Railyard Park of about the same vintage – which remains virtually unused, despite quite a bit of interesting development around it. The arts district of downtown Dallas is not the most promising or hospitable of environments for a public space. Downtown Fort Worth is way more walkable, human scaled and attractive. The surrounding streetscape to Clyde Warren is towers and institutions set back from the street – essentially bleak, unwalkable and car oriented. Prominent among the high design structures of the arts district (Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster) are a large number of parking structures. But somehow, pedestrians find their way to the two large blocks that constitute Clyde Warren — most likely from the offices and residential towers that overlook the park.

The nonprofit that operates the park, The Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation, has an operating budget of around $15 million. The biggest challenge for public spaces with water features is keeping them running. And the features at Clyde Warren are complicated and fun to watch. The Foundation seems to have the resources to keep things running. The water features are open for kids (and adults) to splash around in – which is just great, and unfortunately not standard practice. These water features are complex and they work. Kudos to the park’s managers.

That not-withstanding, the Foundation appears to contract out for the park’s maintenance, and it shows. Outsourced maintenance is never as detailed oriented and perfectionist or as highly motivated, well-compensated internally managed staff.  The park demonstrates a lot of wear from high use and is not kept to the high standards of Bryant Park. The lawn panels are need aeration and reseeding. The horticultural elements are designed for low maintenance and aren’t well maintained even given that. They don’t have the kind of visual pop that a public space of this caliber really ought to have. Some of the arts institution facilities in the district have much more imaginative and appealing plantings nearby.

Big Belly trash receptacles are in use – which are a bête noire of mine. They are a mark of managerial laziness. The design is awful – they are a squat box. The labor they supposedly save, is labor that the park really needs. Staff dumping out the trash bid are a visible mark of social order. Visitors want to see people working in the park – maintaining the horticultural elements and emptying the trash bins. It contributes to the perception of public safety.

But those issues aside, Clyde Warren Park, is a clear model for others to follow as to what makes a park lively and attractive. The built environment in downtown Dallas makes creating lively public spaces a challenging task, and so the park’s success is even more a particular achievement.

The hostile environment of a highway overpass, makes the success of Clyde Warren even more of an achievement.

The fabulous water feature amidst the forbidding neighboring towers. One of them was once famous for hostile reflection of the Texas sun into the neighboring sculpture park.

A close up of the water feature.

Contract worker — looking disconsolate.

The lawn is beat. Needs aeration and reseeding.

Low maintenance shrubs. Boring.

The dreaded Big Bellies. Ugly and bad.

And…movable chairs.

A shade structure. Essential in the southwest — along with the trees.

Signs of consistent programming. Probably not enough though to really contribute to the space’s animation. In a space in a downtown of this size, daily programming is essential to energizing the park.

Fantastic playground, even though its play equipment is liability lawyer-proof in design.

Wonderful climbing structure.

An adjacent dog park. A great move!

Shade and movable chairs contribute to the attractiveness of the space.