Mapping Decline

Location: St. Louis, MO

Website: www.mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu

The maps were composed in ArcView 9.2, using a combination of digital census geography, archival maps, and historical and contemporary datasets. The base map for the home and the documents pages is Plate I from N.M Fenneman, Geology and Mineral Resources of the St. Louis Quadrangle (United States Geological Survey, Bulletin 438, 1911).

The base map for the other map series is the ESRI shaded world relief layer, based on the USGS’s National Elevation Data (NED) data.

The White Flight series uses 1940-2000 tract level census data. The 1990 and 2000 data and tracts boundaries were drawn from the Census, the 1970 and 1980 data and boundaries are based on the digitization done by Geolytics for those census years. 1960 and earlier data was adapted from the Donald and Elizabeth Mullen Bogue data, maintained by the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research. 1960 and earlier tract maps were digitized (working backwards from 1970) by the author.

The historical data and tract boundaries are now much more readily available thanks to the yeoman work of the University of Minnesota’s National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) project and Andrew Beveridge’s Social Explorer.

To display the change over a decade, tract boundaries were normalized for the two census years. This usually meant restricting the scope of the map to the metro tracts of the earlier census, and collapsing data from the latter year into the census geography of the earlier year. In the 1950-1960 map, for example, this required adjusting the 1960 data (323 census tracts) to fit the 1950 geography (247 tracts).

The Race and Property series is based on a number of archival sources. The 1916 layer is based on the text of the ordinance, and on the description provided in “Blocks in Which Negros May Take up Residence,” St. Louis Post Dispatch (2 March 1916) from the clippings collection of the St. Louis Public Library. The scope of the 1923 and 1941 realtor’s zones are summarized in Charles Johnson and Herman Long, People v Property: Race Restrictive Covenants in Housing (Nashville, 1947), and are noted on the City Plan Commission’s 1930 map, “Distribution of the Negro Population,” a copy of which is in the Missouri Historical Society’s map collection.

The NAACP’s 1945 estimate of the reach of restrictive deed covenants is adapted from Johnson and Long, People v. Property, 24, 60. The HOLC security maps were digitized from the 1937 and 1940 St. Louis maps in the City Survey Files of the&Records of the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation, RG 195.3, National Archives.

The Municipal Zoning series is based on archival zoning maps from a wide variety of sources, including the planning and zoning departments of many St. Louis County municipalities. Many (and especially the earliest) zoning plan and maps can be found in the bound and unbound city planning reports conducted by the Harland Bartholomew company and archived in the Harland Bartholomew and Associates Papers at Washington University, St. Louis City ordinances, programmatic reports, and the City’s current property database.

CityPulse

Location: St. Louis, MO

Website: citypulsestl.org

CityPulse is citywide network of beacons that provides pedestrian lighting as interactive art, detects and reports street-level activity in real time, creates civic connections, and offers a new platform for human interactions and entrepreneurship.

Each beacon is a modified standard of an existing lighting product equipped with inexpensive infrared sensors and micro controllers. CityPulse gathers pedestrian motion data for display via the CityPulse Map, which can be viewed on any number of digital devices. Choose to overlay the Map with additional data from other open-API resources.

Because the Map is accessible through any web-capable device, it translates seamlessly into a mobile application or a touch-screen kiosk, making it an invaluable exploration resource for locals and tourists alike. Find a bus stop, see who’s playing at that venue, or just choose a new place to get coffee.

The beacons are available in two sizes: a planted 21-foot-tall Home Beacon and a wall-mounted 10-foot-tall Satellite Beacon. The two different options offer different levels of accessibility, accommodating everything from high-traffic hubs to off-the-beaten-path storefronts.

This variety of beacons creates a complete network of nodes into any neighborhood. Once the beacons are hardwired throughout a neighborhood, they will collect Beacon activation information to send in real-time to the interactive activity Map. When a Beacon is activated, it appears as a “blip” on the Map.

Other blips indicate geo-tagged social media activity. The Map interface can be accessed via any web browser, as well as smartphones and tablets. Due to its intuitive design and quick access to location-based data, the Map offers the ideal interface for a public kiosk (see next page), serving as an informational hub for those unfamiliar with the city, or someone simply looking to explore.

Overlaid with the Map are a variety of helpful options including:

- Venues including restaurants, bars, convenience stores, markets, and other amenities, as well as nearby beacons,

- Promotional sales or current coupons in your surrounding area,

- A calendar of events and showtimes to make correlations between crowds and activities,

- Transit routes and schedules, as well as road traffic reports,

- Applied gaming using CityPulse’s API that encourage exploration (i.e. scavenger hunts, check-ins, etc. and,

Interesting city tips, fun facts, architectural history, community art, etc.

Brain Drain

Location: St. Louis, MO

Website: braindrain.co

Brain Drain is the brainchild of a group of young people united by a love for St. Louis. Some of us met in college, while others of us became friends after graduating. We are the ones who stayed, and we are committed to reversing the trend of young people leaving St. Louis.

Brain Drain aims to influence the trajectory of this city we all now proudly call home — and show other young minds that they can, too.

Our passions are urban ones and human ones. We are designers, architects, urban planners, journalists, educators, musicians, brewers, printers, archivists, builders, activists, organizers, mobilizers.

Our respective fields range from as technical as architecture and mechanical engineering to as creative as illustration and printmaking. We want to offer our diverse skills, backgrounds, and passions to solve real problems on a human scale.

Please come to our weekly #crappyhour, the public Creative Happy Hour on Wednesdays at 6 P.M. at Urban Chestnut Brewing Company, 3229 Washington Ave. Brain Drain invites all creative people, i.e. all people to #crappyhour tweeted every Wednesday.

Brain Drain is the antidote to urban exodus. Representing young natives and transplants that call St. Louis City home, our projects revere the city’s unique heritage while catalyzing its future. We focus on community-based projects that enhance the vitality of the larger St. Louis region and turn shared experience into shared initiative for our city.

nextSTL

Location: St. Louis, MO

Website: www.nextstl.com

First launched in 2004 as urbanSTL, nextSTL has become the preeminent online hub for those who wanting to know more about the St. Louis community.

The blog has been recognized for feature articles discussing changes and issues critical to the continuing resurgence of the City of Saint Louis and the Metro Area. The forum has emerged as the go-to source for issues current and critical to St. Louis, with more than 2,700 registered users; 7,000 total topics; and more than 176,000 posts. Forum topics have frequently featured breaking news and have been sourced by multiple news outlets.

Renegade Tours STL

Location: St. Louis, MO

Website: www.renegadestl.com

To us, Saint Louis is a state of mind; one that doesn't stop when you leave the city limits. We tell the history of the people that built this place, lived in it, died in it...while setting their stories against the gorgeous and important architecture. At Renegade STL we strive to provide fresh, offbeat, and completely original tours, and we refuse, I repeat, refuse, to take ourselves too seriously.

RENEGADES

Founder, tour guide, and french toast expert Amanda Clark comes armed with a B.A. in History, an obsession with architecture, and a sharp wit acquired from her Southern grandmother. For over 3 years Amanda has been creating private tours for clients such as Arch Grants and Leadership St. Louis.

She is also a founding member of Saint Louis TEN, a very popular story slam event held throughout the city. In 2011, she was listed as part of Alive Magazine's Buzz List, which makes her feel cool sometimes.

Tour guide and cool guy with a cool beard Chris Naffziger is an independent art historian who writes and edits www.stlouispatina.com, which is coming around on its seventh year documenting the history of St. Louis's built environment.

In 2012, Chris's blog was chosen by the Riverfront Times as the Best Architecture Blog in STL, which should make him feel cool all the time.

Lou-lover, world-traveler, lunch room raconteur, Jenny Ingram is our marketing maven and occasional tour guide. A high school English teacher by day with a background in Art History, Jenny is skilled at giving “the look,” deadly with a red pen, and proficient at making a fool of herself to keep an audience entertained.

Jenny is cool all of the time.

Great Rivers Greenway

Location: St. Louis region

Website: www.grog stl.org

There is a place that has always been wireless, cordless and decidedly un-virtual — Nature. Great Rivers Greenway has been preserving nature just for you. Greenways give you somewhere to go, close to home, when you feel a deep longing for time away from a screen.

Listen to a bird song you’ve never heard before. Smell the foliage in bloom. See your very first river otter and witness what nature can do for you.

Great Rivers Greenway District is the public organization leading the development of the region-wide system of high-quality greenways, parks and trails known as The River Ring. Our mission is to make St. Louis a better place to live while creating an enduring legacy for future generations.

Working with our many partners, the development of The River Ring and its greenways represents a common cause with common ground.

Clean air, clean water, healthy forests, connected neighborhoods and walkable streets provide a healthier lifestyle which serves as a catalyst for economic vitality, making the St. Louis region a better place to live.

Simply, our mission is to improve the community:

Making the St. Louis Region a Better Place to Live
Connecting Communities and Neighborhoods
Preserving and Connecting People to Nature
Improving Economic Vitality
Providing Transportation Options
Promoting Good Health

Landmarks Association of St. Louis

Location: St. Louis, MO

Website: www.landmarks-stl.org

St. Louis, bequeathed with a wealth of historically and architecturally significant buildings, owes the conservation and adaptive reuse of much of that inheritance to Landmarks Association of St. Louis, Inc.

Organized in 1958 and incorporated as a non-profit in 1959, Landmarks is the primary advocate for the region's built environment. Important victories from our early years include the Bissell Mansion and Red Water Tower in Hyde Park, the Chatillon-DeMenil House in Benton Park along with the Wainwright Building and Old Post Office in downtown. But in spite of many accomplishments, preservation was seldom included in the planning process. In the early 1970s, Landmarks embarked on an ambitious citywide survey to identify important sites and potential historic districts.

The survey pace accelerated in the late 1970s when the federal government passed legislation offering tax credits for renovating properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places. By the mid 1980s St. Louis led the country in historic tax credit reinvestment, thanks in large part to Landmarks' nominations to the Register.

Landmarks also played a key role in framing Missouri's historic rehab tax credit program in 1997. High-profile rescues resulting from this legislation include the Drury Plaza Hotel (encompassing the partly demolished Fur Exchange), the Westin Hotel (an adaptive reuse of Cupples Station) and the Sheraton St. Louis City Center, ingeniously inserted in the former Edison Brothers Warehouse. Without historic tax credits, these three sites and countless more including the Arcade Building would be surface parking lots.

Each May Landmarks presents a ceremony honoring St. Louis' 11 Most Enhanced Sites. Inaugurated in 1996, the list runs the gamut from those privately financed to those requiring every possible public resource. Projects recognized in 2007 (with costs ranging from $500,000 to $36 million) contributed $129,400,000 to the local economy. The total figure since we started keeping close tabs in 1998 is an astonishing $1.5 billion.

Landmarks' National Register nominations also provide essential background for publications including the organization's bi-monthly newsletter and a series of guidebooks. The most popular, St. Louis: Landmarks & Historic Districts first published in 1988, was revised in a greatly expanded version in 2002. That same year Landmarks released the third in its series of multilingual cultural tourism pieces based on public transit.

Designed to encourage international tourism and to introduce recent immigrants to easily reached attractions, the full-color brochures (Art on Wheels, Art on Rails) were funded in part by the Regional Arts Commission, the Whitaker Foundation and the Gateway Foundation.

Students participating in the WABMO program explore Daniel Chester French's sculpture, Peace and Vigilance, in the Old Post Office building.

In 1991, Landmarks created "What Are Buildings Made Of?" (WABMO) to introduce the built environment to tomorrow's leaders. An acclaimed heritage education program supported since its inception by the Regional Arts Commission, the original WABMO sessions were directed to students in the 4th through 6th grades. Since then the program has grown to include versions for high school and college students, for at-risk youth and for senior citizens. A WABMO for families and Architecture Weekends for adults will be offered starting in 2008.

By 2006, the Landmark Association recognized the need to establish an architectural center for metropolitan St. Louis to advance its core mission to preserve, enhance and promote St. Louis' architectural heritage and to ecourage sound planning and good contemporary design.

With an eye toward its 50th anniversary celebration in 2009, Landmarks embarked on an ambitious capital campaign, raising over $300,000 for the center. By late 2008, Architecture St. Louis was open to the public, quickly becoming an educational center hosting programs for children and adults and a gallery space for exhibits on contemporary architecture, architects and historic preservation.

Today, Landmarks draws its strength from a broad-based membership. The more than 1300 regional dues-paying citizens include architects, attorneys, developers, consultants, historians, neighborhood leaders, bankers and community volunteers who contribute expertise and participate as advocates.

Over the years they have supported Landmarks, even in the face of controversy. That is probably the legacy envisioned in 1962 by Roger Montgomery, one of the founders, who wrote: "We must encourage continued use and creative adaptation of existing buildings and districts. But it is a mistake to insist that there must be an economic income returned by all buildings. Preservation is often self-justifying on purely cultural terms."

Old North Saint Louis Restoration Group

Location: St. Louis, MO

Website: www.onsl.org

ONSLRG is pursuing a comprehensive revitalization strategy rooted in the community’s vision of a sustainable and welcoming neighborhood that offers high quality housing opportunities for a diverse population from all walks of life.

What's New in Old North chronicles the dramatic transformation under way in the neighborhood of Old North St. Louis. As a neighborhood just north of Downtown St. Louis, Old North is becoming a dynamic urban village of new and historic homes, a landmark eating establishment, beautiful community gardens, and a diverse, friendly, and engaged community.

Ecology of Absence

Location: St. Louis, MO

Websie: www.preservationresearch.com

"And so if perforce we must study disease let us study it systematically. I cannot indicate to you the precise nature of that constitutional social disturbance of which our architecture is symptomatic; but little by little I will reveal to you the hidden causes and make clear and palpable to you the aspects and nature of the malady."

- Louis H. Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats

Ecology of Absence is a chronicle of architectural events in the St. Louis region that started as a companion to the website of the same name. The major theme of the blog is historic architecture and the primary goal is to build awareness of that architecture and the forces — social, economic, aesthetic, ecological — that create, threaten and sustain it. The editorial approach is to “strike the roots” and look beyond threatened buildings at the larger forces that create, change and often destroy the built environment of the city. Public policy is a key part of the analysis. Consequently, the blog focuses on changes in the built environment that come about as St. Louis attempts to stem the deindustrialization, depopulation, shrinking public services and loss of architectural fabric that define the modern American urban condition. There is occasional coverage of other cities and adjacent areas in Missouri and Illinois.

Michael R. Allen started Ecology of Absence as a website in August 2003 and has been its primary editor and author ever since. The blog was launched in 2004 and in 2007 all publication moved to the blog. Claire Nowak-Boyd co-edited Ecology of Absence from June 2004 through September 2007. In 2010, the Preservation Research Office assumed ownership of Ecology of Absence.

Ecology of Absence welcomes guest articles. Articles will be published if relevant to the blog’s focus, well-researched and well-written. Photographic and video submissions are also welcome. Submissions should be sent to michael@preservationresearch.com.

Taylor Community Science Resource Center

Location: St. Louis, MO

Website: www.slsc.org/ForEducators/TaylorCommunityCenter.aspx

Jack and Susan Taylor, longtime St. Louis philanthropists, donated $2.5 million to the Saint Louis Science Center to help improve science learning opportunities throughout the region. In honor of the gift, the Science Center named its new outreach facility the Taylor Community Science Resource Center.

The Taylor Center is a state-of-the-art, 69,000-square-foot facility at 4900 Manchester (southwest corner of Kingshighway and Manchester). The Taylor Center is a dynamic place, providing outreach and community programs for youngsters of all ages, adults, and educators. Through its myriad partnerships and collaborations throughout the community, the Science Center has seen a growing need for high-quality math and science-based programming. The new Taylor Center allows these programs to grow and meet the needs of the community.

The Taylor Center is a place where learning happens every day, where teachers connect with science and technology, and where youngsters are actively engaged. The Taylor Center meets one of the metropolitan area's most critical needs - one facility that provides high-quality information about science and technology for many different audiences, including educators, parents, teens and community-based organizations.

The facility houses several classrooms and multipurpose rooms that can be used for after-school programming, professional development for educators, community-wide and family programming, and more. The wet laboratory facilities and technology center will be places for hands-on science activities and provide technology access to disenfranchised audiences. In addition, the Science Center’s extensive natural history/science collection is housed here and visible to educators and the expanded resource library will help teachers strengthen their math and science curricula, and connect them with recent science and technology discoveries.

Youth Exploring Science (YES) is one of the Saint Louis Science Center’s premiere educational programs. Based at the Taylor Community Science Resource Center, YES is a structured program, which sends fourteen-year-olds on a four-year journey of self-discovery. YES teens explore scientific concepts through inquiry-based experiences and then learn to teach others. Through their teaching initiative, YES teens take museum science education out into the community where they facilitate science and mathematics activities.

The Saint Louis Science Center launched the YES program in 1997 by recruiting fifteen under-served, minority teens from community organizations. Today's YES teens continue to be recruited from more than fifteen community partners, including Herbert Hoover Boys & Girls Club, Jackie Joyner-Kersee Youth Center, Beyond Housing, Lighthouse Community Center, Girls, Inc., and Annie Malone Children and Family Service Center.