Kevin Killeen has always been a gem. We worked a docu project together in 1990 and the man is funny in a born-to-it way, dry and smart and ruthless.
Every single thing he said about St. Louis, especially in February, is spot-on. Gobblessim.
And yes:
… it is exactly like this.
The St. Louis downtown you see in Killeen’s piece is the result of a lot of neighborhood razing, mixed-use eliminating, anti-poors targeting, truly anti-human “modernization.”
Loads of parking, though!
The barred building is a parking garage, after all. I suppose it’s better than the alternative-- acres and acres of flat asphalt surrounding the occasional building.
The Ash Wednesday part almost forcibly transfered my coffee from my mouth to my screen
That’s not the only alternative. A decent public transport system that a lot of people actually want to use, or at least are heavily incentivized to use, is another.
Yeah, but then you’d have brown people standing under the Gateway Arch in tourist photos. Westward expansion was designed to leave those people behind.
ETA: /s just in case.
I don’t think completely doing away with cars is in the future as there are cases where they do make sense to have, but a widespread and convenient public transport system that is cheap or free, that reaches well outside of urban spaces, seems like a better strategy to pursue for a more environmentally friendly transportation system overall. I’d love to see city centers with no cars, trains from well out of the country side into cities, etc…
I have one word to say to February:
And the maples start giving us their delicious sap!
I blame in part the rampantly pointless tradition known as “Groundhog Day” for February’s grossly unearned reputation. We should all appreciate February much more.
(Why is GD pointless, you ask? We’re already locked in for six more weeks of winter because it happens six weeks before the SPRING EQUINOX. And no, terrible unseasonable weather caused by climate change, my sworn enemy, does not count.)
I think he needs to spend some time communing with a sun lamp.
You and me both.
St. Louis had a functioning train station.
It was big and fancy and allowed to fall into disrepair as cars became a dominant mode of transportation. So… predictably, what happened next… (shopping mall, hotel, late stage capitalism playground, pretty much anything but a train station)…
An adjacent station serves the light-rail MetroLink Red and Blue Lines, which run under the station in the Union Station subway tunnel. The city’s intercity train station sits a quarter-mile to the south, serving MetroLink, Amtrak, and Greyhound Bus.
I use a different other “adjacent” station periodically when I take Amtrak’s Texas Eagle from Austin to St. Louis. Amtrak ridership is full of folks of all colors and creeds (I shared the train car with Amish folks, last trip, and a very loud stripper who seemed to be on drugs). The Amtrak St. Louis downtown station is tiny, bleak…
(feast your eyes!)
… and scarcely offers a blessing for the weary, except for a roof and its interior is heated and cooled. Well, yay that.
I have a lot of respect for people who find a way to make it work, who actually live in St. Louis. I just couldn’t take it any more.
The aforementioned Gateway Arch.
This is just another example of blatant Northern-Hemispherism.
Hey, we invented February, so we have a right to complain about it.
Yup. February is great.
Not in Montreal. January is our coldest month and things don’t really improve much in February. The sunnier it is the colder it is usually; flowers are at least a month away. It’s a good month for Seaonal Affective Disorder to set in.
February sucks.
