A Denser Downtown Needs Better Parks

Recently, I’ve been proposing ideas to add to Kirkwood’s housing supply, including reforms to our minimum lot size requirements, and an overhaul of our ADU rules. Even more recently, I laid out a process by which we could make public transit a more useful asset in Kirkwood and curb the relationship between added density and added traffic.

These posts have generated a fair amount of backlash in the comments sections. And I think that’s kind of a good thing for the blog, both because people talking about these ideas is good and spreads its reach in a sort of Streisand-effecty kind of way, but also because it helps me refine my arguments to address their concerns and hopefully win them over.

So today, I want to address a concern that was voiced in the comment section of my post on Minimum Lot Sizes. Now, most of the interaction was not very constructive, but there was one point that I thought did merit deeper consideration on my part. The commenter stated that Kirkwood has a below-average amount of parkland and that we needed more green space, not less.

Do We Have Enough Parks?

I tried to run some numbers on this to check its accuracy, but answering whether or not Kirkwood has a below-average amount of parkland turns out to be kind of tough. Municipalities differ substantially by size and population, so it depends a lot on what you’re comparing it to.

But there is research on how much urban green space a community ideally should have per person, which I think is a more useful measure. That research suggests that communities should have at a minimum 9 square meters of green space per person and ideally they should shoot for up to 50 square meters per person.

When you add up all of Kirkwood’s park space plus the 10.5 acres of Ebsworth Park which is administered by the County, we end up right around 40.9 square meters of park space per person. Now, that number isn’t especially rigorous. It doesn’t include things like Meramec or Kirkwood High School’s campus that might count under some definitions of urban green space, and it doesn’t include Powder Valley’s 110 acres that partially fall within Kirkwood’s boundary, but in general, I think the vibes of that figure are right: Kirkwood is certainly not currently deficient in terms of absolute park space, but we’re also not completely overloaded with parks either.

That feels especially true when you take a look at how our parks are distributed. Most of our parkland falls within large remote parks in the southern and western extremities of Kirkwood where the population density is the lowest and the average person already has substantial private green space in the form of yards. Meanwhile, in the portions of town that are most densely populated (and where people are the most likely to live in apartments/condos and have no yards at all), the parks are smaller and fewer and further between. And to the commenter’s credit, that does feel like a real problem!

As Downtown Kirkwood and its surrounding neighborhoods continue to densify, figuring out a way to improve the capacity and functionality of nearby parks will be essential to ensuring that Kirkwood maintains (or improves) the incredibly high quality of life residents currently enjoy. And I think the three parks that hold the key to success in this part of Kirkwood are Walker, McEntee, and the flagship of our entire system: Kirkwood Park itself.

Walker Park

Walker Park is the closest to a finished product of the three parks we’ll look at today, so I won’t have much analysis for it, but I do think it’s critically important. Walker Park feels intentional and established, giving it a character that smaller parks sometimes struggle to attain. It has big oak trees that provide shade in the summer, sculptures, a small fountain, and a (dare I say… iconic?) entrance. Perhaps most importantly, Walker Park has no dedicated parking, ensuring that it primarily serves people arriving on foot.

Walker is also about to see a ton more visitors as The James and Kirkwood Apartments add 212 new apartments less than a block away. Given the neighborhood’s coming rapid transition, ensuring that Walker Park will be able to handle increased usage will become ever more important. The good news is that this additional traffic will also bring with it additional improvements to the park. As part of The James’ discretionary approval, the developers of the project will be funding pedestrian improvements, including curb bump-outs, to the intersection of Washington & Taylor, where Walker Park is located. Not only should this make the park more accessible, but it should also facilitate safer connections between the park and the YMCA that sits across the street.

Still, challenges remain. People, especially young renters without yards, like to hang out in parks, and Walker is by far the closest. This increased use will put the park under additional stresses that will require additional amenities: Public restrooms, grills, bike racks, more benches, and picnic tables, are all things we need to start considering now, before 500 new people move in next door.

McEntee Park

Now because Walker Park is already pretty efficient with its space and is boxed in on all sides, it can be improved, but there’s not really a viable path toward expanding its capacity. That’s not the case for McEntee, which sits surrounded by city-owned land (mostly consisting of surface parking lots) that the city could use for more park space if it wanted to.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that the city is headed in that direction. In January, City Council authorized a contract with Horner & Shifrin for the engineering and design-work associated with the resurfacing and expansion of the Police Station-City Hall lot for an amount of $73,030. Then, two weeks ago, the Council approved another $22,000 to Horner & Shifrin to cover unexpected costs from the design of MSD-mandated water-runoff processing systems, bringing the total cost to the city to $95,030 before paying a cent for the construction and paving of the lot itself.

Now, I haven’t seen the plans that Horner & Shifrin has actually come up with yet, but it’s made explicit in the documentation issued by the council that their mandate is to expand the number of spots where possible, rather than to try and save some space for the expansion of McEntee Park, and they’re already installing dual charging ports for electric vehicles in the furthest eastern portion of the lot, so that ship seems to have already sailed.

I think that’s a mistake. First, maintaining parking lots is clearly a very expensive proposition for the city and because there is substantial public parking already available directly across the street and in the massive Kirkwood Station garage one block over. Perhaps even more importantly, locking ourselves into this particular parking lot brings with it the substantial opportunity cost incurred from failing to expand the park when we have the opportunity to, which feels short sighted.

Now I certainly don’t have all the answers here. The Kirkwood dispatching center (located in the Police Station), has started to face severe space constraints since Kirkwood contracted with neighboring municipalities to take over dispatching duties for them, Kirkwood Police need to be able to park their vehicles, and City Council meetings have to be accessible.

But the thing is you can always build taller parking garages and increase the quantity of parking on the same sized piece of land. There’s no way to do that with parks; you’re stuck with what you’ve got. I know parking garages are even more expensive than surface lots, but there are also five of them within a one-block radius of City Hall so it’s not like they’re don’t-even-think-about-it expensive. So, that leaves us with a simple question: How much is 3/4ths of an acre of parkland worth if it’s the only 3/4ths that will ever be available in Downtown again? A million? More? Less?

What I’d Do With The Extra Space

I guess a lot of what that extra space is worth depends on what you plan to do with it and how much utility you could expect to get out of it. Now, I’m not a landscape architect (although sometimes I think how being a civic landscape architect would be the coolest job ever), so don’t trust me on the specifics of what that programming should consist of, but if I was winging it, here’s what I’d do:

First, I think you’re going to want to add some amenities. My picks would be a dog run (Kirkwood doesn’t have any that I know of, a deficit especially felt by the apartment-dwelling dogs of downtown that don’t have a yard to utilize), and a basketball court (because you can never have enough and because David Lee lives across the street so maybe he would donate some money or at least head on over and dunk for our entertainment on occasion). Then, I’d leave some open space for two-hand-touch football or whatever because I have good memories of doing that in McEntee (which we called “Depot”) on Friday half-days in my St. Peter’s years. But maybe the community decides something else would be better here, and that would be great too. The point is to add real amenities that people will use.

And What To Do When We Don’t Get the Extra Space

But, as I said, it seems like the ship on the parking has already sailed, so it’s important to have some ideas for what to do with the park space we do have.

The one non-negotiable here is the conversion of the intersection of Clay and Madison into a four-way stop (sign my petition here, we’re almost to 100 baby). You guys are going to think I’m crazy for bringing this up again, but this area keeps getting denser and denser, the park is a huge draw for young kids, and the denser it gets the more chances we’ll have for something to go catastrophically wrong here. Pedestrians crossing Clay or cyclists turning left from Madison on to Clay can’t see cars until the list minute because the slope of the bridge obscures them. It’s really bad, and painting over the crosswalk (as the Kirkwood streets department did when I tried to bring the problem to their attention) does not stop people from crossing here. It’s a natural crossing point, all intersections qualify as legal crosswalks whether they’re painted or not, and someone is going to get hurt.

The other thing I’ll note is that Madison (as well as Monroe, one block South) is incredibly wide. We should try and do something with that width. Bump the curb side parking out into the street and put a bike lane between the parking lane and the curb, thus creating Kirkwood’s first protected bike lane. All it takes is some paint and some enforcement —and the police are right there!

My next order of business would be to add steps (and a ramp) from the Veterans Memorial Walkway up to the Clay bridge to make it a functional pedestrian shortcut (especially in the case of a train) rather than simply being the “scenic route” that spits you out back on Madison or requires you to summit the steep grass hill up to the bridge. We already have a landing here, and the bridge is already set to be substantially rehabilitated in the near future, offering an optimal time to get the work done.

Finally, I’d try to make the underutilized space between the existing path and the fence (the downward sloping that hill we somehow used to play football on) a more functional space, ideally with some sitting steps. Now if you’ve ever been to the clocktower on SLU’s campus or the Spanish Steps in Rome (congrats on being a world traveler), you know how popular a good set of steps can be. Please flip to the last picture to see one of my crowning artistic achievements:

Sit on the steps, watch the trains go by, take in the action in Clementine’s and 4Hands/Peacemaker’s backyard across the tracks, or enjoy a Teleo Coffee and a good book. At the top of the steps, you’d ideally have some tables and chairs so that people could do some outdoor work if they were so inclined.

Kirkwood Park

Kirkwood Park is an amenities-driven park more akin to Forest Park than McEntee’s Tower Grove or Walker’s Lafayette Square. People go there to do things: Play tennis or pickle ball, ice-skate, go to the pool, play baseball, or see a show at the amphitheater. Residents of Downtown probably aren’t going to walk to Kirkwood Park just to hang out —they’ll go to Walker or McEntee for that— but they will walk or bike to Kirkwood Park if it has amenities that they can’t get elsewhere. That, I think, makes it an important piece of the Downtown park-puzzle.

One of my early articles outlined a bunch of ideas for Kirkwood Park in this context, but I think a lot of those ideas were sorta naïve in retrospect. Now that I’ve gained perspective, I think what Kirkwood Park really needs is a skatepark… kidding! (sorta). Here are the three-ish changes that I would prioritize:

1. Better Integration with Surrounding Neighborhoods

First, Kirkwood Park deserves better pedestrian/cycling integration with the surrounding community, especially to the East, where the streets that connect the park to Downtown are some of the most densely populated in the whole city.

Once completed, The James will be just a 14-minute walk from the Park, the Kirkwood Apartments will be just 12, and a whole host of apartments already exist just across Geyer. If Kirkwood can tame the high speed traffic on Geyer and Adams with some raised —or otherwise calmed— intersections, it will be able to drastically reduce the park’s reliance on vehicular traffic to move people to and from it’s facilities which should then reduce traffic in the surrounding neighborhoods and reduce the demand for parking within the park itself. When you can eliminate some of the costs of increased density, people grow more comfortable with increased density.

Now, Kirkwood does have plans to make some pedestrian/cyclist improvements to Geyer when it gets repaved from Adams to Big Bend starting in the Fall of 2023. You can review the specifics of those plans here, but to summarize them, we’re looking at improvements more in line with a few curb bump-outs and ADA-compliant sidewalk ramps rather than things like raised crosswalks or protected bike lanes that would represent a true level-change in terms of comfort, safety, and accessibility. That’s to say these provisions should help, but I don’t expect them to make the experience of walking or biking down Geyer so much obviously safer or more enjoyable to pedestrians and cyclists that they inspire huge behavioral changes in term of how people access the park. And I think that’s unfortunate!

Utilize Jefferson

But even though the Geyer repaving looks like it’s going to be a wasted opportunity, I think Jefferson offers a chance at redemption. A big West Jefferson improvement project connecting the park to the heart of Downtown checks a bunch of boxes, both in terms of usefulness and in terms of feasibility.

In terms of usefulness, the block of Jefferson directly adjacent to the park (between Geyer and Van Buren) entirely lacks a sidewalk on its southern side. That abrupt sidewalk ending forces pedestrians to make an otherwise avoidable street crossing, which in turn offers another opportunity for pedestrian-car interactions to go wrong. Even the existing sidewalk on the northern side of Jefferson is narrow and in poor condition. These sidewalk deficiencies in such a heavily trafficked part of town have likely already landed the street on a short list of priority projects for the city, which has a stated aim of filling in all sidewalk gaps, but it’s important to note that this project is sort of a grant-funding gold mine as well.

If you look at how East-West Gateway (EWG) grades grant proposals, the project seems like a home run. It’s bookended by Kirkwood Park at the one end, and a school (St. Peter’s) and Downtown Kirkwood at the other, all of which should garner the project points thanks to various sections of the rubric. The density of the neighborhood gets you more points still, and then you add in the fact that the project would connect to already awarded STP grant funded projects (improvements to S. Clay including raised cross-walks at Clay & Argonne and Clay & Jefferson, and the project gets another boost still.

The final reason that I think the project would score highly is an incredibly sad one, but it also drives home the point about why the project is so urgent: Edward Schaefer was hit and killed at the intersection of Jefferson and Geyer while visiting the park in 2017, one day shy of his 86th birthday. It’s incredibly frustrating that we haven’t done anything to address the intersection in the subsequent five years, especially given that EWG’s rubric specifically prioritizes projects that address the causes of known pedestrian-involved accidents, but it’s better late than never.

Click around on the map above to look at the details of what I think should be done here as well as the context of the other projects a remade Jefferson would fall within, but the Sparknotes version is something like: fill in the missing sidewalk, widen the existing sidewalks, convert the intersection of Van Buren & Jefferson to a 4-way stop, add a mid-block crosswalk across Geyer, and maybe add some bicycle facilities if you can. If you wanted to get really crazy, you could do something ambitious through Argonne Alley at the eastern end of the project. The bottom line is, I think this project is a good one, and if we submit a half decent proposal, one that should exceptionally highly as well. The higher it scores, the more funding we can get away with asking EWG for, and the more ambitious we can make the project’s scope.

2. Programming, Again

In terms of increasing its utility, Kirkwood Park has some significantly underutilized spaces, mostly mowed grass, that could be transformed into more widely used spaces with a little programming. I have a couple of ideas for what this could/should look like, but much like my note on McEntee’s programming, if the community wanted a different kind of programming, that would be okay too.

Both Forest Park and Tower Grove announced they were finally adding basketball courts this past year and I think Kirkwood Park should follow suit. Kirkwood Park currently has a lone sad basketball hoop on a remote parking lot near the water tower, but adding a legitimate court on the eastern side of the park would be a huge coup for the surrounding community. Throw one at the Geyer-Jefferson intersection (the Schaefer Memorial Court would be a nice touch) just below the tennis courts and I guarantee they’ll be utilized for everything from pickup games, to summer camps, and could even serve as a versatile venue for events like Greentree Fest where a little extra paved surface could accommodate additional food trucks or bail the event out incase of rain.

Speaking from personal experience, heading up to the courts after work with my roommates in NYC and playing pickup with whoever we find there has become a daily ritual, not only because it’s an enjoyable way to get some exercise, but also because the diversity of the community that interacts at the courts is really quite unique. I might be overstating it a bit but I don’t think by much; basketball courts make community and community is an asset worth investing in.

The more wishful skate-park and roller rink ideas I’ve thrown on the map just south of Walker Lake are similarly inspired: places for different people to find communities of their own. I will also note that adding a roller-hockey rink would not only be a nice amenity to offer residents (I’ve frequented Maplewood, Brentwood, and especially Webster’s offerings), but would would also make Kirkwood Ice Rink a more attractive place to host hockey camps that can generate significant revenue for rinks in the Summer where demand for ice-time is greatly reduced. These camps often entail an “dry-land” component in-between ice sessions and a roller rink would be an ideal venue. The addition of such a venue then makes the ice rink itself a more attractive venue for these sorts of events and, eventually, generates more profits.

3. Community Center

And now we end with the big question: what do we do with the Community Center and the old theatre that has now been made (mostly) obsolete with the opening of the Performing Arts Center? To add to the theme here of things that I have gripes with but which are already partially in the works, Kirkwood is planning on making some improvements to its Community Center in the next couple of years, but those are improvements to existing facilities rather than any sort of expansion of services. Liz Gibbons (who sends out incredibly helpful email updates to a distribution list, which you should ask to be added to if interested), offered this synopsis after a City Council meeting back in June:

Additionally, we had a presentation from Navigate Building Solutions regarding conceptual planning for renovations of the community center.  Funds available for the overall project, when appropriated by City Council may total approximately $8.3M.  Working with staff an evaluation was done of the things that are absolutely needed for continued operations.  The basic necessities take about half the budget.  They are HVAC, fire protection, electrical and roof improvements. The options being reviewed for the balance of the funds include:

1st Floor

• Lobby enhancements
• Flooring replacement – ice rink lobby
• East & West Gym improvements – Floors, ceiling, finishes, new lighting
• Restroom renovations — new fixtures & finishes
• Wi-Fi including the gyms

2nd & 3rd Floor

• Selective removal of walls and ceilings – improve functionality
• Upgrade meeting room entries
• New Finishes – flooring, paint, ceiling, lighting
• New audio/visual systems
• Wi-Fi

Now all of these seem worthwhile to me, and the fact that we’re going to have to choose between them (let alone add a community workout facility or develop a plan for the old theatre) is kind of insane. Kirkwood is far too rich a community not to have these kinds of facilities.

Now part of this is that the YMCA is in Kirkwood and the YMCA is a good organization, and no one wants to compete with them and put them under. Part of this is that there seems to be fairly broad access to Kirkwood High School’s fitness center which is nice and serves as a reasonable substitute for young recent grads, and part of this is that neighboring municipalities have facilities that Kirkwood residents can and do become members of (The Lodge in Des Peres and Sunset Hills Community Center where my family goes to workout, to name a couple).

That’s all fine and good, but if Kirkwood is growing its tax base more quickly than those other municipalities through more intensive development, it’s an awfully bad look for them to have better facilities than us.

Now, maybe the finances are tougher than I’m imagining or maybe the community isn’t crying out for these amenities like I assume it is (although, I’m not sure there was any sort of popular consensus for the need for KPAC either). Maybe I’m wrong. That’s fine, let’s vote on whatever the funding mechanism would end up being. But I don’t think I am wrong, I think we’ve waited long enough, and I think we need to make it happen.

Keep an Eye Towards the Future

The additional tax revenue that additional residents bring in should ensure that we have the funds to make these improvements (density brings with it abundance), but that doesn’t mean that the city won’t face tough decisions on how to use space in a town where land is a constraining factor. Unlike housing, you can’t stack parks on top of each other and break free of that constraint. What you can do, however, is make decisions that maximize the amenities we do have, and ensure that we’re anticipating the challenges we will face in the not-too-distant future. Because change does, in fact, have costs. Change brings more traffic, construction annoyances, and change sometimes even crowds the parks. I don’t deny any of it. If we’re going to convince people that those costs are worth it, we have to show them that change brings with it incredible perks too.