St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 12

m-region ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH Deo. 17, 1982 itowntown Redevelopment In all the construction and all the streetcar line between East St. Ijihis exploring the tunnel idea. But it said streetcar line between East St.

Louis exploring the tunnel idea. But it said Plans Ignore Mass Transit Bidd5- the cost might be as much as 10 times JJ lll Uj II Cast plans for the redevelopment of downtown St. Louis, one factor is conspicuous by its almost total absence transit. Mass transit in downtown St. Louis means a mass of automobiles, creeping alorijlhighways at nours.

creeping into crowded downtown parking girageSj.and creeping along downtown streets. I Community Development Agefijy painted the picture this way in a reoent draft of its master plan for doWrltQvVn: "No clear hierarchy of streets differentiates the jumble of automobiles, buses, delivery trucks, pedestrians and the occasional brave cyclist converging on downtown streets." Developers here say they can live with that. They are counting on the area's, highway system to funnel suburbanites into downtown for work and shopping and entertainment. It might make a bad situation even worse, but the alternative no further development downtown would be worse still. But in some quarters, at least, a qjnsj'nsus is arising that if downtown develops the way people hope, sjjmfcthing will have to be done about njo kinds of traffic the kind that camfs in and out of downtown, and the kfyidjthat moves around downtown once people get there.

For decades, planners have been doing expensive studies on how to get a highpowered rapid transit system to link, the Illinois communities with downtown, and downtown with the IVlissouri suburbs. The problem is, and atwyhas been, finding money to pay for a system. The newest of these proposals came up last month. It would be a $100 million I llllp lf Brown's $4 million estimate. Nonetheless, said Frank Hamsher, Mayor Vincent C.

Schoemehl assistant for development, "this is not just a pipe dream." "Lots of people are working on it, and they're talking nitty-gritty," Hamsher said. Yet another idea for moving people around downtown came from Donn H. Lipton, who recently lost his bid for redevelopment rights in the Gateway Mall. Lipton and engineers at Ross Barruzzini Inc. proposed putting a large surface parking lot where the tunnel emerges at Spruce.

The idea is for people to park on vacant land beneath the elevated part of Highway 40 and take the tunnel or shuttle buses if the tunnel isn't developed to their offices. Such "satellite parking" would help cut traffic congestion and free land used for parking lots for other developments. Shuttle buses, of course, aren't a new idea. Until two years ago, the Bi-State bus system operated "Scooter" buses along two downtown routes. Despite the 10-cent fare, the Scooters never caught on and Bi-State abandoned the system.

The Community Development Agency, in a list of proposed downtown traffic improvements, has suggested that the downtown shuttle system be resurrected. The CDA also proposed several other ideas: Designating some downtown streets for buses and delivery trucks, and others for passenger cars and taxis. Such a "functional street hierarchy" would eliminate bottlenecks, the and Hazelwood, using existing railroad tracks and an existing tunnel beneath downtown to keep the costs down. City officials say this system is "doable." They would like to start construction in 1984, and have it finished by 1986. In the.meantime, they are looking for money.

There are some, however, who have been taking a closer look at only a part of that $100 million plan the unused but well-maintained railroad tunnel beneath downtown. The tunnel runs near most of the major buildings and attractions downtown. If stations were built, and vehicles put into the tunnels, it would go a long way to solving the question of moving people around downtown. The large, limestone and brick tunnel was built about 100 years ago. It begins at the Eads Bridge near Laclede's Landing.

It goes west along Washington Avenue to Eighth Street, then south along Eighth until it emerges at Spruce Street, near Busch Stadium. Surface tracks, where the tunnel emerges at Spruce, could continue the transportation link to Union Station at 18th and Market Streets, where a large entertainment and commercial complex is planned. The Old Post Office, St. Louis Centre and the Gateway Mall lie along the route of the tunnel. A year ago, Richard C.

Brown who has done light-rail studies for the Bi-State Development Agency, said the tunnel could be put to use for as little as $4 million. That cost, he said then, would include cleaning and repairing the tunnel, and fitting it with an electrical system and tracks for trolley cars or similar vehicles. The Community Development Agency, in its master plan, encouraged OeimafSW. 8 51 tr i i i i II Id II 121 in 0 P'hJ' Downtown VLKinaOr. in 6 r- Lticw Ave, Washington Ave.

St.Ctartes St. 55 A co'. Mi locust SI Olive St, Chestnut St. 16 V) Proposed Shuttle System 8 agency said. Better coordination and regulation of parking lot operators, the idea being to encourage more parking on the fringe of downtown instead of in the core.

Strongly encouraging developers to provide parking as part of their Carr St. 3 i 9 Cote St. CO t- Convention Plaza 1 IS llllj ass 4 40, Post-Dispaich graphic by Tony Lazonxo The largest housing development downtown is the Plaza Square Apartments, along Chestnut and Pine Streets just west of the central business district. Built at a cost of $17 million in 1961, the six Plaza Square towers contain 1,090 apartments, which are almost 100 percent occupied. The total residential population of downtown is about 5,000 people scattered from 16th Street on the west to Mansion House on the riverfront.

This dispersion presents a problem, Strauss said. For downtown to work as a neighborhood, he said, "you have to create a mass to make people comfortable. And that's a real cable and maintains a good subscriber base. I guess our timing was bad. And St.

Louis' economy is pretty tough right now. "As we projected down the road, we saw that we just couldn't get to our goals. We were installing about 2,000 homes a month and we needed 3,000 to 4,000," he said. Nine days before Christmas, most of Preview's 77 full-time and part-time employees now find themselves out of work. Forty-two people, salespeople who handled telephone calls from prospective subscribers, got severance checks and termination notices Thursday afternoon, said Preview general manager Don Pascarella.

Others will stay on until March to handle customer service problems and disconnections. A few members of the Preview work staff may wind up at Channel 30, which will return to full-time, conventional television operation beginning March 1, Kievman said. Pascarella said Preview was offering its present subscribers two 'Market St. Walnut St. Clark Ave.

lOngBrfeJge Lucas Ave. Atcti PoM Dtspatr qrahn hy Tony 1 aforko pedestrians could use those to get from place to place. Improving access across Tucker Boulevard, to make it easier to get to and from the "core." Building convenient pedestrian access to and from the riverfront and Laclede's Landing. Developers here are excited about the potential for housing in the loft district, generally bounded by Delmar Boulevard on the north, Chestnut Street on the south, Tucker Boulevard to the east and 21st Street to the west. That is uie enure nonnwest quaarant of the official boundaries of downtown.

According to a study done by Team Four Inc. in 1980, nearly 60 percent ol the 7.9 million square feet of space ir the buildings is vacant. Many of the empty buildings were formerly used by the garment industry, and offer vast floor space. Construction crews with huge reciprocating saws could cut atriums tnrougn the lloors and make ceilings as high as the customer wants. Similar buildings in other cities have become trendy for downtown; condominiums, both office and.

residential. Strauss and the Pantheon Corp. year purchased the old Lammert's- Furniture warehouse at 10th and." Washington. Just what Pantheon plans to do with Lammert's is Strauss said. "But we bought it cheap, so we can hold it." But, said Strauss, "We won't do it unless it can be spectacular, unless you can walk through the door and said, "Ahhh! is this gorgeous!" Others who.

have bought loft' buildings downtown include architects Gene Mackey and Robert Brownstein and developers Harry Morley and Donald Spaid. Brownstein is more bullish on downtown housing than the others, and is moving ahead with plans to build 54 apartments in his building in the 1300 block of Washington. But Morley, a former executive with Regional Commerce Growth Association, and Spaid, former director of the Community Development Agency, say they intend to move more cautiously. They are looking into several possible uses for their two buildings. And housing is only one of them.

"I'm not sure you're ever going to see housing in downtown," said Spaid. "But if you do, it won't be for 10 or .15. years." SUNDAY: The vision of a great downtown. that at $50, the company was breaking even on installations; at half the company essentially was paying $25 to hook up each new customer. ij One programming element that' would have helped distinguish Preview from such cable movie channels as HBO and Showtime was local sports.

During the baseball season, for example, Preview offered exclusive telecasts of seven Cardinals home games. Pascarella said Preview had made offers for home-game coverage of Steamers indoor soccer and Blues hockey for this year and next, "but we couldn't get any of them to respond." He also said he had been dealing (0 acquire more Cardinals home games for 1983. "We were told that our offer was a good one and that as soon as the dust settles from the (World) Series, we'd get together. We never got an answer." Kievman declined to specify ust how much Preview had cost the company, but one source estimated the financial drain at $100,000 a month, the research department in AFSCME's international office, said prison systems in every state had problems. He and Anderson want to meet Jith Gov.

Christopher S. Bond, membefs of his staff and key legislators to rnalte proposals for better pay and working conditions for state prison employees. "My contention is that it's not oSt effective to have prople go on the work a couple of years and then qtjit Saunders said. Tunnel Begins Housing In Downtown St. Louis llf Under Existing wm.

Construction Proposed Mansion House 6 Ford Apartments Plaza Square 7 Laclede's Landing Columbus Square 8 Avenue Loft District Jefferson Arms 9 Riverside Urban Redevelopment Centenary Towers iring Or. WasMfwrton Ave. Convention Kara locust St mt Vt projects. Some buildings now are built with little thought to the parking problems they will create. Widening and landscaping downtown sidewalks, and putting benches along them so that walking downtown becomes less of a hassle.

Building more sky walks so dilemma." Perhaps the most hopeful sign for developers about the downtown housing market is not really downtown at all. Developers of major retailing projects here hope that near-downtown neighborhoods which in a city of only 61 square miles mean almost every neighborhood in St. Louis city will look to downtown as their shopping mall. "If you look at a map of all the shopping malls, downtown is the only place left where it makes sense to put one," said one architect. Officials of the Simon and Rouse companies said, that they expect the resurgence of city neighborhoods here to help their projects.

Pantheon's De Baliviere Place development in the West End is almost complete. Neighborhoods on the South Side, including La Salle Park, Soulard and Lafayette Square, are within 10 minutes of downtown. The St. Louis Community Development Agency's new downtown master plan suggests that 45,000 additional housing units will be needed in the city by 1990, and 54,500 units will be needed by the year 2000. That means 2,500 to 3,000 new or rehabiliated units a year, though such a pace would be difficult in today's tight real estate mortgage market.

The CDA study was done by Real Estate Analysts which suggested that changing social and demographic patterns will encourage a demand for housing in the city. "The most likely scenario will show an increased demand for housing from the middle and upper income householders through the year 2000," the study said. If that prediction comes true, people with a lot of money may be able to choose from a variety of spectacular housing. Several major developments planned for downtown include provisions for "luxury" housing if the market warrants it. The well-to-do might be able to choose to live in Laclede's Landing, or in a condo on the Eads Bridge or on the Gateway Mall.

He might be able to take his pick of several converted warehouse buildings in the Washington Avenue loft district. options: They can request immediate disconnection, and they will get a complete refund of their installation fees. They can continue as subscribers until March there will be no monthly charges levied for January and February. In both cases, subscribers will be allowed to keep the rooftop antennas originally installed by Preview. Company servicemen will reconnect those antennas to subscribers' television sets to ensure clear reception of Channel 30 and other UHF stations, including KNLC (Channel 24).

Preview's costs $19.95 a month for regular service, $4.95 a month extra for additional adult-oriented films, $50 for installation, $35 deposit for the decoder severely hampered the growth of the service, Pascarella said. In October, Preview began offering widely publicized discounts on installation fees. By the end of the month, the discounts amounted to a savings of 50 percent. Pascarella said said they had known guards who had suffered heart attacks; 46 percent had known of attacks suffered while on duty. Nearly three out of four respondents complained that prison rules' and regulations changed too often, which they said contributed to stress.

Anderson said the survey's results were similar to findings in other states and in a national study. Lee Saunders, assistant director of in -6 CveSt 55 I I Fl 1 1 Walnut St. Tunnel I Surfaces Nf said, mostly by couples ranging in age from their mid-30s to mid-50s. Though it took longer than planned to get the apartments occupied, Pantheon felt confident enough about the project to start building an additional 217 units. Those are due for completion in November 1983.

Columbus Square was the first new downtown housing since construction of the three Mansion House towers in the mid-1960s. Mansion House started out with 1,248 apartments. After years of mortgage and financial problems, one of its towers was converted into a Holiday Inn. Each of the other towers has 416 apartments. "Now we're starting over again." And starting over means changing an image.

Strauss and the Pantheon Corp. took the first big plunge two years ago when construction started on Columbus Square, which fronts Cole Street on downtown's northern edge. In the first phase of the project, Pantheon built 114 townhouse-style apartments with the assumption later proved wrong that they would attract young people who worked downtown. "It was tougher to sell than we thought," Strauss said. "What we did not get were lots of office workers." Phase one of Columbus Square is now about percent occupied, Strauss V'' FROM PAGE ONE residential.

It's not done." ft ft ft It is, however, done in other cities. "Look at the cities that have great downtowns," suggested one development executive here. "Places like Boston and San Francisco. What are their common characteristics? They, all have efficient mass transit systems and large supplies of dowptown and near-downtown housing." St'. iLouis has neither.

The redevelopment of downtown St. Louis, which began 20 years ago, had been predicated on the use of the automobile. And the key projects for downtown in the next 10 years are being built with th automobile in mind. 1 Forexample, the first thing that the developers of the St. Louis Centre shopping mall insisted on was that the city's Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority finance a new parking garage.

Melvin Simon Associates, the Indianapolis-based developers of St. Louis Centre, think most of the people who'll shop at their mall will arrive by car. And one of the things that attracted the Rouse Co. to the Union Station project here was the station's access to highways and the vast amount of parking space available. Studies done for both Simon and Rouse indicate that downtown residents will make up but a tiny part of the market for their projects.

"People ask, 'Why should I live downtown? I have all these other choices, Strauss said. "In St. Louis, there, are a lot of choices, and a lot of within a 15- or 20-minute drive of downtown." He noted another phenomenon. "In most, cities, housing gets more expensive the closer you move to the core. In St.

Louis, it's just the opposite" Downtown housing has a terrible image problem, Strauss said. "People who used to live downtown wanted he said. "They were poor and they lived in old buildings. There were a lot of those buildings in Mill Creek and around the stadium area. We tore them dywn.

AJiNary May Sign County plget Today 3tJ Louis County Executive Gene McNttry is expected to sign the county's bddget for next year today, 15 days before-the county government's fiscal yelar begins. The County Council gave final, but not unanimous, approval to the $169 mjllidn budget Thursday. The council's lame duck member, Betty Van Uum, D-University City, voted against each bqtrgerblll. "The priorities of the McNary administration are not mine," she said after the council meeting. "There is no money for people suffering from unemployment, no money for day care centers, no money fofthr flooding victims.

This is a government without a heart," she said. Besides, she added, "I always vote against the budget." Thursday was Mrs. Van Uum's last chance, for the forseeable future, to vote against the budget. On Jan. 1, she will to replaced by Ellen Conant, a Republican who defeated her in the election Nov.

2. Mrs. Conant's election gives the Republicans a 4-3 majority on the council. McNary, a Republican, said Thursday that he would sign the budget. In past years, the budget has been held up because of disputes between McNary and the council's Democratic majority.

County Council Chairman Donald L. Bond, D-Florissant, said the Democrats ttiiwyear had little quarrel with Preview Pay-TV Operation To Shut Down rs By Eric Mink Post-Dispatch TVRadio Critic After less than six months on the air, Cox Communications has announced it will shut down its Preview pay television operation Feb. 28. Since its debut June 1, the service managed to sign up only about 10,000 subscribers. Preview uses a scrambled TV signal broadcast by Cox-owned KDNL-TV (Channel 30).

The signal is unscrambled by decoders leased to subscribers. Preview's schedule consists mainly of unedited, commercial-free movies aired for six to eight hours a night starting at 7 p.m. Michael Kievman, executive vice president of Cox, blamed the project's failure on St. Louis' depressed economy and the spread of cable television in the area. "One of the most important things was that cable systems were growing at a faster rate than we expected," Kievman said from company headquarters in Atlanta.

"Normally, STV (subscription television) gets started well ahead of Prison Guards Post-Dispatch Jefferson City Bureau JEFFERSON CITY Starting pay for state prison guards in Missouri is only $945 a month, and nearly half of them quit within two years, according to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Bob Anderson, the president of AFSCME Missouri Council 72, said Thursday that the high turnover could be attributed to low pay and job stress. Many guards, or correction officers as Gene McNary 'Government without a heart McNary's budget because the executive had included money for items such as storm water control, which the Democrats had fought for in the past. The budget would keep the county's property tax rate at $1.08 for each $100 of assessed valuation. Highlights include: $1.4 million to pay for substantial improvements in pension and life insurance benefits to county employes.

But county employees will not get a general pay raise or a cost-of-living increase, at least not for now. McNary has said that raising salaries might be considered at midyear when the county has a better picture of its financial position. $1.5 million for a water main to help open the Gumbo area in west St. Louis County to industrial development. $422,450 to pay half the cost incurred by municipalities using the REJIS computerized criminal justice information system.

About $400,000 for storm water control projects. Say Stress Contributes To High Turnover? they prefer to be called, "are near the breaking point because of the pressures of their jobs," Anderson said. About half the state's 1,200 guards belong to AFSCME, he said. In a recent survey, 70 percent of more than 400 Missouri officers responding said stress had a negative effect on their emotional health, Anderson said. About 71 percent of the respondents.