Dear Pals,
Everyone in St. Louis rejoiced at the new stretch of Interstate I-64/40 when it opened. MoDot and the constuction partners had stayed on plan, on time and on budget.
From the first day I drove it in from Lindbergh Boulevard to Brentwood Boulevard, it gave me a cold chill and a creepy feeling that made my skin crawl.
I thought, give it a chance...
Embrace change.
Don't be a crumudgeon like Horrigan.
You'll come to like it.
Maybe even love it...it might grow on you.
It has not.
It will not.
It cannot because it offends something in my marrow and intellect (limited as it is).
I think it is just the latest example of the City-County-State-Federal continuum's love of S.T.U.P.I.D. (Simply Thoughtless Ugly Planning Institutional Design).
I have come to think of it as a real tribute to flawlessly executing an ugly and grossly short-sighted plan.
Let me make my case.
1) Sunglass sales in St. Louis are among the highest on a per capita basis of any city in the USA.
Why?
Because tens of thousands of us drive into the rising sun in the morning and into a big orange/red ball at sunset on the major east-west Interstates.
I am an authority on sunrises in St. Louis, because I flimed 50 of them all across the bi-state metropolitan area for The Sun's Comin' Up campaign that launched the last new daily newspaper in America.
I'm also an expert on financial sunsets when Warburg & Pincus pulled the plug on Ingersoll Publications.
2) Metro-Stink: The Light Rail Rapid Transit Travesty - if I were a profit-oriented business executive, I would have built high-speed light rail to carry commuters from the western suburbs along I-64/40 to- and-fro to downtown St. Louis and Clayton, the business and government center of St. Lous County. I-64/40 would have stations at key north-south junctions with either light rail or commuter coaches or personal golf-cart style rechargeables, going to the north and south off the major east-west I-64/40 artery.
Did we do that? Nope...our bungling bloated bureaucrats and expedient city planners and short-sighted myopic city-county-state-federal fathers, aka - the "real men of genius," built Metro-Link along old 19th and early 20th Century industrial railroad right-of-ways that meander across the city-county. The track beds were there and it was "relatively cheap" (hahahahahaha) to build along these easements.
The ONLY problem is, these old lines don't go anywhere the real masses of people are going today. So "ridership" is low.
DOH!
One Metro-Link line's south terminus ends abruptly in Shrewsbury just a block from one of FDR's New Deal 1930's WPA projects, the giant open sewer known as River Des Peres.
Or as my mother used to call it, River Des Stinque.
I've updated her insightful, albeit cynical observation to today's situation.
Metro-Link is really Metro-Stink.
The other night as I inched my way west in bumper-to-bumper traffic, the ribbon of red-blinking brake lights stretched for miles into the distance. The new, improved I-64/40 with its added lanes had succeeded in spreading the congestion from 4 lanes to 6 in both directions.
If the food at Tom Sehnert's Annie Gunn's was not sooooo good and I was not the guest of a former client for a FREE dinner, I would have swung off at zipped north to Olive or south to Manchester the nearest McDonald's to snaf down a McRib and call it a day.
Frankly, any high school or junior college student - or even me - could have designed a better congestion solution on the back of a cocktail napkin. I wondered if our "real men of genius" had ever seriously thought about how an elevated light rail system, that could have been built in conjunction with I-64/40 would have alleviated traffic as it sped commuters "greenly and gaslessly" to places they actually wanted to go...to work, to government centers, to bars, to universities, to medical centers, to bars, to the ballpark, to bars and football stadium.
NO...that would make sense and here in St. Louis, we really really really like S.T.U.P.I.D.
3) The Ugliest Highway In America - I think we should name the section of highway with miles of the butt ugly "noise abatement" visual atrocity that lines both sides of the new ungreen soulless concrete walled-in I-64/40, The UGH! for UGliest Highway.
You can't look left or right and see anything, but a tall gray monolithic concrete wall that in this "New Age of Green and Natural" has all the warmth and appeal of an Orwellian or Obaman Acornian vision of a homogenized America speeding like lemmings down a thought-contolled channel to the river, with no vision allowed on either side.
I see no homes.
I see no trees.
I see none of the stately mansions atop the lovely well-manicured Ladue, Frontenac and Huntleigh hillocks. The large mansions and rolling hills that once inspired and awed this Southside city boy to seek fortune and fortune are now walled off from my view.
Every bit of gracious green spacious openness and every vestige of the homes of a successful humanity is gone - for mile after monotonous mile with a few rare exceptions.
From I-270 to as far east as McCausland, I feel like I'm on the fast track to doom and oblivion until I hit the Zoo Zone just east of McCausland, where the barrier walls drop and I can see the sturdy brick homes of Dogtown and Pat's a very cool corner bar near Turtle Park. I've never been there (ahem) but I hear it's quite well known to the Irish denizens of the area; and on my left is the world-reknowned St. Louis Zoo in Forest Park.
( ODD NOTE1: Here's an ad from Pat's Pub.)
Bring your kids to Pat's!
We offer a kid's menu, wikki stix and crayons to color the kid's menu while you enjoy your meal!
Of County Galway, Ireland, did Mr. Patrick Connolly originally hail. With a Priestly letter in hand, did Patrick traverse the Atlantic Ocean, settling in Dogtown. The successful entrepreneur started Pat's Bar & Grill in June of 1942.
(Now what would bring a strapping Irish lad to St. Louis in the early days of WWII? I smell a story.)
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(ODD NOTE2: Thinking of the St. Louis Zoo reminded me that I once was a runner-up in a Sunday newspaper word-play contest.
The challenge was to define: OZONE and use as many "Zs" as possible.
I defined it as: OZONE is the zone in the Oz Zoo where the ozone and oxygen is kept near the Zebras.)
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Let's get back to "The Not-So-Great Wall" of The UGH! It's almost like metaphor for today's America that has been divided against itself into groups "haves VS have nots," "rich VS entitled," "conservative wingnut teabaggers VS enlightened progressives" and of course, the whites VS people of color.
These are the metaphorical politically-correct sound abatement walls that keep us from seeing, hearing, speaking fearlessly and candidly to one another and knowing our neighbors as people - and as individuals.
I hate walls like that.
But it's easier for slime-ball politicians that way. When you divide, you can villify a group. Jews. Christians. Fundamentalists. Conservatives. Anti-Feminists, car companies, evil insurance companies and of course racists.
Here's a news flash, I am a Human Racist. I've put myself out there on this core belief of mine. Visit www.orcastl.com and hit Capstone Project to get my latitude and longitude on this subject. There's an Irish connection here too.
Does the UGH and it's ugly walls evoke any creepy visceral feelings in you? Maybe it's just me and one of those silly feelings that I get from time to time, like whenever I see a politician behind a microphone.
Birk, Commonsensetarian and Citizen of the Republic, Mob of One and Sage In The Snuggie.
PS: On the plus side, when I travel I-64/40 it is uncongested and super-duper double dog fast. That's the plus of going to the office early. Only the earliest birds are up eating worms at BDT on The UGH (Birk Drive Time).
