The Buder and Guaranty buildings in downtown St. Louis. These buildings have since been torn down. A postcard view of the Buder building can be found here on the outstanding Built St. Louis site.
The building you see peeking between the two is the Civil Courts Building.
The parking lot between 6th and 7th streets can be inferred from the top of what looks like a Volkswagen, just visible over the edge of the fountain. This parking lot has been removed and the space used to expand Kiener Plaza with a particularly sterile concrete amphitheater.
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Jimmy the Bum standing in front of the Archview Cafeteria, circa 1984. A similar photo -- without the bum -- was taken by celebrity photographer and bald man Joel Meyerowitz. If you look at the reflection in the window, you can see why this place was called the Archview. It was on the first floor of the Guaranty building, now demolished.
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This is what replaced the Buder and Guaranty buildings; a nondescript box on half the site, and open space on the other half. Directly east and west of the site are entire blocks of open space, so it's not as if there was a particular need to provide respite from the concrete canyon.
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Another view of the Gateway One building which replaced the Buder and Guaranty buildings in downtown St. Louis. Note the much better view of the Civil Courts Building now. The blue lights are relatively recent, and probably have something to do either with the hockey team or a certain W.C. Handy tune, both called "St. Louis Blues". You can't see the bottom of it, but the lighted windows in the building vaguely make up the shape of a quarter-note, the logo of the St. Louis Blues hockey podnik.
Having torn down most of its good buildings, St. Louis is reduced to playing elaborate visual puns with the ones that remain. They'll probably tear down the Civil Courts Building before long, citing earthquake damage or something. I've already heard that the Civil Courts are threatening to move to Houston unless St. Louis builds them a new building with more luxury boxes.
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The intersection of 6th and Chestnut streets in St. Louis, looking generally northwest. 6th street no longer exists between Chestnut and Market (one block south: to the left in the photo) and Kiener plaza (behind the photographer) has been expanded into a particularly sterile amphitheater complex on the site of the old parking lot between 6th, 7th, Chestnut, and Market.
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On the left: a parking garage (the same garage as in the black-and-white photo, but from theo ther side). On the right: a parking garage. In the next block on the right: a parking garage. The result of all this is that parking during a baseball game costs, as the sign indicates, $3.00 and it is impossible to make money operating a parking garage in downtown St. Louis. They keep getting built because the city more or less subsidizes them. At least the nearest garage -- unlike the other two -- has retail businesses at street level.
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That's quite a parking lot. The law says that for a X square feet of floor space, you have to have Y number of parking spaces. The law makes no distinction between a furniture store (which is what we have here) and a movie theater, even though furniture stores by their nature need a lot of floor space for very few people.
I suppose you could defend this by saying that with the giant parking lot, buildings like this could some day be re-used for some more people-dense purpose; but the special economics of furniture store real-estate makes this highly unlikely. Incidentally, just to the left of the edge of the frame here is the site of the legendary and now demolished Coral Court Motel.
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An aerial view of the furniture-store parking lot
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The strip mall is only about twenty-five years old. What they mean is that you can buy antiques in the former Kroger. Strip malls do not adapt well to other uses; not only do they have to spend a lot of money maintaining that now-too-large parking lot, but the merchants there don't benefit from casual traffic. Without people coming there on a regular basis to shop at the grocery store, nothing else is really useful: which is why the space to the left of the Antique Mall is some kind of telemarketing boiler room.
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