City Garden and Chicago’s Millennium Park: A comparison
Is our region’s recurring case of Chicago-envy on display once more in our newest civic monument?
That, in a sense, is what one prominent Midwestern urban affairs blogger takes away from the newly-opened City Garden. In a lengthy posting this morning, Aaron Renn, aka The Urbanophile, writes on “St. Louis, City Garden and The Millennium Park Effect,” comparing the sculpture park that opened downtown last week (to rave reviews) with the Chicago park and art garden that many credit with sparking new life in The Loop.
Renn, who splits time between Chicago and Indianapolis (and described his first impression of St. Louis as “pathetic”), sees many architectural similarities between City Garden and Millennium Park. But if St. Louisans are expecting similar results, in terms of nearby development, from City Garden, he wrote, they may expect too much.
Millennium Park is a spectacular space. But as I’ve long noted, Chicago’s excellence lies not in its spectacular monuments, but in its magnificent workaday neighborhoods and throbbing commercial heart. To take away Millennium Park and its ilk as key to Chicago’s success is to mistake the frosting for the cake. Chicago has Millennium Park because it’s a great city, it’s not a great city because it has Millennium Park. To try to replicate merely the effect of the built environment is to miss the point.
Also, the large crowds drawn by the park are enabled by the massive size of the Chicagoland region, its huge tourist base, and the gigantic employment and student base in the Loop. Building Millennium Park was like throwing gasoline on an already raging bonfire. Yes, it will make a nice explosion, but the fire was already going. The vast bulk of downtown areas do not have anything like this, thus what they can hope to gain from similar ventures is much less.
To be fair, St. Louis city leaders have been muted in their expectations for City Garden spurring development on nearby blocks. But it’s only logical to think that such a space would bring new energy, and people, to a stretch of downtown that’s long been under-used.
And Renn agrees, City Garden is a vast improvement on what was there before. Certainly a project worth doing, he said, and another step forward for St. Louis. It’s just that there are many ingredients to an energized, lively downtown, a la Chicago. A great sculpture park is but one of them.
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Millenium park is a great thing, but yes, it absolutely exists because of the energy of chicago itself.
And yes, Citygarden is not Millenium park. But it doesn’t have to be. It is a wonderful place in it’s own right.
Could it be even better? Yes. For starters we could remove the Serra sculpture and extend it one block west. (and I have often said the serra would make a good wind chime on top of the Arch).
We could also demolish or relocate gateway one and extend Citydarden one block east, which would also link it up to Kiener Plaza. This is extraordinarily unlikely to happen, but I’m going to keep putting the idea out there anyway.
(you should know that in the public planning sessions for the Downtown plan in the late 1990’s, the overwhelming majority of participants indicated they wanted the building gone. This was the case at EVERY public input session. Yet somehow that recommendation never made it to the downtown plan.)
(it’s not like there isn’t room elsewhere. The General American Life building could be rebuilt as a highrise, and possibly have higher value than gateway one now has. Just sayin’.)
Having visited both parks now and lived in both cities, I agree with most of Renn’s opinion. However, I also don’t think city leaders think Citygarden will compete with Millenium Park. Millenium Park is huge itself and built within a huge downtown. Citygarden revived a couple blocks in a rebuilding midsize downtown. As downtown rehabs continue, hopefully city leaders will find a way to expand the park east and west.
I also don’t think demolishing Gateway One is necessary, we’ve already bulldozed enough in this town. Instead, extend the garden along the south side of the building at grade with the blocks around it.