A major problem facing downtown can be summed up in two words — and they’re not “Tishaura Jones.” They’re “working remotely.”
In June 2020, John Berglund, the architect-engineer who was in charge of transforming the old Post-Dispatch building into the new St. Louis home for the technology company Square, gave me a tour of the almost-finished project. It was impressive. Not just the building, either. It seemed like the neighborhood was turning a corner. Young, high-salaried professionals would soon be wandering the streets — and they might be the vanguard of a much larger assembly. The city was so thrilled with Square that it declared the neighborhood to be the “North Washington Avenue Innovation District.”
Who cared that the building was two blocks from Washington Avenue? Also, the St. Patrick Center, an organization that provides services for the homeless, was just south of the building. Would the city give the heave-ho to an organization that serves the homeless to make room for some tax-paying techies?
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The struggling restaurants and saloons in the neighborhood knew that answer was yes, and they were thrilled.
COVID made everybody hunker down. When that cloud finally lifted, nothing.
Techies, it turns out, like “working remotely.”
That means they’re not going out for lunch. They’re not having a drink or two with colleagues at a saloon near the office after work.
I loved my job. Truly loved it. But take away lunch and socializing after work, and what are you left with? Your colleagues. That’s not nothing.
My son lives in Austin and works for a large tech company. He got used to working from home during COVID. When that passed and workers could return to the office, he was not thrilled. I like working from home, he told me. I really believe I’m more productive, he added.
“Productive? This is not about what you can do for your company,” I said. “This is about you. Don’t you see the value of having two lives?”
I tried to explain. You can exist in two realities.
“You mean like I can be a character in ‘The Office’?” he asked.
Exactly, I said.
“Why would I want that?” he asked.
His thinking, it seems, is shared by lots of young workers and not just in the tech industry. Many young people would rather avoid the commutes and the parking and the general hassles of going to work.
This is a bigger deal than you might think. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, people have “gone to work.” That is what we have always called it. Going to work. There is a directional component to it. You leave your house to go to work.
Also, you need work clothes. A woman might need a skirt and a blouse. A man might need a dress shirt, maybe even a jacket. My father wore a dark green work shirt and dark green work pants. People had two sets of clothes — work clothes and home clothes.
Mostly, though, I am thinking about relationships. Of course, I was lucky. A newsroom is fun. Or was. I am not in the office much anymore, but I can tell that things have changed. A smaller staff means everybody works harder. My colleagues and I were slackers by comparison. Big-time slackers. People would go to lunch and get lost.
There was a good chance they might be at the Missouri Bar & Grille, but this was in the time before cell phones, and only doctors and drug dealers had beepers. Everybody else was incommunicado. A reporter-seeking editor could only call the Grille and ask if the reporter were there. The bartender, Athena, would turn to the bar and say loudly, “Has anybody seen Bill?” If Bill were to shake his head, she’d go back to the phone. “Nobody’s seen him.”
Eliot Porter, John Michael McGuire and I shared a pod. We had two computers to share. We needed some way to determine who had priority use. Porter was of English descent, and my ancestors were Orangemen from Northern Ireland, so we established “The Protestant Men of Letters Society of the Post-Dispatch,” membership of which was confined to the pod. Society members had rights of first usage for the computers.
Mary’s much younger brother came to St. Louis for a visit when he graduated from high school. He spent the day with me. He said to Mary, “Don’t tell Bill, but my friends in high school are more mature than Bill and his friends.” That’s what he likes about it, Mary said.
We really did not have a problem with the computers. Porter was seldom there. He was very smart and Harvard-educated and a little out of place in the newsroom. He spent a lot of time in the downtown public library. He researched things in a time before the internet. He knew how to use to use a library. That is a lost art, like navigating by the stars.
Then the newsroom banned smoking. The bosses took one of the small “meeting rooms” and made it the smoking lounge. When Porter wasn’t at the library, he stayed in the lounge. He smoked a pipe, which was a habit he said he had developed in Korea during the war. He was an infantryman. He said it was easier to smoke a pipe in the bitter cold. Although I had by then quit smoking, I sometimes went into the smoking lounge to chat with Porter. Our friendship enriched my life. And McGuire was like a brother.
Perhaps it’s just as easy to make friends on Zoom. Maybe you can sense simpatico. That is probably the case. And, of course, you can meet people anywhere. It doesn’t have to be at work. Remote workers are not necessarily lonely.
But the streets around the North Washington Avenue Innovation District are generally empty these days, except for the homeless people who line up for free lunch at the St. Patrick Center. Restaurants and saloons have shut down. The Grille has become a crab shack.
There is a park just east of the old newspaper building. I spent some time in the park around noon Wednesday. I didn’t see anybody come out of the building.
Deserted streets are a huge problem for downtown, and it’s a problem that feeds on itself.
How do you fix a deserted downtown in a time of remote work?
