Biddle Street, on the near Northside of St. Louis, was in days of yore well known as the heart of the Kerry Patch and later ethnic communities. Also, it was part of the earliest infrastructure development of the City: the Biddle Street Sewer, started in 1850.
However, it's quite evident that Biddle Street no longer exists as a true street, and hasn't for quite some time.
Walking eastward from lunch today, I noted the following blockages along Biddle from Tucker east:
Other portions of Biddle are a little more street-like; for example, it's landscaped and wide east of I-70 all the way to Lenor K. Sullivan Blvd. However, this relatively recent improvement seems rather odd, given that there are no buildings on that section. It's pretty much just an attractive parking lot entryway.
Perhaps the Pinnacle casino will relate to this street, but I'm not sure it will.
West of Tucker, Biddle does somehow resemble a street, albeit with vast expanses of vacant land on several stretches, until about 20th St., when it disappears almost completely into the halfway-redeveloped southern end of the famous Pruitt-Igoe site. There are athletic fields there now, serving both Pruitt Military Middle School (the online picture of which looks like it should be on the edge of some suburban area with the amount of empty space in the background) and the Gateway schools complex, known officially as the Samuel Shepard Jr. Gateway Educational Park.
2 comments:
Some of the largest collections of superblocks border downtown, cutting it off from nearby neighborhoods.
The area Joe mentions north of Washington to Cass, east of Tucker to I-70 is just one grouping of superblocks, blocking off the north.
Downtown is also blocked off from the northwest by Pruitt-Igoe/Carr Square, to the west by AG Edwards' campus and to the south by Purina's campus and near-southside public housing.
The culprit? Why, urban renewal!
From Mill Creek Valley to Desoto-Carr, all these areas experienced massive demo for superblock developments that were again partially demolished (Pruitt-Igoe only the most infamous).
And what did we learn from superblocks? Apparently nothing with the Bottle District's plan.
Downtown may be reviving, but it remains a disconnected island from neighborhoods to the north, south and west with these bordering superblocks still in place.
Joe,
Great post! I would love to see or help create a series of short essays on lost or largely lost streets like Biddle.
If only the bottle District could reconnect Biddle to Broadway, at least the street's name would be on more people's lips.
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