Washington University students re-imagine the Wellston Loop
By Chris King
Of the St. Louis American
In a metropolitan area that has development fever, no one talks much about the Wellston Loop, a severely depressed pocket of the city on the verge of Wellston, hubbed around Martin Luther King Boulevard.
But this neglected area was the subject of furious research and brainstorming over the weekend and early this week, when some two dozen students from the Hewlett Program in Architecture at Washington University worked on a community building class project. If their professor and the president of the area’s development corporation have their way, this class project may jump the curb and help to transform the blighted area.
The assignment: to study the community, through a block-by-block model of it, by walking its mean streets and through citizen interviews, and then to devise and construct architectural models that correspond to the community’s development needs.
Don De Vivo, president of the Wellston Loop Community Development Corporation and a realtor who owns several area properties, got involved in the program when he saw students roaming the streets, photographing buildings and knocking on doors to ask residents about their community needs.
“They probably know more people in the community than I do,” De Vivo said admiringly of the students, who are freshmen studying architecture at Washington University under the guidance of professor Bob Hansman.
Hansman is a small, lean, intense white man with deep and varied roots in the black community.
One student in the program, Cameron Ball, said, “Our bus driver said Bob is a genie, that he is wise from many lives, from many incarnations.”
It’s a remarkable insight. Even more remarkable is that a student at an elite university was quoting a bus driver as an authority on his professor. This is the sort of open approach to experience and education that Hansman instills in students.
They also learn their trade and its cultural context. “Bob teaches us how cities fluctuate and how built environments interact with the cultural and social fabrics of our lives,” said another student, Carl Fritschel.
Most importantly, they learned how to bring such abstract insights literally down to the street, in a way that may bear fruit for the community.
Fritschel worked in a group with three other students that based its development plan on a conversation they had with Bonnie Reese, director of St. Louis Transitional Hope House, which provides shelter and activities for homeless women and families.
Reese had told the students of her plans to expand into a vacant space between her agency and the old Wellston Loop trolley turnaround building, which now houses a burger joint. She said they hope to open a small business like a resale shop, which might provide the beginnings of job training for the women who stay at Hope House.
Using the architectural language of the trolley turnaround building (which would be preserved, in the students’ development), they envisioned a small, well-lit strip mall that would already be guaranteed one tenant in the Hope House resale shop.
“I had a lot of discussion with the students, and what they came up with is what I see when I look out my window and imagine,” Reese said.
De Vivo, who joined a community group that critiqued the students’ work on Monday, said if he had the money to greenlight only one of the projects he reviewed, he would choose this development – though he was extremely reluctant to choose just one.
It’s not difficult to see why. Taken together, the students’ projects presented a dream version of this impoverished neighborhood.
They saw the abandoned JC Penney Building transformed into a community center with a wealth of playgrounds. They saw vacant space transformed into community gardens planted by children under the direction of high school students. They saw a library with “lots of nooks and crannies to read in.” They saw a neighborhood museum that would, in the words of student James Thomas, “bring new life into the community without edging out the life that is already here by making rents go up.”
Hansman has managed to train a freshman architect student at Washington University to re-imagine a poor neighborhood while trying to prevent the worst effects of gentrification.
Of course, a group of young, mostly privileged students from an elite university (with tuition higher than the average family income in the city of St. Louis) betrayed some naivete. When Ball talked about “turning an intersection into a node of activity,” it was impossible not to think how problematic a “node of activity” can be in an urban neighborhood. One community member looked at the design for the playgrounds and saw dangerously clear sightlines for drive-by shootings.
But the students had evidently stretched in the direction of this North Side community.
John Trevor, envisioning a retail space in another vacant lot, admitted his proposal was modest. He said, “I addressed the needs that most immediately need to be addressed to build toward a long-term vision of revitalization.” In doing so, he made reference to all of the people – and money – that passes through the community every Sunday en route to Friendly Temple, sounding like a seasoned community planner with a detailed sense of the neighborhood’s resources.
At the end of the presentation, De Vivo clearly didn’t want it to be over – ever. He buttonholed one student, Hitomi Inoue, and walked her over to the block-by-block model of the neighborhood. He wanted to argue for a better placement of the modest, much-needed neighborhood grocery store she had designed.
“It needs to be closer to the strip,” De Vivo said, as if Martin Luther King Boulevard were already the bustling node of positive activity that the students had imagined and Inoue were an architect about to get to work, rather than a student who had just completed a project.
De Vivo said his development group has plans to hire a professional architect to work with the students, in an effort to further the collaboration. Hansman said he has proposed to the deans of architecture and art at Washington University that the community building project be expanded into an ongoing program housed in a storefront in the Wellston Loop. Bruce Lindsey, the dean of the School of Architecture, was not available for comment at press time.
“A whole bunch of you all have called me and spoke to me on the phone for hours,” said a community member, Minister Betty Crusoe, who participated in the critique.
“You’re bringing back an historic community, like I told you all. This is just a birth, just a beginning.”