West Florissant Avenue became known worldwide as “Ground Zero” for the Ferguson movement, after the police-shooting death of Michael Brown Jr. in August 2014.
Now residents and community leaders are hoping that it will become known for a different reason in the next few years. On March 9, St. Louis County held an open house for the community to provide input on plans for the West Florissant Avenue Great Streets Project – which aims to redesign the high-traffic corridor from Stein Avenue to the Norfolk Southern Railroad.
The main idea is to slow down traffic and create a more pedestrian-friendly business district.
“We are trying to get that same kind of feel that’s in the Delmar Loop and bring it here to Dellwood and Ferguson,” said Reggie Jones, mayor of the City of Dellwood.
The plan was in the works prior to Brown’s death, and the master plan for the $33 million project was approved in 2014.
Jones said that now, after the Ferguson unrest, “it makes it more important that we do complete this project. It’s good to have all of these community people out here who are engaged in this process.”
The open house on Thursday evening has bustling with residents who milled around the various stations to learn more and leave their comments. Several said they liked the proposed designs but were concerned about where the money would come from.
“I like the whole project,” said Anjanee Wilkins, a Dellwood alderwoman, “but I’m concerned about the funding and the diversion of traffic, because West Florissant is a busy street. I don’t think they know how busy it is.”
West Florissant Avenue is a four-to-six lane road that runs through the cities of Jennings, Country Club Hills, Dellwood and Ferguson. It is a highly used connection between North St. Louis and North County. It’s lined with a mix of small businesses, large stores, single-family and apartment buildings, large employers like Emerson, and community destinations like parks, churches and health clinics. The street was designed to serve motorized vehicles, so it is often difficult to walk, catch the bus or bike along the roadway.
That’s a “big problem,” states the project’s website, because 20 percent of households in the project area do not own a car. And almost 15 percent of project area commuters have to travel 60 minutes or more to work or school, many due to long bus trips.
In 2006, the East-West Gateway Council of Governments launched the St. Louis Great Streets Initiative to encourage communities across the region to consider how they could make their streets more beautiful and multi-modal and produce more economic development. Other Great Streets projects have been completed on South Grand Boulevard, Page Avenue and Natural Bridge Avenue.
“We don’t want the traffic to go away,” Gardner said. “We just want it to slow down. We are hoping that once we slow that traffic down, people will be more likely to stop and support some of those businesses and thereby get more people to come back to the area.”
The current preliminary design phase, which costs $2.5 million, came from federal grants and local funding that St. Louis County and the cities of Ferguson and Dellwood secured. In order to compete for federal transportation funds, the project has to complete this first phase, which should be finished by the end of the year. The preliminary plans are only for the first three “segments” of the entire project, which is estimated at $23 million of the total.
“We want the community to feel that, when the project is done, that they are getting something that actually adds value to their community overall,” Nichalos Gardner, director of the county’s public works department.
Gardner believes the project will compete “very well” for federal funding. If all goes well, construction would take place in 2019 and 2020, Gardner said.
