St. Louis Struggles With an Old Question: “Why Go Downtown at All?”

On the surface at least, this question seems to suggest a realistic and sensible solution to the problem of all-day parking and rush hour traffic in the central business district of any big city. Why go downtown at all? Why, indeed.

Just the same, many of us will have the uneasy feeling that this solution is almost too easy, that there’s a hint of danger in it, the threat perhaps of some kind of social disorganization on an enormous scale.

The suburbs surround what we have long thought of as the central city, the core area, but what will happen to the surrounding belt of suburbs if this core simply disintegrates and then vanishes? Could the suburban belt just go on expanding forever leaving a bigger and bigger circle of nothing much in the middle, a bigger and bigger hole in the doughnut?

We continue to talk about rapid transit expansion (a new MetroLink line), and urban transit in the form of streetcars and buses. We continue to preach the necessity of a strong urban core. We continue to complain about traffic and parking. What’s been learned, what’s changed in half a century?

Why are we still asking “Why go downtown at all”?