This week on Talking Headways, Vanessa Cooksey, President and CEO of the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis, and Chris Hansen, Executive Director at the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, chat about growth and investment in St. Louis’s Grand Center Arts District.
We chat about the people that make the arts district work. We also discuss ensuring that the public can enjoy the arts while making sure artists benefit from their work in the community.
Scroll past the audio player below for a partial edited transcript of the episode — or click here for a full, AI-generated (and typo-ridden) readout.
Jeff Wood: I was going on Google Maps, looking at the district, and just kind of impressed by the urban form of it. Just, the buildings are impressive, historic, there's a lot of walkability. It's easy to get around. I'm curious what the work is to connect some of that urban fabric together, because it's obviously not all the buildings are in the same street. But it does seem to be like a cohesive place.
Chris Hansen: Yeah, I appreciate you noticing that. A lot of areas are like one street, right? You have a strip where this is, four blocks by many, many blocks, and it's surrounded by institutional strength. A historically Black college at Harris-Stow, St. Louis University, a veterans hospital, really important residential neighborhoods, [and] City SC soccer club on the eastern side of downtown west. And so we've got something that very few areas have, and the challenge for us is to connect that. A lot of our work at the foundation over the next coming years is to connect the dots, and we're doing that through public art, through a mural initiative called "The Walls Off Washington." To not just make the streets more walkable, but to even make the alleyways feel walkable to continue to work on public-private partnerships that invest in infrastructure.
Not handing developers money, but getting the streets and the traffic and the sidewalks and the lighting. We want to wake up in 10 years and be able to walk from the Fox Theater to City SC, which would only take you 15 minutes roughly to walk there, right? It doesn't take you that long, no matter how fast you walk.
But we just wanna be able to do that in a way where everyone feels safe, it's accessible, it's connected, and when you're walking, there's vibrancy, there's door pulls, and there's things that can entice you to enjoy it or view it, learn from it, and there's more people living here. So I think a big part of that is in a city like St. Louis where there's a lot of fragmentation, there's a multitude of taxing districts, community improvement districts, SPDs.
We've really worked on setting that broader table across Midtown and into downtown to help build that bridge. And I think this is a moment where those public-private partnerships, really getting stakeholders that have invested their time in treasure from faith communities, residents, small businesses, nonprofits, bigger institutions, and city government to really start to work together to meet the moment in an area that is our greatest cultural asset.
And we believe this, believe this through real data that Grand Center in Midtown is the most important and greatest cultural district in North America, and we're gonna prove it over time by making it easier to enjoy it because we still have too many flat surface lots. We still have harsh conditions. We still have lack of accessibility and connectivity. We don't need a lot more big things.
We need small things now, lighter, cheaper, faster. We don't need another huge development. Couple hundred more residential units, few more mom and pop restaurants, a little more retail and more, most importantly, walkability and safety — and we've got Mecca.
Vanessa Cooksey: Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly, and that's why we've been partners with the Kranzberg Arts Foundation for many years, and I like to think of the work that RAC does is public money for the public good, and art districts in particular succeed because they create a density of creativity and humanity, right?
And so being able to come to a place where for just however many hours or time, you don't have to worry about all these things that divide and separate us. We have an amazing festival, MATI, and when people are out together, it’s This is St. Louis. It's not my particular neighborhood. Like we're bringing all of the best of us to a place to experience something together. And so that density of creativity and humanity, especially for a time like this, I think is so important. And KAF does it better than anybody.
