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In an old Catholic city like St. Louis, it's pretty hard to turn a tide when church and state are allied together. Yet the tide turned at the Preservation Board meeting. Three witnesses signed up to testify in support of demolition: Wohlert, Vollmer and Bommarito, which had oversight over the disposition of St. Aloysius Gonzaga. Cultural Resources staff and city planner Rollin Stanley also endorsed the demolition. But that's it; not a single independent citizen spoke or wrote to support the demolition permit. However, several people sent letters and four people spoke in opposition at the meeting. These people included two architects, Steve Patterson of Urban Review and myself -- not exactly a random group of average citizens, but not a group with financial or legal involvement in the matter. We were citizens with an interest in preserving a church with tremendous reuse potential and in upholding the integrity of the city's Preservation Review law, which is very important to the future of our city's renewal. Our goal was making our voices heard by the members of the Preservation Board, our representatives in government. In this case, they responded to citizen input. Members of the board asked good questions, considered claims by both sides and voted against granting the demolition permit by a vote of 4 to 2. Then the Board voted 5 to 1 to expressly deny a permit. While this was preliminary review, meaning that the matter could be heard again, we were elated that the Board sent a clear signal that it was not going to easily grant a demolition permit to Wohlert. To get further, he would have to support his claim that the main church building had irreparable structural deficiencies -- his own engineer's report did not support the claim -- or he would have to revise the site plan for his redevelopment to include some adaptive reuse of the historic church buildings. The vote was a reminder that, however inconsistent its members can be, the Preservation Board is a rare body with citywide scope over urban design and some degree of independence. In the 1999 Preservation Review ordinance, the Board of Aldermen created the Preservation Board as the successor to the Heritage and Urban Design Commission. The Preservation Board is a deliberative body charged with ruling on preservation review issues that the Cultural Resources Office staff cannot resolve with property owners. The preservation review process begins when a property owner applies to the Building Division for a permit to alter, build or demolish a building located in a locally-certified historic district (there are very few) or to demolish a building located in preservation review districts. The Building Division sends these permits to the Cultural Resources Office for review and approval. If Cultural Resources approves an application, it is granted; if they deny it, and the owner appeals their ruling, the Preservation Board hears the matter. For large development projects, a developer like Wohlert may request a "preliminary review" directly by the Preservation Board to gage the likelihood of the project's design being feasible under the law. Contrary to popular belief, preservation review is not specifically about 'saving old buildings" and increasingly covers new construction is areas like the Central West End and Soulard. Note that preservation review districts follow ward boundaries and are optional per the discretion of each alderman; this system has miraculously placed half of the city's wards in preservation review but also has given the aldermen tight control over preservation review matters. The Preservation Board's members are appointed by the mayor, so it can seem only as perfect as the current mayor. But overall it is a good part of our city government. The biggest problem? The Preservation Review ordinance has a gaping hole that renders the Preservation Board's votes almost useless under aldermanic override. Leave it to aldermen to write a law giving them power over another government body! In Section Five, Paragraph A of the ordinance appears a sentence that so many aldermen seem to know well: 'Demolitions which would comply with a redevelopment plan previously approved by ordinance or adopted by the Planning and Urban Design Commission shall be approved except in unusual circumstances which shall be expressly noted." Savvy readers probably know where this story is going: to the Board of Aldermen, where each member has authority over development within his or her ward and all other members hold their noses and vote to approve other members' projects, no matter what the citywide impact or bad precedent may be. This operating system, dubbed 'aldermanic courtesy," can short-circuit the Preservation Review in a heart beat. And that's exactly what happened with St. Aloysius Gonzaga: Vollmer introduced a bill to 'blight" the church buildings and approve Wohlert's redevelopment. Rather than appeal the Preservation Board ruling, the alderman and developer simply turned down the one-way street that's always available. (A wider one-way street that Vollmer mentioned but did not use was removing his ward from preservation review altogether.) Vollmer's bill sailed through the Housing, Urban Development and Zoning Committee -- what doesn't? -- right onto the floor of the full board, where it passed unanimously this month. Opponents figured that they would have another chance at the Preservation Board, and waited to see an appeal on subsequent agendas. A subsequent meeting of the Southwest Garden Neighborhood Association revealed that the residents of the area around St. Al's were split on the demolition and felt blindsided by the development plans. So the Preservation Board now has to revisit the demolition permit and, per the do-as-the-Aldermen-say clause in the Preservation Review ordinance, give its reluctant rubber stamp? Apparently not. That is the sorry outcome that one might think would happen, but the Southwest City Journal has reported that the Building Division is granting the demolition permit on the basis of the bill passed by the Board of Aldermen. This seems hasty given that the law would almost bind the Preservation Board to approve the demolition if it considered the matter again, unless its members -- like those of the Board of Aldermen -- agreed that the matter was exceptional enough to warrant special treatment. So what of the Preservation Board's ruling? Can aldermen now opt out of that? It seems that a deliberative government body is being ignored as easily as citizen input often is. While not unprecedented, this move comes after considerable public debate over the demolition. Aldermen should have respected the participants and their ideas, no matter what their opinions. The debate is intensified by an understanding on all sides that more money than ever is flowing into development in St. Louis, and the decisions of what we build and how we build and approve it are precedent-setting. The precedent set in the matter of St. Aloysius Gonzaga Church favors hasty plans over careful planning choices, parochialism over consensus and political expediency over open public debate. If great architecture like that of St. Aloysius Gonzaga Church embodied the precedents set in the age of its construction, what sort of building will embody those our leaders now have set?
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