Friday, June 25, 2010

Friday rewind

Summer is Farmer's Market season in St. Louis, and downtown is in on the action:


Washington Avenue gets lots of attention and is home to cool places on every block, but Olive Street has a real urban canyon feel too, and is seeing a big increases in pedestrian traffic:


I vote for Olive to be the place to host downtown's next parade. Narrow city streets make the best parade venues.

2 comments:

Daron said...

As a former resident of Plaza Square, I've got to say there are too many parades on market. I could never sleep with those marching bands beneath my window. At least two blocks from any residential buildings, please.

Why not parade up Gravois from river to river? That'd be quite a walk.

Rick Bonasch said...

The best parades I've ever experienced were the Chinese New Year parades on the 10-15 foot wide Grant Avenue in San Francisco's Chinatown.

Sometime around 1975 civic leaders moved the parade a couple of blocks to the north through the wider streets of the San Francisco Financial District.

Instead of the historic Chinese architecture of the Grant Avenue buildings, now the parade passed by the steel and glass towers of the financial giants.

All charm was lost in exchange for easier pedestrian and vehicular access.