A non-profit conservancy created to maintain and enhance the greenway would do best focusing its funds on interdisciplinary academics. This greenway should be viewed most properly as a research corridor shared between UMSL, Wash U, and the institutions in Forest Park. With a solid research base, economic development would obviously follow from the two ends towards the middle.
The Great Connection
UMSL lacks any sort of retail development on or near campus. The UMSL-Loop connection is already firm. The south campus residential population has a metrolink station and easy access. Most people view the Delmar Loop as an outgrowth of Wash U student vitality, but the residential population at UMSL surely supplements it. When UMSL students ultimately move out of their residence halls, many end up living in the Loop and commuting to UMSL.
A bike trail between UMSL and the Loop further cements the connection for UMSL students, faculty, and staff. Students apartments could spring up anywhere along the greenway. The trail would also be used by those already using Forest Park's recreational bike trails.
Collaborative Interdisciplinary Research
The Pierre Laclede Honors College at UMSL is supposed to take the top 5% of the student body and expose them to interdisciplinary classes that promote collaboration and critical thinking and address the problems associated with information silos that naturally occur at major universities. To do this, the college uses big themes like CHERP, which stands for Campus Honors Environmental Research Program. The idea is that every department at the university can fit into a general environmental theme and create a balanced multi-faceted understanding of St. Vincent Park, a large county park adjacent to UMSL. The English department can do a nature writing and poetry class. The biology department can do urban ecology. Student sculptures might have a place as well. There are many education majors in the honors college, so naturally the life science programs at the neighboring Normandy-Wellston schools get to be involved as well. No matter what a student's major is, there should be some sort of class that they can take in the CHERP program.
CHERP is a very interesting because it invests students and the university in the caretaking of a public good, which certainly fits UMSL mission. In the fall of 2009, students from a CHERP ecology class submitted a plan to UMSL's chancellor to convert the campus to a "wildflower meadow [that] would help prevent soil erosion, [and] save $5000 a year by not having to [be mowed or landscaped]." By investing students in a place and filling them with sound ecological thinking, the students turned around and offered a way for the campus to save money.
As UMSL has adopted St. Vincent Park, and St. Vincent Greenway continues south from that park to Forest Park where a major wetland restoration project took place in the last decade, it seems natural that CHERP could be expanded over the entire greenway. Graduate programs could be added in like public policy, transportation studies, and civil engineering.
If Wash U made the same investments as UMSL in the greenway, then the green research potential would be easily doubled. Add the institutions in Forest Park and the partnerships just keep expanding. A conservancy that acts as steward of the greenway should also be a body for facilitating these partnerships. Grants for undergraduate research can be a lot smaller and numerous than those needed for grad students and professors.
With enough research investment, green jobs and real estate investment would follow.
Development
The federal Department of Transportation has an interesting grant program called TIGER that tries to fund urban transportation projects. In the first round of grants, money was not secured for the Loop Trolley.
The Loop Trolley would not only put a streetcar in the Loop, but conceptually expand it to Debaliviere and the History Museum in Forest Park. It is worth noting that another, sadly separate, applicant for the same TIGER grant was transit-oriented-development around the Forest Park Metrolink Station. The TOD would be next to the trolley, and their applications might have done better in the review if they were bundled as one. The development along Debaliviere is also part of the St. Vincent Greenway.
That short section of DeBaliviere should apply for the next round of TIGER grants as TOD, a streetcar, AND a greenway. Though short, such a complete street is ambitious enough to stand out from other applicants. Add Wash U and UMSL as backers in some form and it surely must happen.
When the Loop is expanded to DeBaliviere, it will also be expanded to the St. Vincent Greenway. Delmar Blvd is the traditional dividing line in the city between the wealthy white south and the poor black north. The greenway transcends this divide and could potentially help move wealth north into the Ruth Porter Mall in the West End neighborhood and on to Wellston.
Perhaps most interesting to some is that giant building visible from the Metrolink between St. Charles Rock Road and UMSL South. It used to be called St. Vincent's Hospital, but is now a silly apartment complex called 'Castle Park.' St. Vincent's is very much part of the Daughters of Charity property collection that UMSL has partial dominion over.
St. Vincent's is a massive structure with a huge estate. It would make a great museum or residence hall. It seems like too beautiful of a gem to sit next to UMSL untouched far into the future. It will surely be purchased eventually. If indeed that happens, it would make UMSL a sprawling campus connected by park space. SIUE, the other sprawling campus in the region has introduced a bike sharing program for students to get around. A St. Vincent Greenway Conservancy could be the steward of a similar program for UMSL, Wash U, and Forest Park.
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