City Preservation Board: High-End Retail Glam, Vinyl Villains & Creative Demo/Rebuild

American historic preservation is unique. We value an exacting maintenance of form and materials. It's often an all or nothing. This isn't without reason, but it leads to interesting challenges in a city like St. Louis, where sometimes perfection can be the enemy of good. Requiring exacting standards can sometimes prevent investment. Ultimately, historic preservation guidelines are a local issue as neighborhoods set standards. In St. Louis, the result is sharp edges between neighborhoods such as Lafayette Square and Peabody Darst Webbe and between Soulard and Kosckiusko. It would seem that a graduated preservation standard could go a long way toward creating a better city - though that's a topic for another post.

Next week's City of St. Louis Preservation Board agenda aptly highlights the various challenges of historic preservation in St. Louis: high-end yoga clothing retailer seeks to add flash to a Central West End storefront, vinyl windows installed without permit, proposed demolition and reconstruction of the Swedish Society Building and a covered patio structure in historic Soulard. There's a little of everything this month.