Teaching kids about bikes, computers and life – 26 Nov 2005 P-D

ometime last year, the wheels started to come off for BicycleWORKS and its sister program, ByteWORKS.

Board members of the nonprofit organization hadn’t gotten grants lined up, and the money was drying up. The piles of paperwork and donated bikes were both in disarray. Some volunteers were fed up, while others were getting burned out.

“It was a total mess,” said Gavin Perry, a member of the board of BWorks, the nonprofit that runs the programs.

It’s been a bumpy ride for the programs ever since BicycleWORKS in the Shaw neighborhood north of Tower Grove Park started in the late 1980s as a place for kids to learn about and work on bikes and get some casual mentoring and life guidance from adult volunteers along the way. Like many organizations that depend heavily or exclusively on volunteers, there have been ups and downs at BWorks as those volunteers have come and gone, bringing different strengths and weaknesses.

Most at the organization agree the lowest point came late last year. But with most of the board replaced and new volunteers and officers in place, there’s also a sense that the place is on an upswing.

“We’re rejuvenated again,” said Perry, 52, whose day job is in the electronics shop at Washington University School of Medicine.

On the BicycleWORKS side of the organization, Patrick Van Der Tuin has taken over things. He’s slowly but surely inflicting organization on the shop at the intersection of Thurman and Shenandoah avenues, where kids from the neighborhood and beyond come to take classes about bicycles, eventually earning their own free bikes from the stockpile of donated bikes that fills the basement. Volunteers clean and fix up the bikes, selling some to generate BWorks’ only current income.

“Patrick’s young and ambitious for the program,” Perry said. “He’s done more good in six months than was done in the previous three years.”

There’s been more stability next door at ByteWORKS, where Ken Walter reigns over a similar program that trains kids how to use computers before eventually sending them off with free, refurbished computers, giving the children vital tools they couldn’t otherwise afford. Walter, 74, a cardiologist retired from St. Louis University, has been with the program about four years. He dropped by one day to donate some computers. He was told they were too old to be of much use — but that he wasn’t.

ByteWORKS has put scores of computers this year into the hands of pupils in the fourth through eighth grades who’ve taken computer skills classes, and there’s a waiting list long enough to warrant another set of classes, Walter said. The program is limited only by the number of volunteers needed to run the classes and prepare donated computers for the kids. Potential volunteers may call at 314-664-0828.

“Plenty of people are willing to drop off computers or bicycles. What we need are people who can give their time,” Perry said.

The bicycles and computers are important to the kids, and they can be important tools to get kids outside and active or help bridge the digital divide that separates those who have computer skills and access from those who don’t. But they’re also bait.

“Those are just props to bring the kids in,” Perry said. “The lures are the bicycles and the computers, but it’s really about the lives of the children.”

The bike shop and computer lab aren’t just about learning bike repair or Internet resources — they are about getting guidance.

That’s why BWorks leaders hope to get their defunct Brains Barn program up and running again. That program gave kids a place to get help with their homework or just have fun after school four days a week. It had to be discontinued because it didn’t have enough volunteers.

In his day job as a probation and parole officer for the state of Missouri, ByteWORKS volunteer Keith Jones said he sees people every day without basic computer skills and who are struggling with illiteracy as adults. The kids who go to BicycleWORKS and ByteWORKS might become such people without those programs, he said. “They may wind up where I’m working without something like this,” Jones said. “I work at the back end, so I’m trying to do something to make a difference on the front end.”

GROUP GARDEN – 6 Aug 2005 P-D

One of the best ways to view some sweet little plantings in the Shaw neighborhood of St. Louis is from just across the street, at the new Thurman Community Cafe in Historic Shaw, 4069 Shenandoah Avenue.

Sit at a cafe table, and you’re likely to see Gwendolyn Moore at work in what’s called Dorothy Park (named for Alderman Steve Conway’s favorite aunt) and Loretta Garden (for a longtime resident of Shaw).

Moore and other volunteers in the four-year-old garden work around thick stands of spring’s blue-blooming baptisia (Baptisia australis) and red, summer-blooming crape myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica ‘Dynamite’). All the while, the ubiquitous yellow black-eyed-Susans, euphorbias and a range of ornamental grasses wave in the hot summer breeze.

“The first year hardly counts,” Moore says of a summer when three redbuds were donated and planted in a row in the middle of what had been a vacant lot. But the group worked with berms of grass and started installing flowering plants and meandering pathways there. A couple of elegant dwarf crab apples were donated by students at St. Louis University. Many other plants came from Gateway Greening.

The volunteers, calling themselves the Shaw Neighborhood Garden Club, made it all work, even if watering these plants is especially difficult.

“We drag hoses from the house across the street,” Moore says, pointing in the direction of Eddie Kane’s home. Kane says he’s lived there for 30 years.

“It’s much nicer than when it was a vacant lot,” Kane says of the garden. “You see people out there trying to make a go of it, trying to get the city turned around and get something positive out of it.”

But buses often run over hoses attached to Kane’s house, and the hoses must be replaced on a regular basis.

“We have to raise $3,000,” Moore tells the group, “if we want a $3,000 match from Gateway Greening for our own water supply.” They nod and start discussing fundraising events. Meanwhile, two police cars stop nearby, midstreet, with lights flashing. The fundraising talk doesn’t miss a beat.

“This is why we like it here,” Moore says, “some of this and some of that. But it’s a good neighborhood. It’s like the world.”

Photographer develops his art in Shaw Neighborhood – He hopes to put photo cooperative in rehabbed structures – 21 Jul 2005 P-D

The boards on some of sturdy old brick buildings at the northeast corner of Thurman Avenue and Shaw Boulevard have been removed. At that corner, Nathan Clark is restoring the buildings to long-lost splendor.

Some of the woodwork is reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright designs. An art gallery is growing in some of the space, and a cooperative for photographers where they could live, work and display their art is also taking form.

“My goal is to have a photographic collaborative, to bring some great photographers together in one community,” said Clark.

Clark owns three buildings there. He says that when he bought them, kids with guns, gang members, board-ups and trash were common.

The property came cheap. One of the buildings cost $65,000. Now it is worth $400,000.

Clark, 38, speaks with zeal. “I am a photographer by passion,” he said. “My passion is large- and medium-format black and white photography.”

His building at 1818 Thurman Avenue has a darkroom with five work stations. The art gallery, called Shaw’s Gallery, fills the first floor of the building next door at 4065 Shaw Avenue, and the third building, at 4069 Shaw Avenue, could become a restaurant.

Four apartments are taking shape above the art gallery and restaurant area, and two have been rented even though the apartments are still works in progress. Rents range from $750 to $800. One of the tenants is a photographer.

“Living over a gallery — what photographer wouldn’t like that?” Clark said.

On a recent day, Clark sat at a dark brown bar that dates to the early 1900s. It fills a corner of the gallery. The floor is light in contrast, made of golden maple, oak and heart pine.

On one wall hangs a face the size of a torso, made of bleached wood by Abraham Mohler. Mohler also works in marble. He does all his work by hand and lives to the east on Shaw Avenue.

Shaw’s Gallery has free viewing parties on the first Saturday of each month and is also open by appointment.

Clark is a precise man, neat and trim. He said, “I think this building reflects me.”

He said nothing has been done the easy way, and he has done much of the work himself. He recalls, with gallows humor, sandblasting exposed brick walls on one of the hottest days of the year.

These days, Clark has an assistant, Steven J. Davis, 30, of the Central West End. Davis studied to be a sculptor and helped set up some galleries in Kansas City. He is working for Clark as a carpenter.

Davis read a book on William Adair Bernoudy, a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright who worked in the St. Louis area. Davis is hand-fashioning the woodwork in the apartments along Bernoudy’s sleek lines. There are even hidden storage places in the woodwork of the entry foyers.

“This building took me over,” Davis said.

Their meeting was serendipitous — the mother of a friend of Davis’ wife married Clark’s father.

Clark works full time at Boeing Co. as an aircraft mechanic. Part of Clark’s dream is for income from the buildings to make it possible for him to work full time as a photographer.

In carving out his own dreams, Clark has helped other neighborhood reclaimers realize theirs in the Shaw Neighborhood.

He said that eight years ago when he bought his first building, people thought he was crazy. At the time, there was no redevelopment on the north side of the neighborhood. The buildings needed extensive repairs. So far it has cost Clark $340,000 to rehab the gallery building alone. But he is certain he will recoup his investment. There are nine rehabs going on in the 4000 block of Shaw Boulevard and nearby De Tonty Street.

Clark gives others much of the credit for changing the neighborhood — “the perseverance people who care about neighborhood issues, people who stop to pick up the trash.”

He also is proud of his contribution.

“I’ve already taken a chance,” he said. “I’ve helped established the northern part of the Shaw Neighborhood as a good place to invest.”

Planting a seed in Shaw – 7 Jul 2005 P-D

James Fox of Hartford Coffee Company fame has opened a second establishment, the Thurman Cafe, on the site of a long-ago small grocery store in the Shaw neighborhood at Thurman and Shendandoah avenues, two blocks north of Tower Grove Park and two blocks east of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

Fox says the new place is a “community cafe” similarly family-friendly to the Hartford Coffee Company, but with a larger, bistro-like menu focusing on fresh and unprocessed foods. In addition to tapas-like sharing plates, there are sandwiches and wraps ranging from classic roast-beef-and-cheese to Mediterranean themes, as well as a full list of salads — and, of course, Hartford coffees. The Thurman Cafe is open from 7 a.m.-8 p.m. Sunday-Thursday and 7 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday;

WHEEL LIFE – KIDS LEARN RESPECT AND EARN REWARDS AT NONPROFIT BICYCLE AND COMPUTER SHOPS – 1 Dec 2003 P-D

For six days each week, two storefronts on the southwest corner of Shenandoah and Thurman avenues in the Shaw Neighborhood, just north of Tower Grove Park, sit quiet, almost forgotten by local residents.

Patrons who stream in and out of Ryan’s Market, a small Iraqi-owned grocery across the street, barely notice the nondescript two-story structure with apartments on top and two small businesses below.

But for three hours every Saturday over the past eight years, that corner becomes a beehive of activity straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting: boys, girls, adults and machines come together in a modern twist on the old American passion of bicycling.

This is BicycleWORKS, a 12-year-old nonprofit operation where boys and girls come with hopes of earning a free bicycle and something more — a sense of pride and self-esteem.

On the sidewalk in front of the building is Antwian Rhodes, 12, his hat pulled down tight around his ears against the morning cold, his jaw set, as he focuses on repairing the chain of a mountain bicycle. Not far from him is Sean Dye, 15, who has come in search of a new seat for his bike.

A gaggle of boys astride bicycles of varying sizes and types gathers around a tank to fill tires with air and catch up on the week’s news. Nearby, the unofficial resident bicycle expert, Dantrell Henderson, an eighth-grader from just up the street, is there, as he has been for seven years, to help anybody who needs it.

Inside, just past the cracked storefront windows covered with posters and help-wanted signs, Robert Dane, 71, sits amidst a mess of bicycle parts that are hanging from the ceiling or leaning against the wall. He is stripping the spokes out of the back wheel of 10-speed before he sets out to replace the inner tube.

In another room, this one cluttered with even more bicycle parts and bicycles – BMX bikes, freestyle bikes, touring bikes, street bikes, 10-speeds, mountain bikes – Will Robertson, 51, has a smart green 12-speed locked into a work area so he can adjust the back brakes for a paying customer.

Not far from him is an avuncular Mark Allen, 56, the bicycle shop manager, who is trying to juggle requests and questions from clamoring kids and at the same time find an elusive part.

As a business, BicycleWORKS fixes and repairs donated bicycles and then sells them cheap, $10 to $20, said Allen. “If we get a really good one, like one that’s almost new, it might go for $50.”

That’s how the business pays the rent and keeps the lights and heat on. But its real purpose is to teach kids to repair and enjoy bicycles. Anybody who puts in 20 hours gets to pick out any bicycle in the shop, free.

Some, like Dantrell, have worked there so long that they have earned more than one. He figures he has picked up at least six. All but one he gave away to the sister and three female cousins who live with him in the Shaw neighborhood, and to close friends.

The main goal is to teach responsibility, Allen said, and to give the children something to do. They have flat tires, so they want to fix them. And when they get their own bikes, they’re constantly trying to improve them. They want new seats, new handlebars, different wheels.

Working at the shop creates a sense of pride that even parents see.

“Dantrell just loves it,” said his mother, Ann Marie Rhodes, a single parent who works at a Mobil station at Vandeventer and Forest Park. “It makes him feel so good. He’s always saying, ‘Mama I fixed it. Mama, I fixe d it.'”

Kids say it gives them something to do in a neighborhood where there aren’t many organized activities.

“If I wasn’t doing this, I’d probably be just sitting in the house and doing nothing,” Sean Dye, 14, said. “This is a lot better than that.”

Next door to BicycleWORKS is a sister start-up called ByteWORKS. The program was started eight years ago by Gavin Perry, a research engineer at Washington University, and Fred Kratke, a computer specialist, at the request of kids at BicycleWORKS.

“A lot of kids already had bicycles, and they wanted something else to do,” Perry said. “So, they asked us to start a computer program.”

It provides free training, after which students can earn a free refurbished computer and up to a year of free Internet service.

ByteWORKS is now headed by Dr. Kenneth Walter, a retired St. Louis University cardiologist, who got hooked three years ago when he came by to donate two computers and agreed to do some volunteer work.

He now teaches classes on Saturday.

“I do it because without something like this, most of these kids will never get a computer,” Walter, 72, said.

On Saturday, he stood in front of a half-dozen second- and third-graders – some accompanied by their parents or grandparents – and used the human body as an analogy for how a computer works.

“This is the computer’s brain,” he said, holding up a central processing unit, “and just like our brain, it tells other parts of the body what to do.”

The computer program is having an impact on narrowing the digital divide between low-income and other students, said Denise Blanchard, the program’s executive director. A study by Washington University found that of 20 high school students who had gone through the program while in middle or elementary school, 16 use their computers on a daily basis.

And other family members also were using the computers, she said.

Unlike most nonprofits, BicycleWORKS and ByteWORKS don’t particularly need money, Blanchard said.

What they do need desperately are other volunteers.

“We’ve got computers, and we’ve got bicycles,” she said. “What we need are people.”

DOG PARK OFFERS OWNERS AND THEIR PETS A REGULATED ROMP IN THE GREAT OUTDOORS – 4 Aug 2003 P-D

With the help of a garden group, Gateway Greening, the lot sports cherry trees, juniper trees and crape myrtle bushes.

Life just got better for dogs in St. Louis’ Shaw Park neighborhood. The pooches can run free – off leash – in a new park all their own.

The Shaw Dog Park is on the northwest corner of Cleveland and Thurman avenues.

“It’s a place for people and dogs where yards are small or nonexistent,” said Susan Raney, who is the dog park’s coordinator for the Shaw Neighborhood Improvement Association.

The park was Raney’s idea. Raney, 44, lives in the neighborhood with her husband, Mike, two cats and her dog, an Akita named Misha. An Akita is a large breed that once guarded the palaces of Japanese emperors. Misha weighs 88 pounds and needs room to exercise.

Misha’s veterinarian told Raney that Misha needed to socialize with other dogs. That meant running and rolling and sniffing and tugging with other dogs.

“A dog can’t run on a leash,” Raney said.

It is illegal to let a dog run off leash in Tower Grove Park or Forest Park, two places Raney took Misha for exercise.

Raney heard that dog parks were springing up across the nation. She checked it out on the Internet and found a site, http://www.dogpark.com, that keeps an unofficial record of such parks. The current count, according to the site, is 619 parks nationwide.

At least two others are open in the St. Louis area. One is at Vernon and Pennsylvania avenues in University City, and the other is at Maryland and Taylor avenues in the Central West End. Both require paid memberships, as does the Shaw Dog Park.

From the start, Raney had her eye on the corner lot at Cleveland and Thurman. It was big, about 100 feet square. It was empty. A few years before, a derelict apartment building had been torn down on the site, and the lot belonged to the Land Reutilization Authority.

When she approached Alderman Stephen Conway, D-8th Ward, with the idea that dogs needed parks, he just rolled his eyes, he recalls now. But she convinced him that the park would provide an attractive use for the land and add to the neighborhood’s sense of community.

“The park should be a community meeting place,” she said. “The idea was to beautify the area and make it welcoming for everyone, whether they have dogs or not.”

A handsome, six-foot-high black wrought-iron fence now outlines the dogs’ play area. With the help of the community garden group, Gateway Greening, which is allied with the Missouri Botanical Garden, the lot sports cherry and juniper trees, crape myrtle bushes and coreopsis. Improvements in the park cost $14,000, which came from the city’s capital-improvements budget.

Interest in the park seems to be growing. More than two dozen people turned out to help landscape. So charmed by the dog park is Conway that he and his family have adopted a pup of their own, a chow and Labrador mix named Chocolate.

* * * * *

Shaw Dog Park

The Shaw Dog Park, which opened today, is open from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week. The yearly membership fee is $25 for one dog; $30 for two dogs; $35 for three dogs. Members must live in the Shaw neighborhood, but as the park becomes established, it may be opened to others. The neighborhood is bounded by Grand Boulevard on the east, Tower Grove Avenue on the west, Interstate 44 on the north and Magnolia Avenue on the south.

To join: Membership forms are available at the site or on the Web site: http://www.shawdogpark.org. For further information, call the Shaw Neighborhood Improvement Association: 314-771-3101. For further information on dog parks in the St. Louis area: http://www.stldogparks.org.

BALCONIES’ COLLAPSE SPURS CITYWIDE INSPECTIONS – 14 Apr 1998 P-D

St. Louis officials are launching a citywide inspection of balconies like the two that collapsed in a south St. Louis apartment building over the weekend, injuring six people – four seriously.

“I don’t think we need to wait for another incident to happen to take action,” Building Commissioner Ronald Smith said.

Smith said city inspectors will canvass the city over the next week or so to find how many such cantilevered balconies are in use and whether any have obvious signs of deterioration.

The concrete balconies, which do not have supporting piers or pylons, are held up by steel extending into the building.

After the initial canvass, the city will decide whether to require property owners to hire private engineering firms to do more detailed studies, Smith said.

Both collapses involved concrete second-floor balconies in an 82-year-old, 13-unit apartment building at Cleveland and Thurman avenues in the Shaw neighborhood.

Smith defended two of his inspectors’ decision against condemning the entire structure and evacuating the 30 or so residents after the first incident about 7:30 Saturday night. He said they had detected no signs of major problems in other parts of the building.

Condemnation and evacuation were ordered only after the second collapse, which sent four people to hospitals. That occurred about noon Sunday in another part of the structure.

“The whole thing just fell,” said Brandon Williams, 17, who was in serious but stable condition Monday at St. Louis University Medical Center with a broken vertabra.

“I went out on the balcony and was out there for two minutes. I didn’t really know what happened until we hit the ground.”

Also injured was Williams’ girlfriend, Renata Kallmbah, 14, who is pregnant; Renata’s mother, Barbara Kallmbah, 34; and Jeremy Nickelson, 22.

Barbara Kallmbah was in critical condition at Barnes-Jewish Hospital; she was taken there with chest and abdomen injuries.

Renata Kallmbah was in satisfactory condition at Barnes-Jewish with a collapsed lung and broken ribs. Nickelson was in serious but stable condition at St. Louis University Medical Center after surgery to remove a kidney.

“It was so scary,” Renata said Monday. “The four of us were just standing there and talking. My baby is OK; the doctors told me its heartbeat and everything else are fine.”

Two children were taken to hospitals with minor injuries after the incident Saturday night, a Fire Department spokeswoman said. Their identities were not released.

City officials are investigating to determine the cause of the collapses and whether they are related.

In the first incident, building commissioner Smith said, a second-story balcony on the southeast corner of the building folded down and rested on some loose brick work above the first-floor balcony.

The two inspectors, he said, condemned the first-floor apartment because the collapse had damaged its exterior wall. They also inspected the second-floor apartment but found no reason then to condemn it.

Then, Smith said, they did “a quick visual inspection” in the dark of the rest of the premises.

“I feel comfortable with the way it was handled,” Smith said. “They did not see any alarming situations there to warrant, on a holiday weekend, evacuating the entire building.”

He said the other balconies had been freshly painted and “there wasn’t a visible sign, at least at night, that we had a major problem.”

Then came the second collapse, which occurred in the northeast part of the building. “It did the same thing – it sheared from the building at its support from the wall,” Smith said.

But this time, the second-floor balcony hit the first-floor balcony.

Leo Hayes, a part-owner of the building, said a woman living there who often sits outside was not doing so at the time of the collapse.

“That would have been pancakes,” Hayes said.

Rusting of support beams is hard to detect if the damage is inside the walls. With so many buildings 60 years old or older in the city, Smith said, a special effort needs to be made to check on them.

“Things are just not always readily apparent,” he said.

Smith said the city also would inspect other structures built similarly – such as fire escapes and service stairs.

Smith said a check of city records over the past five years found no major problems cited with the building, which is one of several owned in the Shaw area by a partnership known as Garden Manor.

Hayes, one of the partners, said, “It’s just one of those unforeseen things that happen.”

Nickelson, one of the people injured, was asked by a reporter what he thinks of the city’s plan for inspections. “It’s a good idea,” he said. “But it’s a little late.”

RELATIVE CHARGED IN WOMAN’S ASSAULT – 29 Aug 1994

A relative of an 85-year-old woman was charged Sunday with first-degree assault after the woman was beaten and possibly sexually assaulted in her home in the city’s Shaw neighborhood.

The woman remained in critical condition Sunday.

Police identified the suspect as Reginald Cunningham, 19, of the 2200 block of Thurman Avenue.

Police said Cunningham admitted punching and kicking the victim late Friday or early Saturday. “The suspect said he had been drinking heavily and became angry when she called him a name,” said Detective Louis Clayton.

Another relative of the victim found her on the floor about 7 a.m. Saturday and, thinking she had fallen, helped her into bed. Relatives called an ambulance when they discovered her unresponsive about 1 p.m.

Cunningham was arrested later Saturday.

Cunningham did not admit that he sexually assaulted the victim, police said, but hospital personnel reported that she had injuries consistent with a rape attempt.