The Gateway Community Center is a community based project and therefore requires a review and analysis of the cultural and historical impacts that the project will have on the neighborhood and its residents. For example, the nearby Cahokia Mounds is an important national archeological site that must be preserved.  In addition, the residents of the area are likely to have found certain areas, buildings, or spaces that they find to be identifying markers for the neighborhood.  These markers can be important for helping to create a sense of place for the residents.

Cahokia
Cahokia is an historic settlement of indigenous peoples in the Mississippi Valley near East Saint Louis.  Great earthen mounds built in Cahokia and its satellites supported ancient civic structures and dwellings of Cahokian society. Burial mounds have been discovered that not only provide a final resting place for the common citizen but also for rulers, mass graves of women, and vassals of the buried ruler who sacrificed themselves after his death. Other artifacts of the Cahokian settlement can be found in eastern Kansas, Arkansas, and as far north as Minnesota.

The Gateway Community Center
The site selected for our community center is a vacant school building in the Emerson Park neighborhood of East St. Louis. The site important because it is centrally located and therefore already embodies a neighborhood scaled building and place, it is also important to recognize the re-use of existing facilities and the preservation of the historic and cultural meaning that a school can represent.

A community center can be a cultural and historical asset for the Emerson Park neighborhood because it can help to embellish the neighborhoods ‘sense of community’, while it protecting its historical landscape.  It provides a neighborhood meeting place, a place for neighborhood interaction and organization, and a place for learning and playing.  In addition, archeological research at the Cahokia site can use the available parts of the old school for field representatives and a base for local activity and education.  A community center is a low impact land use that can preserve neighborhood history and culture as well as unify the residents in the neighborhood toward common goals.
 

Project Specifics

>Economic Evaluation

Visual Quality of Project

Wildlife/Habitat Issues

Project Feasibility

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