Strong Roots Kevin McGowan greens downtown St. Louis one flower at a time.
Kevin McGowan couldn’t be more passionate about St. Louis, yet he can’t stop talking about Chicago—and Mayor Richard Daley.
He credits Daley for turning Chicago into one of the most beautiful cities in the country via landscaping. Sounds simple, but getting cities to invest money in plantings and gardening is anything but easy.
McGowan met with Daley to get some pointers and left with some valuable lessons. “I made the mistake of calling urban greening beautification,” he says. “Mayor Daley stopped me and said it’s not about beautification; it’s all about economic development.” Well-landscaped streets and medians do more than make a city look pretty—these upgrades attract new businesses and residents to downtown neighborhoods. Yet it’s hard to attach a dollar value to street improvements, and cities are hesitant to fund such investments.
So McGowan is taking matters into his own hands. He’s involved in a number of nonprofit organizations committed to greening downtown St. Louis. As a founder of Urban Roots, he helps raise $150,000 to $250,000 every spring to plant all the downtown medians and put flower boxes around City Hall. “Before, there was none of this,” McGowan says. “You might see a dried up marigold every 4 feet in a weed bed.”
At Gateway Greening, another nonprofit, McGowan is helping to turn vacant land into community gardens. “Kevin helps with the planting,” says Dennis Woldum, an investor in a handful of McGowan’s projects. “Our board members get their hands dirty.” McGowan secured approximately 4 acres of land on the edge of downtown from the Missouri Department of Transportation for an urban farm, which is run by the homeless and recently released prisoners. The farm yielded 6,000 pounds of vegetables last year, which were distributed to food pantries. “Kevin was instrumental in getting us the land,” Woldum says. “We were trying to get land from the city, and it was in areas we didn’t want to be.”
These efforts just might get St. Louis on the list of America’s most beautiful cities, right alongside Chicago.