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Photography by Jennifer Silverberg.
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It’s May 7, 2010, and today at 3 p.m., the future Mercantile Exchange, the concept that will become downtown developer Amos Harris’ signature achievement, is going to die.
That’s a shame, too, because the project has the potential to transform downtown, to add a happy ending to one of the city’s most embarrassing and enduring failures.
St. Louis Centre opened in August 1985 as the largest enclosed urban mall in the country, 1.5 million square feet of stores and restaurants behind a gleaming facade of green and white. City officials heralded the mall, located between Sixth and Seventh streets on Washington Avenue, as the silver bullet that would save downtown.
Instead, it became a colossal disappointment. As competition from suburban malls increased, crowds diminished. The Dillard’s across the street, connected by a towering glass sky bridge, closed in 2001, and the decrepit mall, down to one remaining tenant, finally succumbed in 2006.
Developer John Steffen was poised to resurrect the shuttered mall as a mix of retail and luxury condos—until his company, Pyramid Construction, crumbled in 2008. St. Louis Centre seemed destined to remain an ’80s-era eyesore in perpetuity, the first bad impression given to out-of-towners visiting the nearby America’s Center.
Harris and his backer, Clay Fowler of the national development company Spinnaker Real Estate Partners, had been among Steffen’s investors. When “Pyramid cratered, the project dropped in our lap,” Harris says.
As the recession worsened and various financiers and governmental agencies worked to untangle Pyramid’s mess, the deal could have fallen apart again. But Fowler invested millions of his own money to keep the dream alive. “He is a visionary kind of guy,” Harris says. “He went way deep into this deal.”
Harris, too, has been described as a visionary, but he’s also enigmatic. He arrived from New York in the early ’90s, and much of his background remains a mystery. He is a beekeeper, throws legendary parties at his extravagant loft, and is friends with both the owners of downtown buildings and the people who clean them. His first big St. Louis project was the Mark Twain Hotel, which is hardly glamorous. Now, he’s taking on the St. Louis Centre site, among the city’s most difficult development challenges.
It took Harris more than a year to secure enough money, in what he calls one of the most complex financing structures in the country, involving a bevy of private investors and all manner of tax credits and other public funding.
He would rebrand the old Dillard’s building as The Laurel while converting it into 205 apartments and the 212-room Embassy Suites St. Louis–Downtown hotel, and he would turn the mall’s retail space inside out, with shops and restaurants facing the street. The entire district would be called the Mercantile Exchange.
A key component was a $45 million loan insured by the Federal Housing Administration. Once approved, Harris had a certain window in which to close the rest of the deal, or the money would move on to the next project. As he spent months wrangling all the pieces and players, Harris extended the deadline as many times as he could—and then some.
Which brings us to today, the final, hard-and-fast cutoff for the loan. The closing started yesterday, but it’s hit a snag. One of the investors, a major New York bank, has misplaced $4 million. The bankers were supposed to wire the money, but they somehow sent it to the wrong account, and now they can’t find it. “I was on the phone with this guy in New York,” Harris says. “I didn’t want to yell at him, because I didn’t want him distracted from finding the f—king money.”
Meanwhile, Harris’ wife, Dr. Natalie Semchyshyn, is nine months pregnant with their first child. Her doctor says she could have the baby at any time. “No, no, no, no, you’re mistaken,” Harris says. “That can’t happen.”
Finally, with time ticking away, with Harris dying on the phone, they find the money. “We closed with 12 minutes to spare,” he says, pausing for emphasis. “Twelve minutes.”
His daughter, Ember, won’t arrive for another two weeks.
Amos Harris was born in 1959 in New York City. His father, T. George Harris, a native Kentuckian, fought in World War II, graduated from Yale University, worked at TIME magazine, wrote a biography of George Romney, and became editor-in-chief of Psychology Today.
Amos says his father taught him that words could bring people together. “He had this wonderful facility with words, and he was able to take ideas that were seemingly completely disparate and weave them together with these gossamer threads of language,” he says, “in a way that people who were working on these two disparate ideas all of a sudden thought they had something to talk to each other about.”
He has three siblings: a sister, Annie, who has Down syndrome, and two brothers, Crane and Gardiner, the latter now a foreign correspondent in India for The New York Times. Because of Dad’s career, the family moved around a lot. For a while, they lived in San Francisco, where Amos remembers more about bikinis and surfboards than school. “California was magical,” he says.
In 1977, his mother, Sheila Hawkins Harris, died of cancer at age 50. Amos was devastated. He decided he didn’t want to go to college, so his father shipped him off to Columbus, Ind., to work for his godfather, J. Irwin Miller. “My godparents were the big deal in Columbus,” Harris says.
Miller was an industrialist (chairman of the Cummins Engine Company), a musician (playing a Stradivarius violin), an influential Christian lay leader, and, in Harris’ words, “a multikajillionaire, an amazing man.” Miller made a deal with the city of Columbus that he would pay the design fees for public buildings if they let him pick the architects. As a result, Columbus now boasts buildings from many of the most prominent architects of the 20th century, including Miller’s own house, designed by Eero Saarinen, the man behind the Gateway Arch.
Miller gave Harris a job working on the Cummins factory floor. Living on his own for the first time, Harris got a small apartment with a leaky bathroom. A prostitute lived next door. “It was just, to me, terrifying, fascinating,” he says. “I just didn’t know what to do with that.”
Harris was lost, so Miller took him to church every Sunday, in the hope that he might get found. He still thinks about Miller’s theology: “So in faith, if the written word is so important, why didn’t Jesus write anything down?”
But the biggest lesson that Harris learned from his godfather was watching him put up all those celebrated buildings. “Early on, it was this sense of the built environment and how it affects community, how beauty and the built environment work together.”
Harris spent two years working in Indiana before Miller impressed upon his godson the importance of higher education. His freshman year at Yale, Harris acted as best man when his father remarried. The bride was Ann Roberts, president of the Rockefeller Family Fund and daughter of Nelson Rockefeller, former governor of New York and vice president of the United States. (This once led Jerry Berger to refer to Harris in his gossip column as a “reputed Rockefeller scion,” which is only a bit of a stretch.)
Before his junior year, Harris bought an eight-bedroom house in a rough part of New Haven, Conn., thinking he could fix it up and rent it to students. He recruited his buddies to spend the summer helping him with renovations. Crime was a major issue in the neighborhood, so Harris helped form a block watch. He also helped the police chief, Biagio DiLieto, get elected mayor. Harris landed a job in city administration, working on “figuring out how to foster community, how to stem the chaos.”
New Haven was broke, so he looked for cheap fixes. “Stuff like painting the picket fences—not much money, but it has an impact,” he says. “This whole relationship between clean and safe.” He mentions an experiment where a beat-up car and a brand-new car are both left in a bad neighborhood. The clunker gets ransacked. The same goes for buildings with broken windows. “Which is applicable to St. Louis, to downtown,” he adds.
Years later, when DiLieto left office, The New York Times observed, “The once-dowdy district around Yale University has become a fashionable area of bistros and bookstores.”
In the ’80s, Harris moved back to New York, where he started a small real-estate company. But after President Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986, the whole real-estate market bottomed out. “We should have just declared bankruptcy, but for whatever stupid reason, we didn’t,” he says. “I wound up with a huge amount of personally guaranteed debt that I had no way of paying.
“I had a little starter marriage at that point, too. It lasted all of a year. My big challenge was just getting out of bed in the morning. I was depressed. Life was lousy.”
He moved to Moscow for a couple of months, trying to do commodity deals, but the Soviet Union at that time felt like the Wild West. “You’d run into somebody on the subway who would tell you they would sell you a nuclear missile,” he says, “and maybe they could.” Then he went to Jerusalem and worked for his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend doing Palestinian aid. Their office was firebombed.
Harris came back to New York and started working for some rich guys who were trying to make money off the savings-and-loan crisis, through the Resolution Trust Corporation, which Harris calls “the largest transfer of wealth from the government to rich people ever.”
His bosses would buy loans from the government, then figure out how to turn a profit on them. When they bought a loan in the Midwest in the early ’90s, they sent Harris.
Harris’ first impression of St. Louis was getting thrown out of Mark Twain Bank.
Here’s how Pulaski Bank president Tom Reeves, who was then chief lending officer at Mark Twain, explains the situation: “We had been struggling with a very large development deal in north St. Louis, crosswise with the developer, who had I guess recruited, for lack of better words, a team of thugs from New York to come in and threaten the bank.”
One of those “thugs” was Harris. When Reeves had heard enough, he said, “This meeting is over, and you’re not welcome back in this bank.”
By this time, Harris had been doing these deals all over the country for years. Nobody had ever banished him from a bank. “Usually, they’re just polite and listen to me,” he says.
Taken aback, he tried to keep smooth-talking. “No, you don’t really understand…”
“We’re calling security if you don’t leave right now,” Reeves said.
“We don’t have security,” somebody whispered.
“But they don’t know that,” he replied.
The next day, Harris called Reeves, apologized for the lawyers (a.k.a. “thugs”), and laid out a plan for salvaging the deal. “I was impressed at his grasp of a very large, complicated transaction,” Reeves says. “We together penciled out a way that we thought we could restructure this deal to make it work.”
What happened next depends on whom you ask. Reeves says Harris looked around downtown St. Louis, saw a bunch of cheap, vacant, historic buildings, and decided to move here to take advantage of the opportunity. Harris says he and Reeves hit it off, and when Reeves learned of Harris’ debt, the banker offered to back him if he came to St. Louis. “He allowed me to re-create my life,” Harris says.
At first, he stayed at the Missouri Athletic Club. “They had this great pool on the fifth floor, and you could swim naked in there, because it was all guys,” he says about the MAC of that era. “Every morning, I would do that. I loved it.” But, as Harris tells it, while the young men were swimming, the older guys would “ring the pool with their towel over their lap. And then you’d have the black guys in the penguin outfits coming and serving them coffee” while the older members “were ogling the young guys in the pool. It was the weirdest.”
He’d go back to his friends in New York and say, “You’re not going to f—king believe this.”
Harris’ first development project in St. Louis was the Mark Twain Hotel (no relation to the bank, though Reeves did help with the financing). Harris bought it in 1995, before most people had any inkling that downtown might make a comeback. At the time, the building was plagued by cockroaches and criminals. Before Harris bought the building, the city was considering condemning the Mark Twain as a flophouse.
He moved in, spending a hot summer with no air conditioning in Room 842. Once he kicked out the drug dealers, “it was just me and Terminix,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2000, as he was completing the five-year, $8 million renovation.
“There was a lot of female entrepreneurialism,” he says. The attendant at the front desk was supposed to keep the working girls out, but they got in by climbing up the fire escape. The previous owner’s solution was to cover the fire escape in bear grease. “It sort of obviates the purpose of the fire escape,” Harris says. As part of the renovation, he moved the exit stairs inside.
But he kept the Mark Twain’s business model intact, operating it as a single-room occupancy, an inexpensive place for people who work menial jobs downtown or who are transitioning out of homelessness or prison. (The Twain is known for its large population of sex offenders; the Post-Dispatch has commended the hotel as “a place that knows their past and is still willing to help them find a future.”) Harris instituted strict rules, requiring guests to leave their IDs at the front desk. He even experimented with setting up savings accounts for tenants. For a while, boxer Leon Spinks lived at the Mark Twain.
Reeves says it would have been easy for Harris to gut the place and turn it into condos, but “he looks at each project as more than just a development deal… The SRO is, along the housing spectrum, a very important piece.”
Harris initially planned to reinvent himself in St. Louis, then return to New York, saying the Big Apple remains a “siren call.” Then he met his future wife.
For a while, Harris lived on Washington Avenue with Tom Carnahan, the wind-energy pioneer. Harris had a reputation as something of a playboy, and he was an early adopter of Match.com. He would travel to Los Angeles on business, and a woman he met online would offer to pick him up at the airport.
“I was not interested in long-term relationships,” he says. “I was just interested in short-term relationships and having sex.”
Then someone with the username Zyzzyva sent him a three-page message about the rain and the trees and the beauty of life. “You never get that,” Harris says. “Usually it was like one sentence, ‘Hey, you look cute; do you want to meet for coffee or whatever?’”
Harris figured it was a mass email. But he knew “zyzzyva” was a rare word in Scrabble, so he wrote back with one short sentence, composed entirely of obscure Scrabble words. He thought it was clever. Zyzzyva didn’t.
But eventually, she agreed to a date. They scheduled it for September 12, 2001. At the time, Harris had two theories about online dating: First, meet in person as soon as possible, and second, arrive early, so when she walks in, you have a second to decide whether you want to sneak out the back. When Dr. Natalie Semchyshyn came through the door, Harris thought, “God, I hope this is her.”
Both former New Yorkers, they were stunned by the events of the previous day. But they stayed at the bar after dinner, closed the place down. Around midnight, he walked her outside. Her white Saab convertible was parked next to his black Saab convertible. When Harris “swooped in for the big kiss,” she ripped his shirt out of his pants and ran her hands up his back. He thought, “I’m in.” It was only later that he learned she was a cosmetic dermatologist and once had a bad experience with a hairy back.
Instantly, Harris decided his philandering days were over. “I was done,” he says. “It took her a little longer… I asked her to marry me at least three times.”
Once, after they had been living together for a few years, he took Semchyshyn on a trip through northern Spain. They were sitting out on a little terrace at an old monastery in the Picos de Europa. The view was breathtaking, the valley full of fog. “I thought, ‘There’s no way she can say no.’”
She hesitated for a moment, then said, “Yeah, I’ll get back to you. Let me think about it.”
Harris smiles. “She takes her time.”
Mack Bradley met Harris in church about a dozen years ago. Like just about everybody else in St. Louis, the founder and principal of StandPoint Public Affairs was drawn to Harris’ vision for downtown. “He’s got a certain energy about him that is a little infectious,” Bradley says. Harris is charisma personified.
Bradley has done public-relations work for Harris, but the spokesman talks about the developer like an old friend. Because he was among the first wave to repopulate downtown, Harris is often called a “pioneer,” but now that thousands of others have joined him, Bradley doesn’t find the description useful.
And he points out that Harris is just one of many developers—not to mention civic boosters of all sorts—who have contributed to downtown’s budding revival. Even his signature project, the Mercantile Exchange, is a massive team effort, involving a variety of people (like Zack Boyers, the chairman and CEO of U.S. Bancorp Community Development Corporation, who facilitated millions of dollars in federal New Markets Tax Credits) and government agencies (like the Missouri Development Finance Board, which sorted out the ownership tangle after Pyramid collapsed). Harris isn’t responsible for the connected parking garage or office tower. He’s no savior.
“He’s like a cheerleader and a cruise director all wrapped up in one,” Bradley says. “He’s like the Julie McCoy of downtown St. Louis.”
Bradley denounces what he calls St. Louis’ “Eeyore syndrome.” In general, he thinks we’re too afraid to fail, “down about everything and ourselves.” And many who have spent their whole lives here carry preconceived notions about downtown: It’s dangerous! Everybody evacuates at 5 p.m.!
“I’ve often thought that maybe it takes somebody who’s not from here to see the potential,” Bradley says.
Enter Harris.
Though he’s known for finding creative ways to make a project’s numbers work, when discussing the Mercantile Exchange, or downtown in general, he talks more about place-making than money. His pet phrase is “there there,” as in, “The idea of the Mercantile Exchange is to create an array of venues that appeals to as many demographics as we can, so you can create a there there for the folks who are already coming to downtown St. Louis.”
A seminal moment for the MX came shortly after that tense financial closing in May 2010. For years, city leaders had lamented the colossal sky bridge, connecting the vacant Dillard’s building to the likewise empty St. Louis Centre. The bridge stood as a “symbol of failure and neglect,” says Maggie Campbell, president and CEO of the Partnership for Downtown St. Louis.
But once Harris gained control of the buildings, the bridge could finally be knocked down. The “bridge bash” was a major event, complete with beer, music, dignitaries, fireworks, and a live newscast. During the event, Harris turned to Bradley and said, “You got to tear it down before you build it up, so let’s get on with it.”
When Mayor Francis Slay took the ceremonial first whack with the wrecking ball, he got a little overzealous on the backswing, putting a divot in the side of the mall before breaking the glass on the bridge. When Bradley shot a worried look at Harris, he waved it off. “Oh, we’re tearing that off anyway,” he said.
Because of the biases that many locals harbor toward downtown, Bradley says the bridge bash—and every successive milestone that followed—was important to “reinforce the idea that this is going to emerge.”
How has Harris convinced so many of his vision, given the deep skepticism left in the wake of that flop of a mall?
“He’s a true believer,” Bradley says.
It’s a chilly Tuesday in January, and I meet Harris in the lobby of the Embassy Suites.
Harris is wearing a flannel vest under a peacoat, and his curly black hair, gray around the temples, is slicked back. He grabs a room key from the front desk and leads me toward the elevators. We stop every few steps to exchange pleasantries with somebody he knows.
On the fourth floor, we walk through an open common area, past a bar and event spaces. Inside a room, Harris points out the photography on the wall. There’s a historic shot of the lobby, from when it was a department store. All of the art is local, and the building—both the hotel and the apartments—is LEED-certified.
We head over to the residential side. The Laurel is all high-end rental—its tenants’ median annual income is $85,000. Units are outfitted in the usual loft style: high ceilings, exposed columns, walk-in closets, granite countertops. There’s a long list of perks: discounts at the MX restaurants, maid and room service from the hotel, an electric car–charging station, cold storage for grocery deliveries. Then there’s the atrium, an open garden in the center of the building with a wading pool and gas grills.
Harris says that more than 70 percent of the tenants moved from outside the region. “You’ve got high-income folks who want to have an urban experience,” he says. “But it also means we’ve done a lousy job of presenting downtown as a viable living alternative to people who live in
St. Louis, who are from the region.”
Neither of us remembers the forecast calling for snow, but out on the street, it’s coming down in big wet globs that stick in Harris’ locks. Perhaps because he’s the son of a magazine editor, Harris speaks eloquently, with refreshing candor. The conversation turns to the Rams. At least from an economic perspective, he isn’t a big fan.
“They have a marginal, possibly a negative effect,” he says. Football culture revolves around tailgating, so most fans hang out in parking lots, not restaurants. Last year, with one “home” date in London, the team played just seven regular-season games in the Edward Jones Dome.
“[Fans] leave their trash all over the place,” Harris says. “You spend a buttload of money on police and traffic and all that crap. The rent [the Rams] pay at the stadium is bupkes.”
On top of that, he says the NFL doesn’t release its schedule far enough in advance for planning major national conventions, so the dome is essentially off-limits during the season.
“I would trade one citywide convention for the entire Rams season,” he adds, “in a f—king heartbeat.”
Harris leads me across the street and into Pi. The pizzeria’s decor is bright, all windows. It manages to feel both rustic, with a wall of distressed lumber, and modern, with simple, angular furniture. We slip behind a curtain into a private dining area, where owner Chris Sommers is having a business meeting over lunch. Here, too, Harris knows everybody by name. He and Sommers step aside for a moment, so the pizza magnate can give the developer a “30-second download” of some issue he’s having.
Later, after lunch at Snarf’s next door, Harris and I sit down at Robust, across Washington. (He seems to be pals with both the hostess and the bartender, which is also the case at Takaya New Asian.) He explains Sommers’ importance to the MX. “He agreed to become lead cow,” Harris says, “and he really made a great lead cow.”
I ask Harris how he sold Sommers on the project. “What was the pitch, or what was the response?” he replies. “The response was, ‘No, never, you’re crazy.’”
But Sommers says he was drawn to Harris’ plans immediately. “He knew what he was trying to create,” Sommers says. “It was just a larger vision for downtown, but also to be this doorway to the city.”
Still, Sommers wanted to be sure he could sell pizzas. So he brought his Pi food truck downtown to test the waters. The experiment was a success.
Since opening, the downtown Pi has become an epicenter of activity, serving as the site for a Rally Saint Louis funding announcement and the meeting place for the no-pants MetroLink ride. Sommers says that it has become Pi’s second most popular location in this market, behind only the original Delmar Loop spot.
And once a successful restaurateur like Sommers was onboard, it became much easier to sell the idea to others.
A few days before our walking tour, MX Movies, the development’s dine-in theater, hosts its soft opening. Elbow room is in short supply. Harris and his associate, Jay Swoboda, greet guests and take tickets.
Visitors enter from the street into a white-box space, then walk upstairs to the sleek bar, with craft beer on tap. Inside the theater, the plush red rockers are beyond comfortable; you order your food on a tablet at your seat; and the menu, designed by chef Josh Galliano, features a variety of St. Louis favorites, including Kakao chocolate and a killer sandwich with salami from Salume Beddu. (Our only complaint: It ain’t easy to eat shrimp tacos in the dark.)
Swoboda first encountered Harris at a community meeting about downtown homelessness in the early 2000s. Harris said something like, “We’ve got to find a way to deal with this homeless problem…” Swoboda, who publishes Whats Up, a magazine that homeless people sell in lieu of panhandling, jumped down his throat, spouting off about a system that works only for those at the top.
After the meeting, Harris pulled him aside and asked, “How can I help you out?” He gave Swoboda, at the time a recent graduate of Washington University, a free office down the hall from his own. Together, they started EcoUrban, building affordable green housing. Harris put up much of the capital. When the U.S. housing crisis caused that investment to come up short, he never asked Swoboda to pay him back. Swoboda describes Harris as “a father figure.”
Lately, EcoUrban has been on the back burner, as Swoboda helps get the MX off the ground. He commends Harris for tackling the St. Louis Centre site, despite its disastrous track record. “No one else would take these projects on without his vision,” Swoboda says, crediting Harris’ ability to “rally the troops around harebrained, crazy ideas.”
In some ways, putting together the MX development required continually selling people on the viability of downtown.
Harris gave the restaurant owners what he calls “a tremendous amount of subsidy” to sign on. “It’s called money, and making it so we spend it and they don’t,” Swoboda says. When retailers scoffed, they put together a co-op, the Collective, where local stores could dip their toes into downtown without committing to a brick-and-mortar location. And while the developers partnered with St. Louis Cinemas on the movies, they put up the cash and did much of the work. “No movie-theater operator was going to come and pay us money,” Harris says, “so we made that ourselves.”
Now, the theater’s marquee is perhaps the MX’s most striking visual element.
On this afternoon in January, there isn’t much to see of the National Blues Museum. It’s just a name on a door. Some skeptics have questioned whether the museum will ever open, but after a crucial $6 million donation from Pinnacle Entertainment late last year, the organizers sound confident.
It started as a conversation between Harris and Mike Kociela, the president and owner of Entertainment Saint Louis.
A few years ago, Kociela started the St. Louis Bluesweek Festival after having “sort of an epiphany” while attending the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. As he was getting Bluesweek off the ground, Harris called. What did he think about a blues-themed bar in the MX?
They talked it over for a while, solicited other opinions. Kevin Farrell from the Partnership encouraged them to think bigger. When they realized there weren’t any national museums telling the full story of the blues, they figured St. Louis had as much claim as any city.
“We foolishly set out to build the National Blues Museum,” Kociela says. “Our famous saying is, ‘I don’t know. We’ve never built a museum before.’” The learning curve was steep: remediating mold, storing artifacts at the proper humidity level, digitizing old recordings.
Prominent attorney Robert Endicott, a partner at Bryan Cave, stepped up to chair the board of directors. Musician Devon Allman got involved. So did Robert Santelli, executive director of the GRAMMY Museum. Actor John Goodman appeared in a promotional video. And the mock-ups look sharp.
Harris and Kociela agree that if they do the museum right, it will become the most important piece of the MX. “It will really provide a whole new angle for us to go out to the rest of the world and say, ‘Come to St. Louis and experience what we have here as a culture,’” he says. “It started as a bar, and now it’s an international tourist attraction.”
The project still has a long way to go, but Kociela credits Harris for seeing it this far. “He’s really put his neck out for this thing in so many ways,” he says. “He’s got the stars in his eyes.”
I ask Kociela for stories about Harris. He mentions the usual stuff: the parties, the bees. Then he bursts out laughing. “Boy, did anybody tell you about his shower?”
No.
“OK. I’m not going to be the one…”
Oh, come on.
Kociela cackles. “He’ll kill me… Well, just put it this way: He does have a shower on the roof of his building.”
Harris lives on the top floor of the old United Missouri Bank Building, which he and Reeves bought in the late ’90s to demonstrate just how luxuriant downtown living could be. “He’s living the urban pioneer homesteader dream,” Swoboda says.
Harris and Reeves lead a grand tour.
The first thing you notice when you step off the elevator and into Harris’ loft is, without a doubt, his daughter, Ember. The 3-year-old will break your heart the instant she invites you to an imaginary tea party. “There’s no end to the cuteness,” Harris says.
The second thing you’ll notice: the trampoline behind the sofa. Big enough for at least a half dozen kids, it was clearly intended for outdoor use. But then, you could probably fit an entire playground in here. Aside from a couple of partial walls and some strategically placed furniture to differentiate one area from the next, the loft is essentially 3,500 square feet of wide-open space—4,400 if you count the roof.
Tribal masks hang above the front door. Huge lengths of bright fabric descend from the high ceilings. Trinkets and artwork line the walls, including some stained-glass pieces done by Semchyshyn. Explore some more, and you’ll find a workbench with tools and a small office, lofted halfway between the bedroom and the roof, with a pullout couch, “for when I get in trouble,” Harris quips.
A spacious bathtub, carved from marble and weighing nearly a ton, sits in the center of the master suite. You have to run hot water forever before the stone warms up. (Reeves owns the unit below and says his bed sits directly under the tub, demonstrating his faith in the floor.)
Harris’ closet, while large, is not quite as ostentatious as you might hope. He’s a regular on the charity gala circuit, and he’s known for his showy style. After visiting his brother in India, he attended the Downtown Ball wearing a sarong (giving guests an excuse to exclaim, “What’s sarong with this picture?”) On the night of the MX Movies opening, he wore a vest that appeared to be made from a tapestry. He sometimes wears glitter.
“You never go to one of these things and then go home that night and say, ‘Was Amos Harris there? I didn’t notice,’” Bradley says.
Up on the rooftop, Harris has a garden where he grows tomatoes, carrots, eggplants. There are peach and apple trees. A water feature cascades into a bed of rocks. When Semchyshyn needed to pollinate peppers, the couple became amateur beekeepers. Harris estimates they have 40,000 bees in hives tucked behind the air-conditioning units.
Harris has just returned from New York, where he was helping his sister, whose Down syndrome has led to early-onset dementia. So he hasn’t had time to clean up the rooftop after his annual St. Patrick’s Day pig roast. The Chinese roasting box sits out, spent coals soaking in the rain.
Harris says the cookout usually draws about 250 guests. In addition to the pigs, whose heads tend to scare the kids, he gets a couple of kegs from a local microbrewery. The guest list is a veritable who’s who of St. Louis, and Harris is on a first-name basis with Francis (Mayor Slay), Robin (former Secretary of State Carnahan), and Jay (Gov. Nixon).
“I don’t know who’s running the city when Amos is having a party,” Bradley says. He suggests that, as with the State of the Union address, whenever Harris hosts a soirée, there should be “a designated survivor at some undisclosed location.”
I ask Harris about Kociela’s outdoor shower story.
Reeves chimes in, gesturing toward an empty tower nearby, waiting to be redeveloped. “There is a reason that whole building is vacant.”
Harris and I sit down at his long kitchen table and run through the three topics that aren’t supposed to be discussed at dinner: money, politics, and religion.
Though he admits to carrying significant personal debt when he arrived in St. Louis and loves to joke about how much more money he could make in the suburbs, he declines to go into specifics about his current financial situation, saying only that he got out of the red a couple of years ago. “I had no ‘ripping up the mortgage’ moment.”
As for politics, “I think of myself as relatively intelligent, and I’m really ready to listen,” Harris begins, “but I really have no idea why you would ever be a Republican.” He runs through his take on the GOP platform. “They continue to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that you lower taxes and business flourishes.”
Now he’s rolling. “The whole idea, in my opinion, behind the growth of this country is that we have been able to function in community, and the whole idea behind community is, to some degree, we’re pooling our resources for the greater good.” He’s talking with his hands, punctuating each sentence with a flourish of exaggerated enunciation. “That’s the idea. What about that don’t you get?”
Last but not least, we come to religion. Harris describes himself as an Episcopalian Buddhist, probably leaning more toward the second half of that combination. He meditates early each morning on his rooftop deck. And he says it’s a shame that the life of Jesus has been turned into such a “death-centric faith.”
“Not to get too maudlin,” he says, “but I believe that God is love or Goddess is love. Love is both genders. I don’t believe that there is an omnipotent being out there to whom we can randomly address our concerns and who might, if you say the right words or push the right buttons, randomly intervene in some conscious way.”
As I’m about to leave, Ember returns from a reading group in her rain boots. Harris scoops her up and gives her a raspberry on her stomach. She begs for mercy and exclaims, “That’s inappropriate, Daddy!”
On a rainy April morning, I meet Harris at his office, in the penthouse of the Frisco Building on Olive Street.
The term “penthouse” is used loosely. Harris is both the president of Brady Capital (Brady being his middle name) and the principal of Spinnaker St. Louis, but there’s no obvious nameplate on his office door. His workspace is sprawling but cluttered. The roof leaks, so buckets are scattered about to catch the water. A couple of plaques sit on the windowsill. One has a key on it, the other a miniature version of the Arch, though the way they’re tossed, you can’t read either inscription.
Several years ago, Harris got into a spat with preservationists over the fate of the Century Building, which he thought should be knocked down in favor of a parking garage. They exchanged blows in the opinion pages of the Post-Dispatch. “It was a ridiculous building to build in the first place,” Harris says. “A marble-clad building in a climate that has freeze and thaw is dumb.”
In the end, Harris won. He rifles through the jumble on his desk and pulls out a fist-size piece of marble. “That’s the Century Building,” he says.
We talk about the Mercantile Exchange. Location, location, location—that’s what makes the MX such a key piece of the downtown landscape, he says. It’s next to the convention center and hotels, meaning that for many visitors, it’s their first taste of St. Louis.
As Craig Heller, a former airline pilot whose LoftWorks company helped kick off downtown’s residential boom, tells me later, “They don’t see much other than a couple blocks of downtown, so having those blocks looking good and being fun and vibrant is critical. It’s great what’s going on there, compared to what they used to walk by, wondering if it was going to fall on them.”
Harris wants the link with the convention center to be just the first of many connections. He plans to improve the Washington Avenue streetscape between the MX and the Arch grounds, with more trees and pedestrian lighting. He’s going to install an information-dense, LED-covered obelisk at the eastern end of Washington Avenue, hoping to draw MX visitors toward the Arch and vice versa.
In his dream world, the Interstate 70 overpass that crosses Washington Avenue would be demolished. In the meantime, he’s asking the Missouri Department of Transportation to let him project light onto it. “You’re bouncing light down, and it metaphorically explodes on the overpass,” he says with a smirk.
Once the final vacancies on the Washington Avenue side of the MX are filled, he’d like to develop along Locust, Sixth, and Seventh streets. He sees Seventh as the most important, because it connects Busch Stadium and the future Ballpark Village to America’s Center and the dome. “Seventh Street is a cool street,” he says. “It’s not too wide; it’s not too narrow. You can retail most of Seventh Street.”
He knows retailers will be reluctant, but he’s got an idea: He’ll run busloads of people up and down the street, to show the potential for foot traffic. “My next project is to see if I can go into another business I know nothing about and make the bus cool,” he says. “Like have a hot chick who drives it, and make it all Wi-Fi–accessible.” (He’s not joking.)
Put it all together, and Harris wants to create a circuit—Washington Avenue to Seventh Street to the Gateway Mall corridor to the Arch—that can be marketed to tourists. “Most of the cool stuff in downtown is either on that loop or right off that loop,” he says.
And the Mercantile Exchange, with its plentiful parking and dining options, will be the launching point. “It’s going to pull all these attractions together,” Kociela says. “It’s an anchor for entertainment.”
The more you hear about Harris’ plans, the easier it is to understand why he has his fingers in so many pies downtown. He’s a believer in the old rising-tide principle.
The staff at the Partnership sometimes hears from him multiple times a day; he’s continually pointing out off-kilter planters or throwing out a kooky idea for making benches cooler. And he’s involved in trying to solve downtown’s larger problems, too, starting with safety.
In his opinion, “the deterioration of families on the North Side that creates this gangster mentality that threatens everybody,” he says, “that, to me, is a tough f—king problem.” His idea: Cover downtown in cameras, with a central control room, and an increased security presence, without making it seem militant.
Once he’s done filling every side of the Mercantile Exchange and starting his “hot chick” bus service, Harris doesn’t know what’s next. He talks about mountain climbing.
“When you’re going up the hill, there is always the next hill,” he says.
So what is his next hill?
“Limited only by your imagination—and money.”
