Photography courtesy of St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission
We asked seven stakeholders for their opinions about the state of downtown—how it’s changed, where it’s headed, and what challenges lie ahead. The interviews were individual, but when put together, they make for a lively debate. You might even say it’s a “game changer.”
Are you excited about the latest developments?
Doug Woodruff, president and CEO, The Partnership for Downtown St. Louis: The opening of Ballpark Village is going to be a game changer. I think, just the same, the 2015 opening of IKEA will be a broader community game changer. Ballpark Village will bring people down hopefully in excess of the 81 baseball games a year and really energize that whole area of downtown. IKEA, being that this is only the sixth urban store in the country for them and the fact that it’s in the center of the central corridor in terms of the city, is really exciting.
Brian Hall, chief marketing officer, St. Louis Convention & Visitors Commission: We’ve got about a billion dollars’ worth of new development coming into the pipeline that is real, and it’s materializing as we speak, ranging from Ballpark Village to CityArchRiver to the National Blues Museum to hotel redevelopments. This really reaches a point that I’ve been anticipating for quite some time, and that is what Malcolm Gladwell refers to as the tipping point. I think it’s happening in St. Louis right now. I think we’re about to tip in a very positive direction.
Alex Ihnen, blogger, nextSTL (nextstl.com): I’ll try not to be too derogatory, but you have these hundreds of millions of dollars in vanity projects that we all talk about. But that’s not what changes downtown. The Arch has been there since 1965, and downtown hasn’t done well since 1965. The Arch is incomparable, the most amazing piece of modern sculpture anywhere, ever. It wasn’t enough to do it, because what people need is a community. You need some basic shops. You need sidewalks that aren’t broken. You need streetlights that work. In the end, what matters is this block-by-block development.
Kris Kleindienst, owner, Left Bank Books: I can understand why these things have to happen. I’m not against them. I just don’t see them as having a lot of effect on me.
Is anyone still skeptical about Ballpark Village?
Kelly Kelsey, downtown resident and co-founder, Friends of Lucas Park: I’m afraid. If it brings down another crowd, I guess that’s good. I just hate to see it pull from the existing restaurants and attractions.
Kleindienst: People who come down to the baseball game will frequent what’s right in front of them, and then they’ll go home. I don’t think it will be a thing where somebody says, “Let’s go downtown and just walk around. Oh, here’s a bookstore. Oh, here’s Ballpark Village.” We’re years away from that. What we don’t have is the stretch between Left Bank Books and Ballpark Village to walk through. It’s like thumbtacks on a map—you need the yarn stretched between them.
Ihnen: I’m completely underwhelmed. We can all agree that the Cardinals Hall of Fame is going to be very cool. But at this point, it’s still a parking lot with some bars and restaurants. What we were excited about when it was first proposed is, there were really mixed uses. It was offices. It was residential. It was something unique for downtown. That’s no longer true, unless you think one dueling-piano bar is more unique than another.
Could that be corrected?
Ihnen: It’s not my money, so it’s easy for me to say this, but residential seems like a no-brainer. You just have to believe modern condos next to Busch Stadium would sell.
What about the makeover of the Arch grounds?
Lewis Reed, president, St. Louis Board of Aldermen: I think that will make a bigger impact than probably some people think, in terms of the downtown foot traffic that we should see once we remove the divide between downtown and the Arch Grounds. I think it will also add to more of an attractive environment for businesses to then relocate or decide to establish their business downtown.
Hall: Transformational. The Gateway Arch is to St. Louis what the Nike Swoosh is to Nike. It’s a symbol that has universal recognition and appeal. It’s a touchstone to Americana. We love what they’re doing concerning uniting the Arch Grounds with downtown St. Louis. I think that is going to be a huge game changer.
Woodruff: I’ve been working in development in downtown for 20-plus years. The park over the highway has been a community development dream for a long time. Downtown needs to be activated from the river west.
Tom Schlafly, co-founder, The Saint Louis Brewery: If that succeeds, it would be wonderful. I don’t think we have any option. It’s been a cliché for 100 years that St. Louisans have turned their back on the river.
What are some of the challenges still facing the urban core?
Woodruff: To continue to attract the kind of capital investment that we saw in the first decade of the 21st century, which was largely driven by tremendous opportunity with affordable buildings, supported by things like the historic tax credit and other types of state and local incentives. Those incentives are a little under attack by various places, but the reality is they’ve helped to develop the fastest growing neighborhood in our entire metropolitan area, and that’s downtown.
Tax credits have been key to redeveloping downtown, but some say they cost too much.
Schlafly: I went to some program where [Gov.] Jay Nixon was talking about tax credits, saying they represented a drain on the public treasury. In our case, that’s absolutely bogus. The building where [Schlafly] Tap Room is had been vacant for over 20 years when I bought it. Throughout that time, it generated absolutely zero dollars in revenue for the state. We’ve had a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of tax credits. In that time, we’ve paid millions to the state, mostly in sales taxes on the restaurant and then the income taxes paid by our employees. It’s one of the best investments the state has ever made. If that sounds like a rant, it is.
Reed: Here’s the long and short of it: We could not have built St. Louis out in the way we have without historic tax credits. It would have been impossible.
Is downtown now a real neighborhood, as opposed to an office center?
Woodruff: It’s important that downtown meets the needs of all 2.8 million people who live in the greater metro area. Downtown is becoming its own neighborhood, and that’s terrific. But if you go to Belleville, Ill., or Chesterfield, everybody there has a belief that downtown is partly theirs, too. We have to continue to meet the needs not only of the folks who live and work down here, but also the people in the broader region who call St. Louis home.
Ihnen: It’s the main business district for the whole region still, even though that’s lesser than it used to be. It’s also the main entertainment district for the region. But now it’s also becoming a neighborhood. It will be interesting in the next decade to see how downtown develops as a residential neighborhood.
How does the increase in downtown residents impact tourism?
Hall: When you rub elbows with locals, you feel that you’re a part of the community and its fabric. We love the fact that the tourists who are coming into the downtown core are now seeing the vibrancy of the folks that are living downtown. It creates sort of a vibe and an energy that this city did not have for a long period of time.
If the Rams left downtown, what would that do to the neighborhood?
Hall: Stan Kroenke goes year to year beginning after the 2014 season. Year to year is nothing to fear. According to Kevin Demoff himself, the executive vice president with the Rams, the Chargers have been year to year for the past decade. This simply is a condition of their lease now. It gives them flexibility, which is something that they fought hard to win. But we don’t believe that the Rams are looking to move from St. Louis any time soon. What they decide to do in the future is entirely up to their ownership.
Woodruff: I think the football team matters most to the region. I think it’s important as the 19th largest market in the country that we maintain the view from outsiders as being a relevant city. There is something to having a franchise with the most successful sports league in the country to do that. Whether that’s downtown or in another part of the region, I think is less of a concern to me.
Hall: There’s lots of other activity happening in the Edward Jones Dome in between Rams games. For example, we just had a Monster Jam. We’ve got some basketball. We’ve got volleyball tournaments. We have One Direction playing a concert this coming August. It’s a multipurpose facility, and that’s the great thing about it.
What does downtown still need that it doesn’t have?
Reed: The thing that we still have to get our arms around is parking, when we think about how we begin to establish retail space in downtown St. Louis. We need a solid plan in place where parking is easily accessible, and it is not a barrier to entry for the average person. We have to begin to think like the average person would think.
Schlafly: Unlike some of downtown, we have parking. I think St. Louisans still don’t like to pay to park when they go out to dinner. It’s prosaic, and people say we ought to be a walkable city—I completely agree with it—but people coming to spend $15 or $20 at the Tap Room are not likely to spend $5 or $10 to park.
Kelsey: [Schnucks’] Culinaria is huge. That was a definite game changer for us downtown. I think the Macy’s is a huge loss. I miss it terribly. There are a few boutiques down here, but you can’t go pick up gloves or socks or an umbrella. A Target, oh man, that would be awesome. We don’t get into a car during the week. On the weekends, why do we get into a car? It’s to go to Target or to Walgreens.
Reed: If we want to truly attract the millennials and keep them here, we have to rethink what we’ve done thus far as it relates to transit. If we build a comprehensive transit system and begin to expand that into the neighborhoods and bring it closer to people, I think it will help our city out tremendously.
Schlafly: A lot just has to happen spontaneously. I think you make it easy for people to move in. But I’m not sure how much central planning can dictate human behavior.
Retail still seems difficult.
Kleindienst: Since we opened, in December 2008, within one block of our store, about 12 street-front businesses have opened, against tremendous odds. We opened that store right at the beginning of the recession. The economy crashed. A lot of development money froze. I think it’s pretty impressive what has happened in the face of those odds, frankly. It’s in superslow motion, but I think downtown is here to stay.
Schlafly: I think there are a lot of people in St. Louis for whom the city and downtown and the river are irrelevant. Overcoming that attitude is a big challenge.
Hall: I think retail is coming back. We’re going to have a brand-new IKEA opening up as part of the Cortex development in midtown. I think that’s a game changer, too. The extent to which we can do a better job connecting downtown with midtown, including the Grand entertainment district, it’s all very proximate. This community has all the assets that it needs.
Kleindienst: Yeah, here are these really big, high-profile, gigantic investment projects that it seems like people in a certain realm of investment in St. Louis understand. But what they can get better at is the stuff you see on the strip on the Delmar Loop and in Maplewood and South Grand and the Central West End. They haven’t figured out the little stuff.
Would you like to see more investment in small business and less in these huge projects?
Kleindienst: There is a lot more attention paid to that stuff and more resources pouring into it. It’s the sexy stuff. But there are still people working at the smaller-scale level, too. In fact, you can’t really have a Renaissance in a really great downtown without both. It’s not an either/or. I’m just pushing for a little more creative response to the challenge among the folks who are working on it.
It seems like the forces of progress and preservation come into conflict downtown.
Ihnen: Downtown has done a pretty remarkable job at preservation. It’s historic tax credits, but it’s also the city’s Preservation Review Board and the Cultural Resources Office. Without them, half of Washington Avenue would probably be gone. Those buildings, and many buildings downtown, were vacant for 5, 10, 15 years, or longer. It’s pretty amazing that some of those have stayed. There should be a lesson there. We can look at downtown and see the value that those buildings have added. Hopefully that prevents us from tearing down too many more.
How important is it to have a strong urban core?
Schlafly: I don’t know if you can quantify it. It’s vital. It’s our identity. Our identity is the river and the Arch.
