(So what the hell took so long?)
Photograph by David Torrence
Ted Koplar’s office, on the 20th floor of the KMOX building, sits a few hundred yards from the center of the Arch. It’s the perfect view, unobstructed. I’m watching from an adjoining Koplar Communications International conference room, peeking across at what must be one of the greatest riverfront suites in the city. Ted enters the room and looks out for a few seconds.
“Yeah, we needed to do something with that yard out there, so we hired this guy to build us a little sculpture,” he says with a slight grin. He bends his tall frame into a chair at the head of a rather modest conference table, his hair—what’s left of it—white, his eyes big and ... he thinks they’re hazel. Asks his secretary to be sure.
Thirty minutes into the interview, Ted’s son Sam walks in and tells me the same joke about the Arch. He’s broader, with darker hair and skin. Were it not for the dry, self-conscious senses of humor, you’d never know that they’re father and son.
Ted needed Sam, though—just as Ted’s father wound up needing him—to fulfill a larger-than-life promise. Together, Ted and Sam recently completed the long-anticipated, near-despaired-of $20 million restoration of three buildings on Maryland Plaza.
Ted’s voice lilts with triumph—then flattens, as he describes the long hiatus and the criticism it provoked. He shifts in his chair as he speaks, seeming boyish, earnest, a little awkward. He offers an anecdote from one of the more acrimonious Central West End meetings, then regrets it. Sam rushes to his defense, adds more details to the story Ted’s wishing he’d never begun. Together, they unfold the larger story: four generations of men and the chunk of real estate that held their lives together, giving St. Louis glamour, letting it die, bringing it back again.
Residents of the Central West End waited 35 years for the Koplars to keep their promise to Maryland Plaza. That’s what Mayor Francis Slay recently called it: a promise. It all began in 1971, when the St. Louis Board of Aldermen declared the plaza’s 11 acres—stretching from Kingshighway east to Euclid and from Lindell north to Maryland—blighted.
Maryland Plaza was the fashion district, the place to be seen wearing expensive linen dresses, fancy shoes and big hats. The impeccably uniformed doorman—either Johnny or Holly—would open the door as the chauffeurs pulled around to the Saks Fifth Avenue garage. Women strolled to Cooper’s, Robbins Hat Company or the Woman’s Exchange—stopping in its tearoom for frothy-tart lemon meringue pie.
Maryland Plaza revolved around the two-hotel complex known as the Chase Park Plaza, and its cosmopolitan elegance was exactly what Sam Koplar, Ted’s grandfather, had envisioned. He built the 28-story Park Plaza in 1929, naming it for Forest Park and his inspiration, the Savoy Plaza Hotel in New York.
A son of Jewish immigrants from Minsk, Russia, Sam started off in St. Louis as a junk dealer. Then he and his brother bought the old Globe Theater, where employees stood behind the screen and read the captions of the silent pictures aloud while Sam’s wife, Jeannette, played the piano to accompany the chase scenes. She was as bubbly and outgoing as he was quiet, a cigar always in his mouth substituting for frivolous words.
Sam became a builder and eventually made enough money to pursue his twin passions: architecture and entertainment. In the ’20s, he constructed the Congress and Senate apartments on Union, the Westmoreland high-rise and the St. Louis Theatre (now the Powell Symphony Hall). Then he began his masterpiece: the Park Plaza.
The building’s Art Deco design celebrated the roaring spirit of the era by gliding upward—streamlined, elegant and glitzy, with perfect symmetry and acute angles—to scrape the sky. Set against Forest Park, it created a sophisticated contrast between nature and urbanity, history and optimism. Its very existence helped justify St. Louis’ status as a big city, an important objective in the hotel and entertainment business.
What some saw as Sam’s folly cost $6 million to build—a fortune in 1929. Midway through construction, the stock market crashed and Sam lost his financing. He finally completed the building in 1930 but lost the Park Plaza to foreclosure several years later. To make ends meet, he managed hotels—including his own—for the next decade.
By 1944, Sam’s humility had paid off. He reacquired the Park Plaza and coupled it with the Chase Hotel next door, which he had also purchased. His son—Ted’s father, Harold—joined the two hotels with a huge lobby, forming the Chase Park Plaza.
Harold was as gregarious as his mother, dreamier and more impulsive than his shrewd, self-taught father. Harold shared Sam’s eye for architecture, though, studying the subject at the University of Illinois and returning home to design extravagant, elegant restaurants and bars for the family’s hotel.
Unlike his old man, Harold was outgoing. He drank and made deals with the city’s rich and powerful—everyone from Gussie Busch to Mayor Al Cervantes. He also brought to St. Louis five U.S. presidents and some of the most famous American entertainers, from Nat King Cole to Bob Hope. Harold became good friends with Dean Martin, who returned to St. Louis again and again during the ’50s and ’60s. The Rat Pack charmer eventually tapped Harold for $10,000 to get back on his feet, and Harold gave it gladly.
Harold turned his father’s successful hotel into St. Louis’ cultural center. Even Life magazine knew the tag: “The Chase is the place.” As a result, that 11-acre strip next door—Maryland Plaza—became the smartest scene in town and the sexiest place to be seen. A renaissance took place in the Central West End, with bustle it hadn’t seen since the years after the 1904 World’s Fair.
Then, in the late ’60s, all the fun drained away. People were abandoning the Central West End for the suburbs, and businesses were leaving, too, leaving the area silent and shabby.
Longtime resident Leon Strauss tried to save the residential part of the West End by redeveloping neighborhoods off DeBaliviere, but changes in tax law soon erased the incentive to undertake the kind of redevelopment he had put in motion.
Drug deals were spilling south to Maryland Plaza, and a nightclub east of Straub’s was bombed. St. Louis was, in fact, becoming the car-bombing capital of the United States. Between 1962 and 1981, 19 mob-related car bombings terrified the city.
Ted Koplar remembers how seriously his father took those bombings. The Chase Park Plaza had already started to lose money, and calls started coming in from convention planners, canceling their bookings.
Desperate to stabilize Maryland Plaza, Harold purchased the old Saks building, and his buddy, former mayor Cervantes, bought the Fairmont Hotel (which was attracting a dubious clientele) across the street. The two men became partners in the Maryland Plaza Redevelopment Corporation, receiving millions in tax abatement. Harold envisioned Ghirardelli Square boutiques in the Saks building but wound up with a disastrous hodgepodge of short-lived T-shirt and jewelry shops. Cobblestones were laid in the street and traffic was routed around a central fountain—and that’s about all that happened. Residents started to wonder what the developers had in mind—and when the city was going to come knocking, looking for the results of all that tax abatement.
By 1985, when Harold died and Ted Koplar inherited control of Maryland Plaza, the Chase Park Plaza had been sold.
Life wasn’t supposed to unfold that way. Ted’s older brother, Robert, had been groomed as Harold’s successor in the hotel business and had gone to Cornell University to study hotel management. Like his grandfather, he had a knack for finance.
Ted looked up to his big brother: “Bob was a very bright guy, very quiet—but people loved him.” Was there tension between them? Ted shrugs. “It was more what he felt about me. Kid brothers sometimes get in the way.”
Sweet and stubborn, loyal and a bit naïve, Ted looked for his own path—but, with a larger-than-life father and an heir apparent brother, the sightlines weren’t clear.
“Coming from a family where they have been successful—it’s a little scary,” he admits now. “You are trying to follow in their footsteps, but you are also trying to find your own identity. My passion never fell hard on the hotel side.”
He finished his freshman year at the University of Missouri–Columbia, then went overseas to “a kind of school.” Pressed for details, he mumbles, “Academic year abroad, credits from the Sorbonne.” His major? “French,” he says, sounding even more embarrassed. “It was ... more of an experience than it was school.”
“I wasn’t good-looking enough to be a playboy,” he adds, relaxed now, “but I wanted to see the world.”
When Ted returned to St. Louis, he opened what was, for a time, the hottest nightclub in town, Chavala, downtown. Harold winced at the project; his impatience with his younger son was already public knowledge.
“Yeah, he was tough on me,” Ted says now, “but he was tough for a reason. Even today I can hear how he might have reacted to some of the things I do, projects he would have thought too ambitious: ‘You don’t know what you are doing! Why are you doing this?’ But, y’know, he was kind of like that, too. I’m sure his dad had the same discussions with him.”
Then, in the mid-’60s, he started working at the family station (KPLR Channel 11) and fell in love. “TV was exciting,” he says. “It was new—and my dad really didn’t have any interest in the day-to-day business.”
Now they had a plan. Bob would take the hotel and real-estate side of the empire, Ted the TV station, where he would be safe from their father’s sharp tongue.
He didn’t think anything of it when Bob, itching for autonomy, moved to Florida to make a few business deals in Panama City.
But then in 1977, Bob was found dead. The probable cause was an aneurysm; no autopsy was performed.
The shock never wore off—and when their father died several years later, Ted had to shoulder a burden he’d never wanted.
Now Ted lives in his father’s stately home off Warson Road and oversees the St. Louis half of the Koplar empire (his sister, Susan Koplar Brown, runs The Lodge of Four Seasons, Spa Shiki and The Club at Porto Cima). Forced into property ownership, Ted’s still not enamored of hotels; he wants his legacy to be innovation on the broadcast side.
He and his wife, Nancy, have five children; Sam’s in the middle. Ted speaks often, with loving pride, of the other four. He’s determined to not choose a favorite.
June Gooch worked for the Koplars for 25 years. She remembers when Ted took over the Maryland Plaza project—and why it never got off the ground.
“The area was just deteriorating, and there wasn’t enough money to start over, so you would do a Band-Aid,” she says. “It was just a case of not enough money, and Ted didn’t have the clout that HK [Harold’s nickname] had to get the financing. I think Ted was willing, but with HK you could do a handshake. With Ted, you had to have it in writing, because he was new.”
Joyce Littlefield worked for Harold Koplar’s redevelopment corporation, but she quit after Ted took over. She had acquired solid financing for one of the properties to be completely rehabbed and paid off in seven years. Back then, that type of financing didn’t come easy in the Central West End. So when
Ted came along and refinanced the loan Littlefield had worked so hard to acquire, “enough was enough,” she says. “He really didn’t understand finance.”
Developers watched with eagle eyes as ... nothing happened. Neighborhood businesses gnashed their teeth. Pete Rothschild, owner of Rothschild Development and Red Brick Management, tried again and again to buy the Maryland Plaza buildings from Ted—not just the Saks building, but the townhomes across the street, three other buildings and a parking lot. Ted just couldn’t bring himself to sell.
Instead, he stayed in his comfort zone: TV. His father had founded KPLR to film touring acts that performed at the Chase Club. In three brilliant strokes, he added The Three Stooges, Wrestling at the Chase and a video cruiser that telecast local events—but the day-to-day operations didn’t interest him. In 1977, Ted took over as president, adding a World Events show and production company. In 1984 he bought the Voltron cartoon from Japan, excised the decapitation scenes, tweaked the rest for a Western palate and added new music. It was a huge hit, the first show introduced in stereophonic sound. And when KPLR won the contract for Cardinals baseball, it became the leading independent station in the country.
Ted kept going, bringing in the interactive VEIL (video-encoded invisible light) technology that could activate a toy or handheld device from the TV set. In 1998, he sold KPLR for well over $100 million.
For all those years, his busy studio inside the Chase Apartments looked out to the empty buildings he owned across the street.
“He did nothing he was supposed to,” says one local businessman, adding, “The city and Koplar were equally culpable. Nobody came by and said, ‘Hey, you sonofabitch, we’ve given you $9 million in tax abatement and the buildings are still sitting empty.’”
“It’s a shame the buildings deteriorated as much as they did,” Ted says now, “and I certainly have to raise my hand in guilt, a little bit, for the amount of time it’s taken.”
Why did he let them sit empty so long? First, he says, there was no parking, so, in his opinion, any major redevelopment would have failed. Second, he says, the market wasn’t right. Others say the West End market has been ripe since the early to middle ’90s, but Koplar insists that only a fool would have thrown $4 million into that area before now. Last, he cared deeply about Maryland Plaza because it was the back door to the Park Plaza. He didn’t want to be a “pig-dog” and rent to a tattoo parlor.
It didn’t hurt that for many of those idle years he received property-tax abatements on the property, he admits.
Residents and businesses didn’t care why Ted was waiting; they saw the hiatus as betrayal. Either act or sell, they urged. Over and over again, he cited the lack of parking.
In 2001, the city built the Argyle Parking Garage, between his Chase Apartments and the Saks buildings. Now would he act?
He thought about it. A company from Washington, D.C., made an offer on the Saks building, the Greenberg Gallery and the Medical Arts Galleries—but couldn’t finalize a deal with three separate owners. The group gave up, and in 2003 Koplar scooped up the other two properties and found himself with even more of Maryland Plaza.
He took the plunge, committing to a $20 million redevelopment. His 23-year-old son, Sam, who loved architecture the way his grandfather and great-grandfather had, would see the project through.
If you want a symbol of Maryland Plaza’s past three decades, it would be the cobblestones. “They were the wrong kind, levee stones,” snaps a local businessman. “It was the stupidest thing in the world, and it killed Maryland Plaza.”
The stones had been known to deflate moving tires. The old fountain—stuck in the center of the circle, where mothers had to bump strollers across the stones while cars, if they were lucky, paused for them—had forced an awkward bend in the road. In 2003, Ted vowed to spend millions in TIF funds putting in smoother stones, a new fountain and a still-curved road. Rothschild wrote the mayor in exasperation, saying that he was “very reluctant to accept [Ted’s] Disneyland streetscape since the last alteration of the historic straight path of the streets and sidewalks on Maryland Avenue, which has been such a disaster for the neighborhood.”
In 2003, Ted finally agreed to sell to Rothschild—not the coveted Saks building but three others, plus the historic Maryland Plaza townhomes. “Making a deal with Ted was hard,” Rothschild says, amused. “I did a lot of things in the contract that I don’t think any normal person would have done—all these terms and conditions. He had a provision that if he did decide to sell the Saks building, I’d have to buy it for $1.5 million. I said, ‘Why don’t I just buy it now?’”
The two competing developments, Ted’s Maryland Plaza and Pete’s Maryland Place, have had several spirited disagreements over the past three years—but the rival developers now need each other to succeed.
That doesn’t mean it’s all gone smoothly.
On March 23, 2005, Jim Dwyer (Rothschild’s partner on the townhomes) chaired a distinctly hostile meeting of the Central West End Business Association, called after Koplar Properties announced that the street would be closed for construction during the NCAA Final Four, cutting patrons off from area bars and restaurants. Ted pointed out that the St. Louis Development Corporation had been holding up his plans and didn’t mention the reason: The alderwoman representing Maryland Plaza, Lyda Krewson, and others felt that he’d reneged on parts of the agreement back in January.
Ted flew back to St. Louis for the meeting—he’d been touring the country with Sam, visiting Seattle, the Grove in Las Vegas, Newbury Street in Boston, looking for clues to luring upscale retail. He rose at the start of the meeting, thinking that he’d reduce the tension by pointing out that those vilified cobblestones were finally gone.
He swears that at least six hands shot up, as people demanded to know why he’d removed them.
“You can’t please everybody,” he says.
Before the meeting drew to a tense close, someone blurted the real problem: concerns “about another 25 years of inaction.”
Old disappointments die hard. Only now, with a “Bellagio” fountain in place, designed by the company that created Las Vegas’ famous fountain; a European back street, with new boutiques; two new establishments from Chicago’s premier Levy Restaurants (Larry Levy graduated from Ladue High with Ted); the rooftop Mandarin Bar open ... only now is the air soft with forgiveness.
Sam learned as a boy that his family owned the old Saks building. He thought about it all through high school, dreaming of the cool things they could do with the building. In college, he reminded his father of his love for architecture, Art Deco design, the real-estate business and ... the old Saks building.
Now Sam is perceived as, if not the savior of Maryland Plaza, at least the catalyst for its redevelopment. He comes off as more decisive than his father, and even Ted’s detractors find the young Koplar likable.
Together Sam and Ted appear at ease, constantly praising each other. Sam teases that he’s going to grow the real-estate side of the business bigger than the communications side. Ted doesn’t argue.
On Maryland Plaza, Sam walks through the European backstreet—his father’s idea—and explains how the Vitrolite façade, a wall of black reflecting tile, enhances the Art Deco motif. As a boy, he used to look out from the KPLR studio and think of ways to redevelop the building. At Miami University in Ohio, he decided against becoming an architect because, he says, “those people were much smarter than me.” Instead, he studied finance and read about architecture in his spare time.
Sam talks about bringing the younger generation back into the city and making it more urban. He has his grandfather’s attitude: Out with the old, in with the new. He wants to tackle developments that will make St. Louis stand out as a big city. He says he doesn’t understand peers who graduate from college and move to the county as if they’re ready to retire.
“It’s like that movie Groundhog Day out there,” he says of the monotony he thinks that life affords. Later he urges me to go to International Night at Bar Italia: “You’ll meet girls that don’t even speak English.”
With his namesake’s masterpiece towering above, Sam can’t help walking around the corner and down York, past the Chase Apartments—his next project—to the corner of Lindell and Kingshighway. Phase II will be the development of this stretch of real estate.
And Phase III?
Sam points across the bustling street to a parking lot his family never sold.
“That’s my goal. I’m going to build the tallest building in the Midwest right there,” he says. “I’m going to hire the best architect of our generation.”
He can see it already.
