Photograph courtesy of Union Station
Here we go again.
“Union Station on track to be sold,” announced the headline splashed across the September 30 edition of the St. Louis Business Journal.
It turns out St. Louis’ quintessential architectural treasure has been listed for sale by a real-estate broker hired by the bank that took over the bank that was taken over by the FDIC after it took over the bank that foreclosed on the property eight years ago.
I’m not going to go into all of that. But here’s your box score: The grand experiment of saving Union Station as a “festival marketplace” of bustling restaurants and retail stores attached to a hotel is pretty much kaput.
And the notion that the landmark is “on track to be sold” is not a hopeful sign, not unless something miraculous happens, because while it doesn’t qualify for government grace under the moniker “too big to fail,” it ominously might be described in a similar way: “Too big to buy.”
As the Business Journal reports, the Union Station complex covers more than 35 acres (1.5 million square feet) and includes a 539-room hotel and 184,879 square feet of retail space. It also has a gigantic parking lot that can be quite profitable if the hotel and retail space are bustling.
But that’s a big “if.” And it brings us to the bad news: Purchasing the hotel itself wouldn’t be such a bad idea—it’s operating decently now as a Marriott—were it not for the small detail that you can’t buy just the hotel.
Any buyer has to acquire the entire complex, and from the perspective of people who have examined the deal (I’ve talked to three), there are approximately 184,879 reasons not to be excited. Even were these great economic times—and they most certainly are not—Union Station is simply not going to work as a retail center.
It’s time to go back to the drawing board.
Here’s what I think needs to happen: The powers that be need to forget retail and think tourism. More specifically, they need to think museum.
There is no other place in this city that has as much potential to house an attraction worth visiting—by out-of-towners and locals alike—as Union Station. Its space is expansive, historic, and stunning. Its downtown west location is ideal for tourists and central for residents, and it even enjoys the rare attribute of sitting on a MetroLink stop.
It would be a great place to visit if something worth visiting lived there.
Think museum.
For all of the overhyped civic dreams that have failed here in recent decades—prime among them Union Station’s promised revival as the nation’s next great festival marketplace—St. Louis’ cultural institutions have continued to thrive. Indeed, they’ve remained among the best in the nation.
Conceived properly, a strong tourist attraction could anchor a sizable chunk of Union Station’s troublesome 184,879 square feet of space, and in doing so, make it possible for the remainder of that space to again become viable for restaurants and a limited amount of retail activity. And it wouldn’t hurt the hotel.
This is not a revolutionary idea. Renovated old train terminals—far less grand than Union Station—now house museums in Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Omaha, and other cities.
These are some ideas worth considering.
A train museum. This would be the ultimate fit for Union Station’s legendary history as one of America’s premier train stations, having housed as many as 290 trains daily and 22 million passengers yearly. True, St. Louis County does operate its Museum of Transportation way out at 3015 Barrett Station, just 20 miles from the Arch—or, for tourists, a convenient round-trip cab ride of roughly two days and $250, assuming the driver could even find it. It’s actually a nice little spot to take the kids, but it could be even more so at Union Station, and be more accessible to tourists (a detail customarily not overlooked by other cities). Here’s a chance for some city-county cooperation. Perhaps the entities could do a transportation swap: airport for train museum.
An aquarium. I know this notion has been bandied about for years—and mostly in the context of nonsense—but aquariums are working well across the country. St. Louis can’t pretend to compete with Chicago’s world-class Shedd Aquarium, but creative minds might figure out how to use a combination of Union Station’s indoor and outdoor space for this purpose. With no disrespect to the World Aquarium housed in City Museum, this space would have a lot more potential.
A satellite facility of St. Louis’ cultural institutions. Perhaps the Saint Louis Zoo could operate an aquarium. Or the Saint Louis Art Museum could add to its network of satellite facilities. Ditto for the Saint Louis Science Center, or even the Missouri Botanical Garden. Are any of them open to it? I have no idea. Could they get over the notion of making it all free to tourists? Doubtful.
Some combination of museum activities. Cincinnati, for example, has transformed its old train station into the Cincinnati Museum Center, with several different museums under the same roof. One of its chief proponents was former Mayor Jerry Springer, so it’s doubtful St. Louis could compete with that city’s dramatic flair.
Other cultural uses or museum ideas. Kansas City’s old train terminal houses its ballet company, the Irish Museum and Cultural Center, and a range of temporary exhibits. Indianapolis’ station has a variety of uses, including the Indiana Museum of African-American History. Omaha’s station has a museum devoted to Western heritage. There are plenty of possibilities.
I’m not sure what would work at Union Station, but it’s pretty clear what won’t, and that is the bold concept dating back to 1985 of a festival marketplace. That idea failed, even as it was succeeding in some other cities, and it failed despite a huge investment and a tremendous amount of effort by some pretty smart people.
The original idea was the brainchild of The Rouse Company of Columbia, Md., in the image of its legendary successes with Boston’s Faneuil Hall and Baltimore’s Harborplace, among others. The concept known as the festival marketplace—blending unique and innovative restaurants and retail uses—was seen as the wave of the future.
It started out like a house afire in St. Louis, with some 80 retailers and restaurants occupying more than two-thirds of the space from the outset. Indeed, Union Station operated profitably—and with a real sense of vibrancy—for its first decade.
Unfortunately for St. Louis, the concept couldn’t be sustained as it has in Boston, Baltimore, and other cities. The reasons for that failure might best be uncovered by an MBA project at a local university, but as I understand it, St. Louis simply suffered from a confluence of bad breaks that rendered Union Station unprofitable.
There was a steady downturn in the city’s convention and tourism business, as well as in the local economy at large. There was the rise of casinos, which took a bite out of lots of businesses, but particularly hurt the likes of Union Station.
There were internal issues as well—at $150 million, the project had come in $25 million over budget, saddling it with more long-term debt than intended. There also was natural management turnover (those of us who worked with Union Station can attest that the people running it in the first decade were a lot more dynamic than their successors).
Some point to the failure of retail activity and contrast it with the Saint Louis Galleria and other suburban shopping malls—St. Louis’ aversion to paying for parking thus entered as Exhibit A—but that misses the point that festival marketplaces were never designed to compete with suburban centers. These were entertainment-centered destinations, not shopping malls, and the parking (however unpopular) was actually a key revenue source.
All of that can be debated, of course, but this much is pretty clear: Union Station needs a lot more than a new owner.
It needs a new concept.
If Union Station were just any old venue, then it might not merit all the fuss. There are plenty of failed projects that wind up gobbling hideous amounts of public subsidies as a bailout. Downtown’s ill-fated St. Louis Centre—which also opened in 1985 amid great fanfare—comes to mind in that category.
But there is only one Union Station for St. Louis. It was America’s premier train station when train travel ruled the roost—heralded by Harper’s Weekly when it opened in 1893 as “cosmopolitan in its very essence”—and it was the heart of the community throughout its
glory days.
St. Louis’ well-documented decline as a great urban core is what brought down Union Station—not the other way around—and even after the last Amtrak train pulled out in 1978, the station stood proudly as one of the city’s great architectural treasures.
It still tugs at the heartstrings of baby boomers with childhood memories of a giant and bustling place of wonderment. It’s still a treasure.
Failure isn’t an option here.
For the moment, there’s nothing promising on the horizon. Absent some civic leadership materializing on the scene, there’s a real danger that the property will languish in its state of steady decline. Or even worse, officials might show up with some sort of Ballpark Village–style scheme to provide artificial incentives for new businesses to engage in activity that normal markets won’t bear.
This isn’t the time for good money to chase bad money. It’s a time for good ideas to chase bad ones, or at least those that didn’t work out. Like it or not, the 1985 model isn’t going to cut it.
And simply selling Union Station to the next owner—which may not even be possible—isn’t going to make a difference unless there’s a real plan to think outside all of the old boxes.
Think museum.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
