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Editor's Note: This article went to press shortly before the impact of COVID-19 began to ripple through St. Louis, temporarily closing many downtown businesses and attractions, in addition to affecting community events and conventions. While the long-term impact of the coronavirus crisis remains to be seen, this article reflects how St. Louis has endured countless challenges over time, finding new ways to move forward as a community.
In Downtown West, just a mile from the riverbank where Frenchmen founded St. Louis to trade fur, Lance Levine trades in fur fedoras. He’s the fourth generation of his family to run the Levine Hat Company. It has endured on Washington Avenue since 1903, even during the bleak ’90s, when retail here was scarce. But these days, it’s surrounded by new neighbors. On a brassy winter Saturday, Levine stands on the front sidewalk, checking them out.
“There’s The Last Hotel,” he says, pointing at the former International Shoe Company building. After a $60 million renovation, it reopened in June as a 142-room hotel (named after the shoe-molding tool called a last). A few blocks west, Levine notes, he can now buy groceries at Fields Foods, which occupies the street level of The Monogram, a former factory converted to luxury apartments with a $51 million investment. And right next to his hat shop is The Selfie Room, a space where visitors pay to photograph themselves in bright décor designed to pop on social media. “I was worried about them at first,” says Levine, “but I looked on their Instagram. They’re doing a ton of business!”
Downtown has momentum these days. It may even be headed toward a boom. True, we’ve heard such talk before. Various schemes over the past half century have failed to turbocharge the city’s urban core, that area between Jefferson and the Mississippi River, from Cole to Chouteau. For now, the young-and-hungry demographic that’s necessary to revive any downtown is flocking elsewhere: Locally, they seem to prefer the rest of the central corridor or neighborhoods such as The Grove and Cherokee Street; nationally, they migrate to Nashville, Austin, or coastal megacities instead of the Gateway City. Still, some observers and participants alike believe that the stars are aligning for downtown.
“What’s extra special is that the investments are so diverse,” says Steve Smith of the Lawrence Group. “There are many, many players—and that, to me, is a more sustainable model than one big, intense investment.”
Consider some of the major projects completed in just the last decade or so. There’s the Arch grounds renovation; Ballpark Village; Kiener Plaza; Citygarden; Stifel Theatre; Soldiers Memorial; the Central Library; Union Station’s aquarium and the St. Louis Wheel; the Mercantile Exchange District, which includes the National Blues Museum; the Old Post Office Plaza and apartment tower; the Schnucks Culinaria; the Saint Louis University School of Law… Add to all this smaller retail successes, such as the many eateries that have hung out shingles: Sugarfire Smoke House, Pi, Gringo, Hi-Pointe Drive-In, Sauce on the Side, Sen, Mango, Kaldi’s, The 314, Bridge, Baileys’ Range, Chris’ at the Docket, Blondie’s…
Now consider what’s in the works: the second phase of Ballpark Village, the Major League Soccer stadium and adjoining plaza, the expansion of America’s Center, the renovation of the former St. Louis Post-Dispatch building into offices for Square, a revitalized Laclede’s Landing, a crop of boutique hotels. And don’t forget what’s going on right outside downtown, including City Foundry in Midtown and the massive National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s new western headquarters, in the St. Louis Place neighborhood. Threading some of these developments together will be the pedestrian trails of the soon-to-be-renamed Chouteau Greenway.
All told, the projects planned, underway, and recently completed represent an estimated $2.3 billion in public and private investment.
“In order for this momentum to stall,” says Richard Callow, who served as spokesman for former Mayor Francis Slay and has lived on Washington since the early ’90s, “a lot of rich people with a track record of success and a lot at stake would have to be wrong.”
Yet challenges abound—and downtown denizens know it. The central business district’s comprehensive development roadmap is 20 years old. To create a new one, nonprofit Downtown STL has collected a trove of data and solicited input from hundreds of people who live, work, and frequent the area. The findings: People see potential but also too many empty spaces, such as parking lots, vacant storefronts, ultra-wide boulevards. Crime, or at least the perception thereof, is also an issue. What people crave is more retail, residents, street activity, and, overall, density and cohesion.
“St. Louisans have done remarkably well at large-scale catalytic projects,” says John Hoal, professor of architecture and urban design at Washington University. The task now, he says, is to be proactive in knitting them together with brand-new spaces and structures—particularly residential ones. “We’re obviously redeveloping old building stock, which is good,” notes Hoal, “but if you look at comparable downtowns that people would say are more successful, they’re building new residential. We need to take on this next level.”
To Levine, foot traffic on his stretch of Washington is picking up, even on weekdays. “You see people walking the dog, people on scooters, people walking to work,” he says. “I think it’s for real this time.”
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When Levine’s great-grandfather Benjamin Levine arrived downtown at the turn of the last century, he entered a canyon of brick high-rises. Flowing through it was a jumble of immigrants, streetcars, horse-drawn carriages, and sometimes even herds of livestock. St. Louis was then one of America’s largest cities. It was about to host the World’s Fair. The riverfront hummed with commerce, and Broadway drew throngs of shoppers. But the Russian-born Benjamin Levine, like many immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, decided to make a living in the Garment District. He opened his hat store in 1903. Customers were plentiful; everyone wore hats at the time.
The Garment District reached its zenith in the 1940s, and the city’s population peaked the following decade. In those days, Levine Hat was a major institution at 923 Washington. It manufactured hats in the back and sold them in the front. But then hats became optional in men’s fashion, and America underwent massive societal shifts. City residents fled to the suburbs. The economy deindustrialized and manufacturing jobs went overseas. Crime levels began a long climb upward. (One sign of things to come: In June 1960, Edward Levine was driving downtown with $2,500 when a robber brandishing a knife stopped his car in broad daylight and stole the money.)
For the next few decades, all levels of government tried to reverse the tide. City Hall gave out tax abatements; federal agencies offered grants and tax credits for rescuing historic commercial buildings. Those policies spurred the construction and renovation of more than 70 structures downtown. Out-of-town developers even launched two downtown shopping centers, St. Louis Centre and Union Station, but neither could compete with such malls as the Saint Louis Galleria in Richmond Heights, which was closer to the suburbs and offered free parking. People continued to work downtown, but few wanted to live there.
“Comparable downtowns…are building new residential. We need to take on this next level.”
The neighborhood hit rock bottom in the ’80s and early ’90s. Levine was just a kid back then. He remembers galloping up and down the aisles of his father’s hat shop, which had moved to its current location, at Washington and 14th.
“It was a bad period down here,” recalls Levine, who’s now 37. “It had a dustiness, a dinginess. It was kind of desolate.”
But as the ’90s rolled on, the clouds began to part. On downtown’s northern edge, the Dome rose to host the Rams. The adjacent America’s Center was completed, as was the convention hotel. To the south, the arena now known as Enterprise Center became home to the Blues. Bars and clubs on Laclede’s Landing attracted revelers. Lofts came onto the market; loft-dwellers multiplied. A public-private partnership group called Downtown Now! drafted a master redevelopment plan in 1999. In one program, it offered grants of up to $20,000 to spruce up storefronts. The recipient of one of those grants, Levine Hat put up a new sign.
Then, in the mid-2000s, the new Busch Stadium opened its gates to Cardinals fans. Washington also got a facelift: special streetlights, widened sidewalks, and a stone median with a zipper pattern to honor the history of the Garment District. Much of downtown’s new energy came from the young people who cruised and club-hopped at night. In the minds of many loft-dwellers and office workers, though, the 2009 opening of the Schnucks Culinaria, at Eighth and Olive, was a signal event—proof that the area was finally becoming a real lived-in neighborhood again.
By that time, Levine was in his twenties and working for his father at the hat shop. He’d served as a suave headwear model in a commercial that ran on late-night television (“I was cheap talent,” he jokes). Young ladies who came into the shop recognized him from TV. The customer base for hats was broadening again, this time in a more youthful direction. There were 4,400 residents living downtown in 2006, the year Levine filmed that commercial. Today, there are about 11,200.
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The Downtown STL office is on the 28th floor of One Metropolitan Square—so high up that when you look out the window of its swank conference room, pedestrians below look like ants. Seated at the head of a long table, the organization’s president and CEO, Missy Kelley, is explaining why a new development plan is needed.
“The plan can help us make sure downtown is for everyone, not just one developer’s idea of what we should do,” says Kelley. “It will be adopted by the city. The idea is that it’s intentional: It locks into place a sense of direction.”
The project, christened Design Downtown STL, got underway last year at a cost of $600,000. Arch to Park, a civic-minded investment organization, partnered with the neighborhood nonprofit to plan, launch, and manage the process; Philadelphia-based urban-planning firm Interface Studio is working on it as well.
To define both downtown’s current state and where people want it to go, organizers conducted more than 50 “stakeholder interviews,” ran online surveys, and staged events, including interactive open houses last October. At the open houses, attendees were asked to write on sticky notes how they would finish the sentences “Downtown today is/has ______” and “Downtown tomorrow can be ________.” They picked points on a collaborative map and left detailed observations and suggestions about, say, a certain sculpture or intersection. They were also asked how they might improve major streets.
“People took it seriously,” says LaShana Lewis, a business consultant and downtown resident since 2014. Currently the board chair of the Downtown Neighborhood Association, Lewis joined the Design advisory committee and helped facilitate the open house. “I was expecting a bunch of negativity, since I’m on the board and I hear that a lot, but that’s not what I got,” says Lewis. “People were taking a moment to think.”
According to the initial findings, the consensus was that downtown has “potential.” A plurality of respondents wanted more retail—cafés, coffee shops, stores. Respondents also wanted more pop-up markets, beer gardens, and temporary street closures. (These would supplement downtown’s already generous offerings of professional sports. The St. Louis Cardinals alone during their 2019 season drew 3.48 million fans to the neighborhood for an estimated economic impact of $344.8 million, according to the St. Louis Regional Chamber.)
According to the initial findings, the consensus was that downtown has “potential.”
Meanwhile, the Design organizers have collected some surprising data from the built environment. Nineteen percent of all downtown parcels are devoted to parking, they found—too many, in the view of many respondents. (A more detailed parking study is underway.) They also surveyed the street frontage of the area and determined that 83 percent is “unfavorable,” be it because of “parking garages and lots,” “blank, windowless walls,” or “long expanses of reflecting glass without entrances.”
Two of the largest office buildings by square footage in St. Louis—the former AT&T tower and the Railway Exchange Building—sit vacant. Giant vacancies like those, the Design organizers say, reinforce negative perceptions. Otis Williams, the executive director of the St. Louis Development Corporation, says a helpful response to such vacancies would be large St. Louis companies moving part or all of their operations downtown. “I think what we need is a commitment from the corporate community,” says Williams. “That has happened in Detroit. That has happened in Indianapolis.”
As for the residential market, about 92 percent of downtown housing units are occupied, according to a 2019 report by Downtown STL. There aren’t many older buildings left to convert to lofts or apartments. In recent years, only two new apartment buildings have appeared: the Tower at OPOP and One Cardinal Way in Ballpark Village. Trey Buffington, the group’s director of economic development, says the upcoming influx of employees from the NGA or Square could mean that ground-up residential construction is “on the horizon.”
Another problem related to street frontage is connectedness. Downtown’s two interstates function as psychological barriers; walking under I-70 to get to Laclede’s Landing, for example, can feel daunting. Yawning boulevards have a similar effect. The data team found that Tucker is actually wider than I-64. “Definitely Tucker needs a road diet,” says Kelley. Possible remedies, she says, include wider medians and pocket parks on the outer edges to calm traffic.
Susan Trautman, executive director of Great Rivers Greenway, says downtown has several “super-wide” streets, where pedestrian trails or landscaping could, in theory, be added to the right-of-way. Portland, Oregon; Indianapolis; and other cities have made similar modifications. “It just feels good to be in a lush, green environment,” says Trautman. “You feel good about yourself there.”
Another calculation by the Design organizers: Downtown has 539 retail storefronts, about 116 of which are empty. Residents have certainly noticed. One of them, Denis Beganovic, lamented in a November tweet that seven of nine commercial spaces on just one side of a block of Washington were vacant. “@downtownstlouis is partially responsible for that,” he noted. “Their focus has been big projects and they’ve lost focus of the little ones like small business.”
Kelley says that although her organization does in fact work with real estate brokers who help businesses find office space in the central business district, Downtown STL’s focus is more on retention and learning why businesses leave. “It’s the nature of a walkable urban space that things will turn over,” she says. “I don’t want to fill that space and then a year from now it didn’t work out. It’s important we pick the right things.”
Levine agrees that more retail would be a boon to downtown, but he recognizes that it’s not the only solution. As far as he can tell, the biggest foot-traffic generators for his hat shop these days aren’t retail at all. Rather, they’re The Last Hotel; the much-loved City Museum, a few streets north; and the Fashion Fund, up the block, which began as a fashion incubator but has morphed into a design co-op. Those places have brought an appreciable number of hat buyers in over the past few years, he says.
“The No. 1 thing for me,” says Levine, “is that there’s always action.”
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To Amos Harris, the developer behind the MX District, on Washington, the “central organizing principle” for all downtown governance must be attracting talented young people. For now, he asserts, it’s not.
“Our default metric is job creation,” says Harris, “but a big reason that our peer cities like Indianapolis and Kansas City and Columbus are experiencing more growth is that they’re trying to create a culture that attracts young people.” That age cohort is critical, Harris contends, because fully repopulating downtown will require transplants from elsewhere, and Americans under 40 are far more likely to move from one region to another, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.
They’re also far more likely to make babies. Once they do, schools become an issue. The city’s public education system has no schools downtown; charter schools such as Confluence Academy have partially filled the void. But the risk remains that young parents downtown will move to districts elsewhere in the city or county where performance rankings and standardized test scores are higher. Harris argues that top-quality schools are not a precondition for a vibrant downtown; instead, they can be an effect of one.
“What I’ve seen in other cities is that if you start with a culture that attracts [residents] before they have kids, then they will advocate for the things they need to stay—they’ll put the pressure on for better schools,” says Harris. All the more so in downtown St. Louis, he adds, where the cost of living is lower than in many suburbs.
So what kind of culture will attract talented young people? “Density,” says Harris. “The whole idea of a downtown is running into people and the collisions you get to have.” That requires a mix of options in a tight radius, sprinkled with public art, people spilling out onto sidewalks, and enough lighting at night to make everyone feel safe. Nashville’s Lower Broadway and Kansas City’s Power & Light District are on the right track, he says. “It takes a shockingly small area to become dense and vibrant and infuse an entire region with that. You have to pick an area to understand why you’re picking it.” He thinks Seventh Street, for example, shows promise because it’s a straight shot between Ballpark Village and the Convention Center. (Harris does own property along Seventh and admits: “I have a vested interest in that.”)
As a property owner, Harris pays an assessment on his property tax that goes into downtown’s Community Improvement District, a 180-square-block area in central downtown. In accordance with the petition voters have approved and renewed, the CID is administered by Downtown STL; the two organizations have overlapping leadership. Harris’ primary criticism of the CID is that it’s not focused on building the density that young people crave, but he has other concerns.
Harris complains that the CID has not been effective on crime. According to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, downtown had the highest total number of reported crimes in 2019 of all city neighborhoods. Downtown STL argues that although crime is an issue, the perception has outpaced reality. The vast majority of reported crimes—1,900 of 2,250—fell into the category of property crimes, and most of those were car break-ins. In addition, downtown’s crime rate is not an outlier nationally, and it’s nowhere near the highest among city neighborhoods if one factors in the 75,000 people who come into the neighborhood to work on weekdays, or the tens of thousands who attend Cardinals and Blues games and conventions.
The CID spent 61 percent of its total budget of $3.65 million in fiscal year 2019 on such “Clean & Safe” programs as hiring secondary police officers to patrol downtown. Other programs in that category included Real Change, the CID’s awareness campaign that guides residents and visitors on how to interact with panhandlers and how to volunteer with organizations working in that space. Harris argues that there should be a more coordinated effort downtown and that the CID should be “right in the middle of it.” (City Hall’s Homeless Services Division is tasked with coordinating the use of state, federal, and local funds to address homelessness.)
Harris laments that the CID’s board, which has about 30 members, is too large. It includes “well-meaning people,” he says, but many don’t own property in the district. CID president Missy Kelley recognizes that small boards can be nimbler, but she believes it’s more important for the board to be representative of downtown’s diversity. She also notes that it’s common for members to miss board functions because of work obligations; a larger board mitigates that problem.
The CID legally expires in 2021. The leadership has hired consultants to gather input from members on how they’d like to change it. (One property owner has sued the district for hiring consultants, alleging that it was an improper use of funds; as of late February, the CID had not filed a response.) Harris says he wouldn’t vote to renew the CID in its current form. To his mind, it’s not providing a return on investment, because commercial and residential rents have not gone up over the past 15 years, but he says he’s open to a modified CID.
“I know there are property owners that are just done with the CID and will vote against it no matter what,” says Harris,“but I believe we do face common concerns that are in fact better addressed collectively. I’m cautiously optimistic.”
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Some St. Louisans look at the northern edge of downtown and see the future. Near the river, developer Brian Minges of the Advantes Group has already had one success on Laclede’s Landing: the fully leased Peper Lofts. Now he and a second developer, David Messner, have bought a clutch of other buildings in that handful of cobblestone blocks next to the base of the Eads Bridge. Their aim: to rejuvenate that area and ultimately create what they’re calling The Founders District, 140 acres of mixed developments stretching north to the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge. They expect that larger project to take 10 years; for now, they’re waiting for guidance on the new state historic tax credit program to jumpstart the Laclede’s Landing phase.
“What I’ve seen so many times in St. Louis is that someone tries to hit a grand slam, and when it doesn’t happen, everybody says, ‘Aw, nobody can do it,’” observes Messner, “but Laclede’s Landing is a base hit. The plan we’ve put out is achievable.”
Six blocks to the west, another transformation is in the works: America’s Center is on track for a $200 million expansion. The project calls for a 65,000-square-foot ballroom on the Ninth Street side, near a new pavilion and green space. All of it will be paid for by 40-year bonds; no new taxes are required, because the fund that had financed the construction of the Dome will be repurposed for the expansion.
Steve O’Loughlin, president of Lodging Hospitality Management, says both Indianapolis and Nashville have invested in their convention centers and reaped windfalls. Now St. Louis has a chance to catch up after losing several large conventions, such as the O’Reilly Auto Parts Managers Conference, which grew too large for the America’s Center.
The new and relatively small boutique hotels—Hotel Saint Louis, The Last Hotel, Hotel Indigo, The Moxy, and 21c Museum Hotel, in the former YMCA building—are more of a response to the closure of the giant 780-room Millennium Hotel than a bet on a revamped convention center, O’Loughlin says, but he predicts the new convention center will galvanize retail downtown. According to Explore St. Louis, each year, the convention center hosts an average of 109 conventions and 600,000 attendees who account for about 350,000 room nights and generate $258 million in direct spending.
The new green space added to the west side of America’s Center will serve as a backyard of sorts for the building at 911 Washington, which is now owned by startup incubator T-REX.
On a February morning, T-REX CEO Patty Hagen peers out a window in the back of the building. “It’s starting to look like a real campus,” she says. Hagen points to her left. “You can see the top of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch building right there.” The significance: Square is renovating that building as a space for its 500 employees already in St. Louis at the Cortex Innovation District in the Central West End. Her main interest, though, lies precisely 1.4 miles past the church steeples on her left. That’s where the $1.7 billion campus of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s western headquarters is slated for completion by 2025. “You can almost see it,” she says.
Already, the NGA itself has leased space on the seventh floor of T-REX. On the fourth floor, the incubator is putting the finishing touches on the $5 million Geosaurus geospatial innovation center, which was funded by federal and corporate grants. Hagen says it’s fully leased by such startups as Geodata IT and teKnoluxion. T-REX estimates that by 2026, Geosaurus companies will have created more than 5,000 jobs in the geospatial industry and will generate more than $500 million in revenue.
“It’s great to have everyone gather around the flag of geospatial,” says Hagen. “At this point in my career, I haven’t seen people get as excited about an initiative community-wide as I have with this.” Indeed, a regional strategic planning initiative called GeoFutures has arisen to help guide the growth of the geospatial sector.
In a bid to attract talent of all kinds, a network of leaders across various sectors has launched the STLMade movement. Its elevator pitch to those outside the region is that St. Louis is rich with entrepreneurial energy and, unlike coastal megacities, is an affordable place to experiment and plant roots. These threads come together in the STLMade slogan: “Start Up. Stand Out. Stay.”
The movement is also aimed at fostering pride among native St. Louisans. One of its collaborators, Arch to Park CEO Jason Hall, points to a recent national perception analysis revealing that St. Louisans tend to hold negative views of their own metro area. The reason: They think the rest of the country views it negatively, when in fact, the rest of the country feels neutral about the Gateway City. “We thought, ‘Let’s start building pride locally,’” says Hall. “We need to speak in a single unified voice. Every community does this. You can’t be the best-kept secret and expect to grow.”
At the same time that St. Louis looks to geospatial tech for an economic boost, tech is seeping into the fabric of downtown’s everyday life. There are now at least seven touchscreen kiosks in the neighborhood and plans for dozens more. They serve as Wi-Fi hotspots, provide listings and directions, and maintain communication with 911 services; unknown to many passersby, they also hold built-in surveillance cameras.
Smart Cities author Anthony Townsend, an expert on urbanization and digital technology, says St. Louis should develop a long-term stand-alone digital master plan, just as it developed a sustainability plan. He says automated vehicles are just on the horizon and “will challenge everything we think we know about how to design cities.” Retail transactions, he suspects, will require less travel and take less time. Automated delivery hasn’t even yet become widespread, and already online retailers such as Amazon have contributed to the closure of about 25,000 retail stores across the U.S. over the past three years, Townsend says.
In an age when you can have anything delivered to your doorstep and stream quality entertainment, Hoal believes, a place-based “experience economy” of downtown becomes paramount. It’s a far cry from St. Louis’ original economy, to be sure. The Frenchmen who clambered onto the muddy western bank of the Mississippi in the 1700s did not do so because they yearned for experience; they clustered here because it was the intersection of two rivers that served as highways for the fur trade. Today, those muddy rivers don’t matter nearly as much to the economy as the invisible river that runs through everyone’s phone and computer: the internet. Using that river to coordinate the delivery of essential goods, human beings could, in theory, scatter much more easily across the land and still survive. But we cling together in the Gateway City. Why? For social- and place-based experience, Hoal says. And in that vein, downtown has to figure out exactly what kind of place it wants to offer the world.
“That’s why I don’t want to be pointing to another city as a model, like, ‘We’ve just got to become like Minneapolis,’” says Hoal. “No, we have to be St. Louis! This is what the experience economy is all about. It’s not about a generic experience of downtown. It’s all about authentic and unique places.”
Levine Hat is a nexus of the digital economy and the experience economy. More than half of Levine’s business now comes from his website, but the experience of shopping for a hat in-person is still crucial to many customers.
“You never know how it’s going to look on you,” he says. “[Customers] want the experience of shopping, in addition to getting the hat. There are not many places around where you can do that.”
