Delmar Divine—Build-a-Bear founder Maxine Clark’s ambitious rehab of the long-vacant St. Luke’s Hospital on Delmar—is getting ready to roar into its next phase. That includes 81 additional apartments, a recreation center open to the community, and more. Construction should begin this summer. Once this phase is complete, the entire city block will be activated for the project.
Clark had originally hoped to get work started on this second phase last year, but she now acknowledges that timeline was a bit too ambitious. Among other things, Ameren’s work building a substation near the complex put construction on pause.
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“These projects that are historic take a lot more time and planning than most people can even imagine,” Clark says. She started work on Delmar Divine in 2015, and she laughs when looking back at the project’s many, many complications. “When you do mall stores, which I did most of my life, you negotiate, design your store, and plug and play, and it’s like 14 or 15 weeks to open. This is years, just because it’s so complex.”
She adds, “It takes a lot of time, but it’s worth it.”
The first phase brought 150 residential units, office space for 33 nonprofits, gated parking, a fitness center (including a pool), and retail that includes a pharmacy and Deli Divine, a riff on an old-school Jewish deli.
For the second phase, Clark says that project leaders are still working through all the details, but they will likely have outdoor pickleball courts open not just to Delmar Divine residents, but the community. It also includes restoration of a historic gymnasium within what had been a nursing school. Just like the gyms you may remember from grade school, it includes a stage, one that Clark is hoping to see preserved for community use: When the gym isn’t being used for basketball, could it be used for plays? Not Shakespeare in the Park, but Shakespeare in the Gym?
“I think it’ll be wonderful to use in the neighborhood for different events that we have, and then graduations and all kinds of things,” Clark says.
While some of the big new apartment complexes that have come online in St. Louis in recent years have struggled to attract tenants, Delmar Divine’s first phase has been fully leased other than a few months in the summer when college students go home. Clark credits the pricepoint, which is much lower than many other big projects around town. Within the first phase, 15 percent of the units were designated for low-income residents. The others are priced competitively ($1,100 for a two bedroom, Clark says).
It’s attracted a mix of seniors, students, and working adults. “A lot of the apartments are teachers, nurses, social workers, and then the rest are residents at the hospital,” Clark says. A shuttle takes students back and forth to not just WashU’s main campus but also its medical school in the Central West End. Clark says the seniors are happy being part of a wide mix of ages: “They just love it because they’re around young people.”
Clark has much bigger aims for the project than just reactivating a building with few other prospects—or providing housing for residents or nonprofit organizations. She firmly believes that it can connect the long-neglected neighborhoods north of Delmar with the upwardly mobile ones to the south. “Everything that we do is going to be really great for the neighborhood,” she says. “We’re bringing amenities here that we don’t have yet, for the people that live in the building, but also for the people that live around the building, whether it’s in 63112 or 63108.”
If Delmar Divine succeeds, she says, it won’t just restore a city block with hundreds of residents and a thriving community. It will also lead to change around it.
“It takes a village, and this is—and it takes time,” she says. “It’s not like we can change 50 or 100 years of investment in just a few years. It takes time to do it, and people are impatient, but now we’re seeing the progress. So this first phase took 10 years, now the second part will take less time, and the next part will take even less time than that.
“And I just want other people to realize they can jump in. I can’t do it all. I want other people to have the fun of doing this and the joy of making a difference in a community that deserves it.”
Hear more from Maxine Clark on The BizSTL Podcast.
