Yesterday, the Gateway Arch Park Foundation announced some big news: It has closed on the purchase of the Millennium Hotel. Using The Cordish Companies to redevelop the long-vacant eyesore into luxury apartments, high-end office space, and more, they aim to better connect the 4.2-acre site with the Gateway Arch and the rest of downtown.
The project represents a sizable expansion of the foundation’s mandate, which was to transform the experience at the Gateway Arch via the $380 million CityArchRiver project, which capped I-44 to better connect the national park to downtown.
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And as McClure makes clear in a new episode of The 314 Podcast, the foundation now has much more on its mind than the 4.2-acre site on its doorstep. In fact, it’s begun conversations about a much bigger effort to deal with the highway that cuts right through downtown. CityArchRiver capped one block of I-44. Now McClure is talking about removing a much bigger piece of it.
“The goal of CityArchRiver was to physically connect the Arch with downtown, and what we did with the park over the highway has absolutely done that, and it’s paid dividends,” he says, pointing to the project’s economic impact. “But we can do more.”
Sounds crazy, and wildly expensive, right? Removing highways from the heart of urban areas has become so popular in cities from San Francisco to Milwaukee, it’s officially a movement. Whether by taking the lanes underground (Boston’s Big Dig), replacing them with a boulevard (San Francisco’s Embarcadero), or just a bigger cap, cities are reconnecting with their waterfronts and putting valuable real estate back into play.
“There are cities across America—and we’ve done some of it so far—that are healing the wounds of those urban planning decisions from the ‘50s and ‘60s,” McClure says.
And McClure says it needn’t break the bank. Sure, CityArchRiver cost $380 million, but that price tag included major improvements to the Arch grounds, museum, and courthouse. The cap itself was just $15–$20 million. Beyond that, the Gateway Arch Park Foundation has proven not only that it can work with stakeholders like the Missouri Department of Transportation, but also that it’s up to the task of raising vast sums of money needed for these projects.
McClure says it “remains to be seen” who would take the lead on such a project, but that conversations involving MODOT, Greater St. Louis Inc., the city of St. Louis, and partners in Illinois, have already begun.
“ We are incredibly fortunate to have a visionary board of trustees and and donors, who challenge us to have a really strong organization that operates well and in a fiscally responsible way, but they also challenge us to think big and dream big,” he says. “That’s how you get transformational things done.”
The time, he says, is now.
“We have an opportunity,” he says, noting the $670 million development proposal for the Millennium Hotel site, the plans for Gateway South ($1.2 billion) and the Mansion House Apartments ($169 million), and the momentum on Laclede’s Landing, along with the $256 million renovations now underway at the convention center.
“All of that is right along the I-44 corridor where you have an elevated highway that goes to grade, then goes subterranean and then back to grade, and then elevated,” McClure says. “And then, in the not too distant future, there’s going to have to be improvements that are made to the Poplar Street Bridge. What opportunities does that create? So this is an opportunity right now.”
For more on the conversations now getting underway about highway removal in St. Louis, listen to McClure’s interview on The 314 Podcast. But whatever you do, don’t write off the possibility of big things happening downtown. CityArchRiver, and the Millennium Hotel plans, have proven that they can.
“ I think that’s a model that if St. Louis follows, we can do really amazing things,” McClure says of all the stakeholders who’ve come together for the hotel project. “St. Louis falls apart when we work separately in silos. When we work together, amazing things happen.”
