Photograph courtesy of Alex Dooley
The faded red-white-and-blue sticker above the dusty, shuttered door reads “Support Your Local Restaurant, An American Tradition.”
It’s a little late for that at the former downtown landmark once known as Dooley’s Pub. Indeed, it has been a year and a half now since they held a St. Patrick’s Day Irish wake to honor the fabled place near Eighth and Olive and lay it to rest.
Alex Dooley’s 40-year run of delectable burgers and brew had come to an end in 2008 because the Chemical Building—the historic erstwhile skyscraper on whose ground floor his business nested—was destined to move on to bigger and better things under new ownership.
Two years earlier, dynamic new owners from Los Angeles had acquired the struggling building from its longtime St. Louis ownership group, Jack Dubinsky & Sons. Dooley’s, for all its watering-hole charm, would not be the right fit for the posh new development to be known as the Alexa Lofts.
So it was out with the old, in with the new. Heisman Properties, the new owners, struck a deal with Dooley to pay off his $35,000 credit line and end his lease early so that work could be started on the condo project. The two parted amicably.
But what about the dust on the old sticker, and what about that shuttered door?
Turns out, the Chemical Building is pretty much what it was 18 months ago when the last toast was lifted, only less so. The building, about 35 percent occupied when purchased by Heisman in 2006, is now virtually empty save for a few first-floor tenants.
A victim of the economic downturn, the project is in a holding pattern, although Heisman principal Rob McRitchie remains adamant that it will be turned around successfully. The company is now envisioning it as a combination of condos, rental apartments, and retail space.
At first glance, the story feels like a civic parable on the decline of corporate civilization in downtown St. Louis. A beloved old pub gives way to some giant yuppie development that gets it in the neck. The good guys lose, the bad guys lose, and guys like me say, “See, I told you so.”
Sadly, from the standpoint of the screed, it’s not that simple.
There are some lessons to be learned here, but they’re uncomfortably complex. The good guy, Dooley, is good to the core, and his story needs to be heard. But he was a victim not of bad guys, but of a bad system that abuses and abandons “the little guy” no matter how much homage is paid to him by politicians of all stripes.
On the other side, the bad guys are, maddeningly, not bad, just unlucky. Those of us who despise corporate welfare would be far better served if Heisman were some behemoth carpetbagger that had swooped into town, taken a bunch of tax credits to blow up our favorite lunch spot, and run off with little old ladies’ money.
Now, that would be a good story, if I may speak as a columnist.
But Heisman loused up the script by having pulled off a stunning downtown success in 2004 by reviving the old A.D. Brown Building at 1136 Washington as a condo development known as The Meridian. It was the prototypical historic-preservation success story, the kind that should have been taking place routinely over the past several decades, and it took out-of-towners to do it.
The company is currently trying to put together financing to purchase the city’s Municipal Courts Building downtown and convert it into a $40 million office-and-restaurant development. Realistic or not, projects like the ones advanced by Heisman generally haven’t sprung out of the local corporate community, thus wreaking havoc on the carpetbagger angle of the story.
Worse yet, the previous owner of the Chemical Building admits that his property was in a state of distress until Heisman showed up. Alan Pervil, trustee of Jack Dubinsky & Sons, had this to say about the evil outsiders: “I did everything I could to find a local buyer starting in 2003, and there was no one who would even look at it. These guys from California came in, and even after seeing all the difficulty we were in, figured a way to make the deal happen. What they did was miraculous.”
Rubbing salt in the journalistic wound, Pervil added this about McRitchie and partner Jeff Crossland:
“The guys from California are very honorable, sincere people. They’ve lived up to every single thing they agreed to do.”
Can’t a writer get a simple villain, please?
This really stinks because the story had so much promise. I could find a thousand people to quote about what a straight-up guy Alex Dooley is, and there’s no doubt he deserved better than to be booted out for some hoity-toity condominium project.
It was set up on a silver platter. In one corner, you’ve got a guy who started with nothing to build a local legend serving the best hamburgers anyone has ever eaten. The opponent: some glitzy, new-age company that hires a PR firm to describe its “strategic vision” of converting “exquisite” downtown historic buildings into “apartments, condominiums, and mixed-use projects…consistent with current urban-renewal trends.”
Gag.
Can’t you just hear the ghost of Dooley’s revelers past saying, “Here, I got something for your exquisite strategic vision, Mr. Current Urban-Renewal Trends”?
Dooley’s at the Alexa Lofts? There wasn’t any yin and yang to be had.
Trouble is, civic failure to save the likes of the Chemical Building over the past 40 years—in favor of doomed nonsense like the Gateway Mall and, more recently, Ballpark Village—was actually the bane of Alex Dooley’s existence for much of his storied history downtown.
Had there been a commitment to projects like those Heisman is proposing now, Dooley wouldn’t have had to watch dozens of great old buildings die, with the resulting exodus of hundreds of small businesses. Maybe such a commitment wouldn’t have broken the free-fall of the great anchor department stores (which he also endured), but downtown would look much different today.
As well as Dooley did for as long as he fought the good fight, his glory days were actually in the ’70s and ’80s; the last half of his long run was about hanging on.
There were lots of social trends that just couldn’t be resisted—the demise of the happy hour in response to DWIs comes to mind—but Dooley was always a prime example of one truism, as he puts it succinctly: “They never do anything for the little guy.”
“They”—usually meaning government—occasionally do things to the little guy, such as the several-year period during which MetroLink construction outside his front door basically crushed his business. (The city’s best solution, he says, was to offer to have schoolchildren do murals on the construction site).
Then there was the time in the ’80s when Downtown St. Louis, Inc., decided to celebrate the Cardinals’ opening day by giving out free hot dogs not far from Dooley’s front door. “They came in to use our tables to eat their free hot dogs,” Dooley remembers.
That, for years, has been my all-time favorite downtown metaphor.
At the end, when Dooley realized he couldn’t stay at 308 N. Eighth, he tried to find another spot downtown. He says he contacted city and civic sources, but there was no help to be found, no good deal to be made.
Dooley is retired now, happily, and he expresses not an ounce of bitterness. Had he stayed, he was planning to franchise his business, and he’s convinced now that the economy would have made a disaster of that.
“It’s all in God’s timing,” Dooley says. “It worked out perfect for me.”
But not so much for downtown St. Louis.
A co-owner of St. Louis Magazine, Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
