St Louis Centre; Different Owners, Different Standards

In 2005 the failed downtown mall, St. Louis Centre, was at the center of Mayor Slay’s priorities. At the time the Mayor and others were busy pushing Centre owner Barry Cohen to tear down the sky bridge that crosses over Washington Ave and move forward with redevelopment.

From the Mayor’s blog on Sept 25, 2005:

Stories in the business pages last week confirm the obvious. Barry Cohen, the owner of St. Louis Centre, is stalled. After a summer of fumbling, Mr. Cohen lost the funding proferred by Downtown Now’s Tom Reeves to demolish the skybridge.

Since purchasing the downtown mall more than a year ago, Mr. Cohen has promised, announced, floated, and projected some plans – none of which has come to anything. It is not clear to me whether he is hapless or canny, hoping for a profit on the $5.4 million the Biz Journal says he paid for the property.

Whatever.

As Tom Reeves told us, there’s plenty else to do Downtown. Meanwhile, we’ll keep sending Mr. Cohen those tax bills.

Wow, he had the mall for a whole year and the mayor calls him out. Slay supporter, now former developer John Steffen, was treated differently from day one:

Friday, February 17, 2006

This is a note to every developer hoping to be able to make a deal in the City and to every citizen hoping for redevelopment: John Steffen has announced ambitious plans to turn St. Louis Centre and the One City Centre office building into a mixed-use development.

These plans are possible because a public/private team, including Barb Geisman, Rodney Crim, Rollin Stanley, and Tom Reeves, kept their eyes on the goal line — not the headlines.

Not every real estate transaction can be negotiated in a blog.

I congratulate Barb, Rodney, Rollin, and Tom for their discipline — and I wish John good luck in getting this done.

This was well over two years ago and today the mall is totally vacant and the bridge still hovers over the street. Pyramid is out as developer with their equity partner Spinnaker taking over the now very stalled project. In fact, as reported here a week ago, Steffen and his company are out of the development business completely. Does this mean that Geisman and company dropped the ball? Were they all too cozy with Steffen?

Oh wait they did manage to give Steffen a sweetheart deal — a TIF backed by the city’s general revenues. That was also in 2006.

In the year and a half since then we’ve seen only slick marketing — drawing a line around a few blocks and calling it a district, The Mercantile Exchange or MX for short. That is almost as clever as the cards calling Ballpark Village a six block area (Broadway/5th to 8th and Clark to Walnut is 3 blocks no matter how many times they say otherwise).

So my question is this —does the city-backed TIF deal run with the property regardless of who takes over? If so, how long does Spinnaker have to complete the project? A year? Five years? A decade?

I think Steffen wanted this project so the city put up roadblocks for Cohen so he’d be forced to sell to Steffen.

Finally on Wednesday KMOX reported Pyramid’s story with greater detail and certainty than I had last Friday:

The developer of major St. Louis projects…St. Louis Centre and the former Dillard’s building, in the Mercantile exchange project…is getting out of the development business. Pyramid Construction’s John Steffen made the announcement through Steffen’s attorney Attorney Steven Goldstein… Problems in the real estate lending market are the main reason. Goldstein says Pyramid is currently working with other developers, investors, lenders and the city to make a transition for its development projects…but will continue to operate it’s property management division…which oversees a thousand apartment units in the city and surrounding area.

For someone with $609 million in development on his plate, Steffen has gone on a crash diet. Two years ago Steffen had this to say;

“We literally have more people offering to finance us than we have projects to finance,” Steffen said. “I need more projects because I have banks wanting to do business with me.”

Our city’s leaders bought Steffen’s hype. Or did Steffen buy off their better judgment with generous campaign contributions and illusions of success? Regardless our leadership has once again failed us. They claim Steffen was a victim of the current crisis but the roots of this go way back (see my post from June 2006) .
Perhaps we would have been better off giving Cohen a chance to prove himself? Of course then many of us wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the fancy parties thrown by Steffen for each project he announced. We sold out for some sushi.

I do hope all their projects are assumed by others and that they perform well. I also hope the next time we’ve got a developer bragging about his ability to get financing that we recognize the red flags.

I Have Missed This View, on KDHX Monday

Just days prior to my stroke I took a series of pictures from my balcony and from the shared rooftop space:

Above is the view from my balcony looking North. I’ve been away for nearly three months now but I know the view is unchanged. CPI Corp. hasn’t built a new building on their surface parking lot (that would be nice).

A guy was found murdered in the parking garage of the Ventana (right above).

The view is still in place for my return to St Louis and back to my own place.

Tune in Monday evening at 7pm on 88.1 or online at kdhx.org and I will talk about my rehabilitation, the date I return to St. Louis (soon) and share details on a welcome back party in my honor. I’ll also talk about being disabled and what life is like in a wheelchair.  Of course host DJ Wilson and I will talk about current development issues in St Louis.

The Video Store, Now in the Parking Lot

In the years that we’ve had video we’ve had video stores. Traditionally these have been brick & mortar stores. As I pointed out in November, local video stores are closing. With rentals from places like Netflix and iTunes who needs to drive to a store.

Companies like Redbox are bringing small video distribution machines to local stores like Shop-N-Save and McDonalds. In other parts of the country these have been placed outdoors.

Above is probably the only video rental place in the small town of Mt. Vernon, MO. The sad part is that it isn’t a place at all.

These are also located in Oklahoma City and likely in every city that doesn’t ban outdoor vending machines.

Above: Redbox rental outside a new McDonalds in suburban Oklahoma City. As this is an entirely new facility they could have found room indoors —the decision to place it outdoors was on purpose. On the plus side this offers the consumer access at times other than when the McDonalds is open.

My fear is that we replaced our main streets at first with suburban strip centers and drive-thrus. Now we are seeing the strip mall fail with walk-up kiosks in parking lots replacing full stores.

Above is the new main street of suburbia.

While the Redbox kiosk is convenient, it fails to help create any sort of meaningful space on the par with a good walkable commercial district. Our cars help isolate us from these dreary spaces — who’d want to walk here?

So the question is should municipalities ban exterior vending machines like soda machines or video rental machines? Should they only be allowed when built-in like a walk-up bank ATM? Should their number be limited based on some sort of formula. Are these visual clutter or just a fact of modern life? I personally think they are clutter and I don’t like seeing a Coke machine outside a store. Still I am reluctant to advocate a total ban except as part of a new urban form-based zoning code. However, allowing this to continue is only going to further denigrate our public & private spaces.

Rumor: Pyramid Ceasing Operations

If the rumor is true developer Pyramid Cos.will cease operations today. With numerous projects on the books, this is a challenging time to be a developer. Even harder to be a developer in debt. From a Business Journal article from the start of the month:

Development firm Pyramid Cos. is weathering the turmoil in the housing and credit markets through staff cuts and a cash infusion from its main financial partner, Connecticut-based Spinnaker Real Estate Partners LLC.

Meanwhile, Spinnaker, led by Clayton Fowler, has doubled its financial commitment in Pyramid’s planned downtown redevelopment projects, said Amos Harris, principal of St. Louis-based Brady Capital and a partner in Spinnaker’s local development entity. Spinnaker originally committed about $8 million to four projects: the former St. Louis Centre mall, the former Dillard’s building, the Mercantile Library building and the Jefferson Arms. That figure has now doubled to an estimated $16 million, although neither Harris nor Steffen would divulge the exact dollar figure.

Pyramid has done some fine projects over the years but also some that are questionable like the Sullivan Place senior apartments. I spent quite a bit of time in 2006 fighting Pyramid’s plans to swap land that would have resulted in a relocated Mcdonald’s drive-thru on South Grand.

Remember this is just an unverified rumor at this point. Take with a hefty grain of salt at this point.

[UPDATE 4/18/08 @ 3:35PM — Confirmed. Employees were, I’m told, given final paychecks and told to cash them quickly.

UPDATE 4/24/8  4pm  — Finally this story makes it to traditional media — from kmox “St. Louis (KMOX)  — “The developer of major St. Louis projects…St. Louis Centre and the former Dillard’s building, in the Mercantile exchange project…is getting out of the development business. Pyramid Construction’s John Steffen made the announcement through Steffen’s attorney Attorney Steven Goldstein… Problems in the real estate lending market are the main reason. Goldstein says Pyramid is currently working with other developers, investors, lenders and the city to make a transition for its development projects…but will continue to operate it’s property management division…which oversees a thousand apartment units in the city and surrounding area.” ]

Copia the same Nearly Four Months After Fire

On the morning of December 29th Copia Urban Winery went up in flames — ruled arson by investigators. The following message was posted on their website within days after the fire:

We regret to inform you that Copia Urban Winery and Market will be closed temporarily due to an unfortunate fire. The Copia family would like to extend their gratitude to all of you for your dedicated loyalty and support. We apologize for any inconveniences this occurrence may have caused. Plans to rebuild are already in motion, and updates will be posted regularly. We look forward to seeing you very soon.

Nearly four months later the Washington Ave restaurant remains boarded up with no signs of rebuilding taking place. The website is the same. To my knowledge there have been no arrests either. With so much good stuff happening on Washington Ave it is unfortunate to not see something happening here.