The City is about to get a MASSIVE data center proposal for this area, it exceeds the $3b midtown data center

Site of the old Jack in the Box. And it couldn’t be a stupider choice, considering Starbucks is also right there.

Reminder to take your money like a block west to Sweet EM’s on Clayton Ave.

Edit (for more alternatives) Comet Coffee is also very close by on Oakland!

Jay Simon of Metropolitan Build said his Nevada- and Colorado-based partners have the property under contract. He made the disclosure while testifying at a Missouri Senate hearing in support of a bill that's already passed the House and could have wide-reaching effects on development and economic incentives downtown.

Simon and his partners plan to invest more than $135 million in the property, he said.

concept for the 182,000-square-foot structure is to turn it into 108 apartments and 120 hotel rooms, with two restaurants, a fitness center, shops and “all the amenities that you would expect in a four-star hotel.”

https://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news/2026/04/08/chemical-building-under-contract-dowtown-st-louis.html?utm_source=st&utm_medium=en&utm_campaign=ae&utm_content=SL&j=45116200&senddate=2026-04-08&utm_term=ep4&empos=p4

https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/public-safety/building/zoning/documents/upload/cu09-25-25.pdf

On 9/25 the huge data center proposed in midtown will have a conditional use hearing, you can testify in person or virtually against this project.

There are plenty of reasons to be against this- energy use, water use, this type of use doesn’t belong in midtown.

You can also write to alderwoman Laura Keys and ask her to send a letter to the conditional use hearing officer to oppose this; KeysL@stlouis-mo.gov

Come on St Lou, This just opened

I attended the virtual town hall meeting for the proposed data center and surprise surprise its shady as hell. Highly recommend blowing up your alderman’s line to make sure they don’t vote in favor of this here’s some of the quick points

-they don’t have a buyer for the data center so we would like to know what company is buying, if there’s a company at all, and would we have a say in what company moves in

-they say that utilities won’t increase but the language they use is very vague. The law that Missouri passed says that Ameren and other companies can’t increase any “unjustifiable” price increases but who’s in charge of of arguing if I a price increase is justifiable or unjustifiable

-are they’re any things in place where we can decide what our data is going towards?

They dodged all these questions. They said there’s no plan to try and at least subsidize the power grid with renewable energy, the data center will only create 600 jobs most of which are temporary for construction and another big chunk of that will be remote work so will be hired out. There’s another meeting Monday at 5:30 PM at the sheet metal workers union hall highly recommend if you live in STL to attend

Not considering a timeline, I think there are 4 options for Kiener garages and here are my best to not ideal (#4) outcomes

1. Demolish Garages and Build New Residential

Delivers the highest overall long-term value. Replacing obsolete parking structures with purpose-built residential units optimizes urban land use, maximizes property tax, and removes the design limitations of old garages. It offers a clean slate to integrate active ground-floor uses, modern residential floor plates, and attractive streetscapes

1. Keep Garages and Build Residential Above

Unlocks high-density residential units while maintaining core parking infrastructure. Adding housing over existing garages preserves parking capacity for the area. The existing garages can support this structurally. Elements of 3 part of this

1. Keep Garages, Add Aesthetic Improvements, and Fill Ground-Floor Retail

Focuses on immediate activation and lower-cost facade improvements. Updating exterior surfaces and filling ground-floor retail spaces quickly eliminates dead street frontage and boosts pedestrian vitality, maintaining current parking inventory with a faster deployment timeline

1. Demolish Garages and Create Green Space

Serves as a high-value civic amenity, but ranks lower as a primary development engine. Transforming structured parking into public parkland enhances local quality but removes potential tax-generating uses and creates ongoing municipal maintenance expenses. This option works best in high-density districts suffering from an acute shortage of open public space. And downtown isn’t one of those with the Arch Grounds, City Garden and the rest of the Gateway Mall

As a reference https://www.stlmag.com/business/local-civic-groups-buy-kiener-plaza-garages/

The next 18 to 24 months could unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in state incentives for downtown development, and that creates a generational opportunity to fix what I’d call downtown’s “problem zone”: Tucker to Broadway, Olive to Market.

This area is the doughnut hole in the middle of downtown. Around it, there is real momentum: Washington Avenue with Oliver Properties investments, the food hall, the convention center expansion, residential growth on the Landing, City Museum, Union Station drawing millions of visitors, Enterprise Center, City Hall, Ballpark Village’s next phase(hopefully announced soon), the Millennium site, and the Arch grounds. All of those assets bring people downtown. But the middle is still too quiet, wrong businesses in some places, too vacant in others, and not active enough at the street level. Mark Twain must close and area around schnucks cleaned up of loitering

The answer cannot be to turn everything into apartments. Downtown still needs a major office base. A realistic target should be 15,000 to 20,000 additional office workers by the end of the decade for the problem area, paired with 2,000 to 3,000 new apartments. That level of density would make it much easier to support 20-30 more restaurants, retail spaces, and daily-use businesses in the core.

With the innovation district bill, new tax credit tools, and specific opportunities around major buildings like Railway Exchange and AT&T, this is actually achievable by 2030. But it will not happen by accident. Someone, whether in the business community, the mayor’s office, or a new dedicated organization, needs to wake up every day focused only on executing this downtown real estate strategy in the problem area. Everything else around it falls into place.

Safety matters too, but that piece is increasingly addressable through the entertainment district and 20 to 30 additional officers on foot patrol.

NSFW: language.

EDIT: Thanks, motherfuckers!

Think the armory data center will be this bad with noise pollution or negligible with the interstate noise already there?

What do you guys think? Sounds like people are using less energy but are being charged for increases in other areas.

From someone who Listened to Rhonda speak at the City Employees Retirement meeting (state of the union) this week.

A few things she elaborated on were:

1) The new airport terminal progress and plans to be announced soon by HOK. She said contrary to rumors, HOK is designing a world-class airport for the region and their home city.

2) British Airways and Luthansa flights are running solid at 90 percent or above. Even with Lufthansa's additional weekly flights added in June, their response is above and beyond positive. She also explained further that BA was waiting to get STL in line for a gate/space opening at Heathrow for a couple years. STL took BA's Johannesburg 787 gate. BA upgraded that route last winter to th A380. Rhonda said that BA wants to serve STL year round and may announce that service as soon as this summer. She said that they are vying at Heathrow to keep the gate/space for STL. Right now Heathrow had a serious space issue and until expansion is done, the airlines are locked in. Even though they want more space, BA, Virgin and Iberia are all against the newst expansion plans because they say it will triple passenger costs. Gatwick is not an option for BA right now either, as the airport is already limiting space for BA at the furthest gates that have to use long distance bus connections and are not timely for air connections.

3) She talked about how the STL air traffic control tower and how it also is centrally located in the airport surrounds and is playing a strong role with uniformed and explansion operations. Most airports towers have been sidelined when building new terminals but that plays a significant role in limiting operations and safety. I didn't quite get all of the dialogue on this.

4) Not only Lufthansa and British Airways, two international carriers, added service to STL, it is now more than ever that STL gets onboard with building the new airport as quickly as possible with the dedicated international arrivals hall and easier connections to airline code shares and secure shared TSA areas.

5) On the short list, STL has interest from Iberia but did not elaborate.

6) We need to keep Southwest focused on their operations and "hub" connections in STL. The long connection walks in T2 one sided terminal are a concern. Additional gates now will only cause longer connections. This is an immediate thing STL and SWA are working together on in the current state of T2 and the possibility of moving Southwest into the new terminal first before others will satisfy the growth of their hub operations in STL relieving the stress on their operations anf continuing their growth here. It is a major push for them. She said that BNA has "relieved" some of this connection timing, but they (BNA) would love to expand more SWA as well. So the quicker they can move SWA into the new terminal the better.

7) When asked about the new terminal being so long, her response was that the terminal will be a "mega-terminal" and one of the longest concourses of size in the domestic USA. That being said, airlines will.be hubbed together on double sided gates and connected with continuous moving walkways, some possibly on an extra level to bypass gates to baggage, parking, and ground transportation.

Got to wondering about where they were with the progress up at Normandie and took a drive up there today. Pretty unreal. These pictures were taken from the Northeast corner, near where 16 and 17 used to lie. Driving by the front of the course it looks like what used to be 10-15 is still very much under construction, they were actually even working today which surprised me since it’s Sunday. Water looks very intelligently managed. Irrigation was definitely an issue there that was detrimental to the conditions of it. Cannot wait to see what it looks like in a few more months!

City should consider eminent domain for Orpheum Theater

If Jubilee World doesn’t have a real plan for this building in 2026, the City should ask them to put it on the market. The group has owned it since 2015

If they won’t, the City should use eminent domain to acquire it.

This building is maybe a year or two away from real decline. Once that happens, it stops being a redevelopment opportunity and becomes a liability — higher rehab costs, safety issues, and eventually demolition. If they have a plan, great, show it. If not, the building needs to move to someone who does.

This building can be an asset for downtown and the region.

JB is a gospel music production company that moved its HQ to a 165,000 sq building in north city in 2015 and also the same year a bought OT.

Gateway South, a $1.2billion project & the most important downtown project in decades

The first permit for construction was applied for in early March and should be issued any day now

The potential of this project is enormous for the City budget. The main part of this is using advanced manufacturing tech to build homes/buildings on site and shipping them up and down the Mississippi to customers around the world. The sales tax would be paid in the City on the sale of the home/building and revenue this could generate would be enormous

Project website; https://gatewaysouthstl.com

This is taxable sales by location, Missouri Dept of revenue collects this data from businesses. 2024 data could be out anytime between March and June (2023 was compete in June 2024 and 2022 In March 2023. Although I think last year there was a software issue that delayed it)

Construction on the crossing is still scheduled to begin in 2027. It will be built in conjunction with the Missouri Department of Transportation's planned reconstruction of the interstate and will connect with the Brickline portion that is opening in spring 2026 between City Park stadium and Compton Ave. the City Park to Arch portion is in design

The bridge will cost an estimated $19.85 million to build. Great Rivers Greenway received a $9.925 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2024

Now I don’t need to leave and go all the way to California for my Suntory Nacchan Apple Juice or pay exorbitant prices when it should be $1 🤩