Expert panel recommends tearing down Jamestown Mall, building town center
Maybe, when all is said and done, Jamestown Mall won’t be a mall at all.
Maybe it’ll be a mix of things. Some offices. Some condos. Stores and restaurants. A YMCA. With a swath of green grass down its spine. A sort of town center for its corner of far north St. Louis County. With a different name. Maybe call it Lindbergh Place.
That’s the vision a team of national real estate experts sketched out Friday morning to a crowd of about 100 area residents and officials who packed a church meeting room down the street from the ailing Jamestown Mall.
They’d been brought in by St. Louis County officials, via the Urban Land Institute, and given a week to talk to people, study the area and come up with some new ideas for the half-empty shopping center.
What they came up with was a total redesign of the entire 142 acre site. Starting over from scratch.
"This mall as a regional mall cannot continue," said Arun Jain, an urban designer from Portland, Ore., who sat on the panel. "There are things you can do, short-term strategies to prolong the mall. But in the end, they’re short-term. The case for change and the time for change is now."
A key first step, the panel said, is for St. Louis County to take over the entire site, chunks of which today are owned by five companies, all from outside the area. It should buy them out, through eminent domain if necessary. And then …
"Take it down," said Ray Brown, a planner from Memphis who chaired the panel. "Bulldoze it and start over."
That may sound extreme, he said, but it’s the only way to create a fresh start, to build something new that is big enough and great enough and unique enough to draw people there, like people go to the Loop or the Central West End now. County officials should talk with the neighboring communities and figure out what people want to see, what they’d use, and what might draw shoppers from outside the immediate area to the new Lindbergh Place.
It is a chance for big vision, said Philip Hart of Hart Realty Advisers in Los Angeles cash advance no fax. It is not a time to be timid.
"We need to be brave," he said. "We need to be bold. We need to have a sense of urgency."
When the panel was done, there was applause. And almost immediately, the thorny questions began.
What would happen to existing businesses that are in the mall now? Why should residents trust the government when it has trouble with so many other problems in north county? Most of all, how will this get paid for?
Those are questions for the community to figure out, Brown said. After all, his group was flying home Friday afternoon. And County Executive Charlie Dooley said he planned to launch a series of discussions with residents, businesses and officials, to figure out where to go next, and what that might look like. The weeklong planning blitz — which cost the county $120,000 — was just a first step.
"Everything’s on the table," Dooley said. "Now we’ve got people thinking about what the possibilities are."
When the event was done, Barbara Brown and Carol Whittier stood in the hall outside, talking about what they’d like out of Jamestown. They both live in Spanish Lake and are tired of having to drive all the way to the Galleria to shop, or go a long way for a good restaurant.
"We don’t even have a Red Lobster around here," Whittier said.
What they’d love to see, Brown said, is something that brings people in, a place nice enough to draw visitors from Chesterfield or St. Charles, instead of the other way around.
"We want those tour buses coming here, as a destination," she said. "Coming to see … whatever."
What that’ll be, they’re not yet sure. But Friday’s meeting, Brown and Whittier said, was a good way to start thinking about it.