Makeover for Jamestown Mall is unveiled
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
May 27, 2011
By Tim Logan
The Jamestown Mall is a failing mall. So on Thursday night came a plan to make it something completely different.
The two-year-long re-envisioning of the struggling north St. Louis County shopping center took another step this week, with the unveiling of a new plan for the 142-acre site on North Lindbergh Boulevard. It is broad brush, and long-term, but proposes a complete makeover of Jamestown, from vast empty parking lots surrounding an enclosed shopping center into a walkable, mostly residential, neighborhood, with parks and tree-lined streets and a mix of offices and locally oriented retail.
"You have to reset the property in everybody's mind," said Victor Dover, principal at Dover, Kohl and Partners, the firm hired to draft the plan. "Get off of thinking that it's the old Jamestown Mall and that it will be some new Jamestown Mall."
That means using the huge chunk of land -- almost the size of New Orleans' French Quarter -- for something new, and something that's needed in that part of the region. A neighborhood with a healthy dose of senior housing and reasonably priced town homes. A sort of "town center" for North County.
It's an idea that evolved over time, Dover said, through a series of public meetings.
One of the things people kept saying was they wanted it to be "identifiable. Uniquely North County. Theirs, as opposed to just anywhere," Dover said.
The challenge will be pulling it off and paying for it.
Jamestown Mall, after all, is still open. It has a Macy's and a J.C. Penney outlet, a movie theater and perhaps two dozen stores along its cavernous concourses. County leaders say they want to involve those businesses in whatever comes next. The site itself is owned by five different entities, in nine chunks. Assembling the land under one owner would make redevelopment easier but will cost money. And the development itself could cost $300 million, according to a rough estimate attached to the plan.
As of now, no developers are involved, and the county has no incentive plans lined up. It's early yet, said County Executive Charlie Dooley, and it's a 15-year plan.
"It's not going to happen overnight," he said. "But we want this to happen, and we're going to do everything we can to make it come to fruition."
The plan was unveiled publicly at a meeting Thursday night, and the conversation about what to make of Jamestown will continue. There's no set timeline, Dooley said. But the next steps will likely focus on assembling the site and rezoning it. Development will likely happen in several stages.
But one thing that's clear, Dover said, is that whatever replaces Jamestown Mall shouldn't be another big shopping center. There simply isn't demand for it in this isolated, slow-growing corner of North County.
And it probably shouldn't be called the Jamestown Mall, Dover says.
"Mall's kind of a four-letter word," he added.
