Ideas abound for redevelopment of Jamestown Mall
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
September 10, 2010
By Greg Jonsson
There was no shortage of ideas for the redevelopment of Jamestown Mall at a hands-on design session to get public input Thursday night.
"I say tear it down," said Ora Thompson as her work group gathered around a table with a plan of the mall in the center and lots of colorful markers to illustrate ideas. "A whole new concept."
At other tables at St. Louis Community College's Florissant Valley campus, participants were also thinking big. A new aquarium, or a water park, or a sports complex might be just the thing for the north St. Louis County site where the mall now limps along.
"If we can get the people to come to the area, they will shop," said Don Krank, who was working at one table.
The plans included shops and offices and residences, big draws and small details, the grandiose, the mundane and the unlikely. But they were the kind of ideas wanted by the design team picked to generate a plan for the St. Louis County Economic Council.
There are a lot of hurdles in the way before any plan can come to fruition, but for now the team wants ideas -- and community buy-in.
"We don't have some plan we're going to roll out in front of you," said Victor Dover of Dover, Kohl & Partners, the town planning firm selected to lead the design process. "We're going to make it in this room this week."
The challenges are big. Currently, almost half of the storefronts in the mall stand empty, and an economic analysis says the mall has twice as much square footage as the area can be expected to support.
The mall is too far from main roadways, on the edge of the densest part of the metro area, and surrounded by a well-to-do but thinly spread population, while rivals are better positioned.
And the economy isn't helping. But Dover said that offers an opportunity to make good plans.
"Right now is a great time to do planning," he said. "Unlike the boom times, we have time to take a breather and think about what we'd like our community to be like when things rev back up."
