Big things are happening out to the west of the now almost completely defunct Chesterfield Mall, which entered the hallowed halls of my Crumby Run-Down Malls of St. Louis pantheon with this post in June of 2017. But Chesterfield still boasts some of the highest income levels in the region (even if other zip codes have more inherited wealth to the east), so all that money has to be spent somewhere. A new town center is growing to the west, and the City of Chesterfield has passed a couple of TIFs in conjunction to the new massive developments. Many aspects of Samuel Sachs’s plans, which first germinated in the 1970s, have already been built, including this veterans’ memorial.

With the daily traffic chokepoint on Highway 40 near Forest Park and Central County, the City of St. Louis is going to have more and more trouble convincing employers to move to downtown when all the new office space possibilities opens up in the new Chesterfield town center (or centre) and all their employees live out west. Honestly, there is the real possibility if Chesterfield is crafty enough that we are seeing the beginning of the creation of a second Clayton–there is enough room out here, with hundreds of thousands of more people just across the bridges in St. Charles County. There are all sorts of new entertainment venues being built in Chesterfield Valley, as well as the amphitheater below in Central Park (yes, that’s the name of the main park in Chesterfield).

If you don’t think it’s possible, well, I can assure you that if you could go back in time to the year 1900, Edward Mallinckrodt, Adolphus Busch and William Danforth would all laugh at you if you told them that in a hundred years downtown Clayton would run circles around downtown St. Louis in attracting Class A office space tenants…

And in all fairness, Central Park is really very beautiful.