Update: Pyramid Companies went bankrupt before renovating St. Louis Centre. The mall has been completely renovated, the mall converted into a parking garage, and the first floor is now street level shopping and restaurants. Both skybridges are now gone. The pandemic affected occupancy rates throughout downtown, including in the former St. Louis Centre building. The former Stix, Baer & Fuller, later a Dillard’s was renovated into a hotel, while the old Famous Barr building sits empty and vandalized.

After twenty years of struggling to attract shoppers and residents back to downtown, St. Louis Centre finally closed permanently in August 2006–ironically just as downtown is experiencing unprecedented growth in shopping and condominium construction in rehabbed historic buildings. The Pyramid Companies has purchased the shopping center from the last slumlord owner and plans to turn it into a luxury condominium project. There has been talk of turning the old Dillard’s into a boutique hotel. Famous Barr, which is now a Macy’s, will stay in business independent of the shuttered mall. Most importantly, the ugly “skybridge” over Washington Ave will come down; currently there is a large banner hanging on the west side of the bridge with a computer generated image of the restored sight lines of the Avenue.

St. Louis Centre ultimately failed because people had the perception that it wasn’t worth the trouble of traveling downtown to shop. St. Louis’s downtown is ironically not centrally located anymore; the population center of the region has shifted west along Highway 40 to Clayton and the Galleria Mall. Simultaneously, the city of St. Louis has lost around 100,000 people in the twenty years St. Louis Centre was open; consequently, the most likely population to shop at the
mall, city residents, has declined.

The belief that St. Louis Centre was dangerous further helped destroy the prospects of the mall succeeding. The first time my family visited the mall in 1986, we watched the police arrest a man who appeared to be high on drugs. This early experience seems to have foreshadowed the mall’s reputation that developed in the 1990’s that the mall was crime ridden. The most popular, and completely unsubstantiated, urban legend painted the mall as the place where gang members went to “earn their bones” by stabbing innocent white shoppers.

That perception of crime, coupled with the slow homogenization of malls in general, left the mall without a major source of shoppers. Ironically, St. Louis Centre’s close proximity to downtown’s huge convention center failed to attract out of town conventioneers. My last visit to the mall before it was closed was depressing and illustrated how far the beautiful, light filled mall had fallen. Pretty much the only stores remaining were fly-by-night jewelers selling cheap “bling-bling;” the vast majority of stores were empty. The floors were filthy, and when I went up the first flight of escalators, I was confronted by what looked to be high school students skipping class. Their cold stares gave me the impression that I was an unwanted presence, and I proceeded to head back down the escalator and exited the mall. I actually felt safer on the streets of St. Louis than inside the mall.

If St. Louis Centre had been built in 2005 instead of 1985, it probably would have been able to ride the wave of excitement that is currently fueling a rebirth of downtown. St. Louis Centre failed because it refused to embrace the urban environment, which is now in such demand in downtown. Around the corner, the Arcade Building, which features a ground level, turn of the 20th century mall space, is now being restored. I suspect that this new, humanly scaled and street level shopping space will soon take the place of the failed St. Louis Centre.

Update: A bonus photograph from December of 2025 from the vault: