It had been awhile since I’d checked in at the site of the former River Roads Mall, and the contrast between 1962 and 2025 cannot be greater. But perhaps it also reflects the changing pattern of suburban shopping; large, anchor-based shopping centers are being demolished and replaced with single parcel stores, each with their own…
Tag: Department Stores
Sears Demolished, Chesterfield Mall
The former Sears has been demolished at the Chesterfield Mall site, which culminates the clearing of the buildings for redevelopment. The former Macy’s and eventually reopened Dillard’s buildings will remain.
Chesterfield Mall, Demolition, March 2025
Demolition is proceeding rapidly at Chesterfield Mall, and the target of finishing in May seems like it will be easily met. We last stopped by in December of last year and interior demolition was still occurring, and now the entire mall portion has been torn down, leaving only the anchors. Presumably the old movie theater…
Mid Rivers Mall
Continuing our examination of the concept of the “shopping mall,” we visited Mid Rivers Mall, located at the intersection of Interstate 70 and Mid Rivers Mall Drive. The mall is doing fine, but it’s not doing great. There are four hundred thousand people located within four or five miles of the mall, and they are…
The Crossings at Northwest, Former Northwest Plaza
I thought I would swing by the “Crossings at Northwest,” or what I called Zombie Northwest Plaza, which apparently was the largest outdoor mall in the United State when it opened in January 24, 1966. Supposedly. The last time I was by was back in 2017. The Famous Barr, designed by Raymond Loewy and William…
The Galleria, Former Westroads Shopping Center
It’s increasingly forgotten, but the Galleria originally was the Westroads Shopping Center, and like many other early shopping centers, it was more of strip mall with a single anchor, in this case a Stix, Baer and Fuller, and several other stores arranged in behind a parking lot. Built in 1955, Westroads was Stix, Baer and…
Stix, Baer and Fuller, Crestwood Plaza
I thought the former Stix, Baer & Fuller department store at Crestwood Plaza deserved its own post, considering its shear size and accompanying enclosed mall which attached to the strip mall to the west of the original development from 1957. Opening on January 23, 1967, the new department store represented a substantial addition to the…
South County Center
Developed by the May Department Stores and originally anchored by a Famous Barr department store in Mehlville, the South County Shopping Center opened in the fall of 1963, spurring increased residential development around the intersection of what would become Interstates 55, 270 and 55, just west of the Jefferson Barracks Bridge. This was the fourth…
Requiem for Shopping Malls?
The announcement that Macy’s will be closing the store at South County Center raised the specter that there will be another round of mall closures after an initial wave that struck the St. Louis region earlier this millennium. As Toby Weiss at B.E.L.T. St. Louis documented so well at Northland Shopping Center and River Roads…
Town and Country Mall
Tally ho! Just when I thought I knew of every defunct and demolished mall in the St. Louis region, life throws a curveball. I just learned about the existence of the Town and Country Mall, at the southeast corner of Woodson Road and Page Boulevard in Overland. Opening in November of 1960, two years before…