Sheraton Convention Hotel Was Too Close to Convention Center

When St. Louis opened the Cervantes Convention Center in 1977 it had an adjacent convention hotel, a Sheraton, at 7th & Cole.  Almost immediately talk of expanding the convention center was underway.  The city had two options — go east of 7th Street or South of Delmar (renamed Convention Plaza).  The convention center is now called America’s Center.

One problem with expanding the convention center to the East was the nearly new, 600+ room, Sheraton hotel that also opened in 1977.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from Thursday, March 10, 1988:

If St. Louis follows through on its offer to buy and demolish the Sheraton St. Louis Hotel just east of the Cervantes Convention Center, the convention center could be left with a marketing nightmare, hotel industry insiders say.  Razing the 614-room Sheraton to expand the convention center would leave the convention center, at least  temporarily, without a hotel on the site that is large enough to handle visitors.

The city offered Monday to buy the Sheraton and other land east and south of the convention center to make way for a 120,000-square-foot expansion. Officials declined to disclose the amount of the offers. Hotel and real estate sources estimate that the Sheraton could be worth anywhere from $25 million to $40 million, but city officials said those estimates were high.

By May 1988 the city looked toward the South rather than the East:

There are several good reasons for the city to have changed directions on the Convention Center expansion and go southward to Washington Avenue instead of eastward across Seventh Street. A Convention Center fronting on Washington would remove an eyesore and contribute significantly to the revitalization of the street. It  will thrust the center into downtown, whereas the eastward expansion would have left it on the periphery.  Finally, it solves the problem of the Sheraton Hotel, east of the center. Under one scheme, the center was to be  built around the hotel. Under another, the hotel was to be demolished. Neither approach was satisfactory.

The Convention Center is on Convention Plaza, better known as Delmar Boulevard, and is bounded by Seventh and Ninth streets. Under the latest expansion plan, Dillard’s parking garage and the Lennox Apartments would be spared but the other structures between Seventh and Ninth would go. The southward expansion would add 120,000 square feet, as would have the original plan. The cost, $72 million, will be about the same. The tourism industry is important to the economy of the region and the state. The expansion of the Convention Center will assure that the area will be able to attract large meetings that otherwise would go elsewhere  [Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch – Saturday, May 21, 1988]

The Sheraton hotel, just over a decade old, was spared demolition – for now at least.

Earlier in 1988 the football Cardinals announced plans to leave St. Louis for Arizona because St. Louis wouldn’t build them a stadium.  The Cardinals had played football in Busch Stadium since it was built in 1966.  I’m not sure where they played 1960-66.  The team wanted a football stadium, not a shared baseball stadium.   The new stadium debate had already gone on for a couple of years before the Cardinals left.  As soon as they announced they were packing their bags for Arizona the efforts to built a stadium and attract a new team gained speed.  Soon the idea of expanding the convention center to the South with the stadium going East emerged.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Friday, December 14, 1990:

The Sheraton St. Louis hotel downtown is scheduled to close the first week of January [1991], idling about 300 workers and leaving the city without a major convention headquarters.  Officials of the two unions that represent the employees were formally notified Thursday morning.  The hotel lies in the path of the eastern expansion of the Cervantes Convention Center, a $250 million project that includes a domed stadium. The hotel will be torn down, but no date has been set for the demolition. Management of the Sheraton had expected to operate the hotel until construction of the stadium began. Until the last few days, the hotel was accepting reservations through 1991.

Late in 1987, city officials first publicly discussed an eastern expansion of the convention center. From that moment on, hotel industry sources say, the Sheraton has seen an erosion of bookings. It has always depended on group business, which is usually arranged two to four years in advance.

The best way to ruin a business is to threaten to take it away.  Talk of razing a building a decade later.  Smart. Taking out your convention hotel to expand your convention center, even smarter.

P-D on Tuesday, July 14, 1992:

As politicians smiled and sweated in Monday morning’s 89-degree heat, ground was broken for the $260 million stadium expansion of Cervantes Convention Center.  The building, scheduled for completion by October 1995, will seat 70,000 for professional football. With 177,000  square feet of exhibit space on one level, it will accommodate events as large as national political conventions.  During the hour-long ceremonial groundbreaking at Seventh Street and Convention Plaza, demolition crews began swinging a giant ”headache ball” at the old Sheraton Hotel, one block north. Each swipe at the 13-year-old hotel, which sits near the 50-yard-line of the stadium expansion, brought cheers.  But the sturdily built hotel was slow to succumb to the headache ball.

It took a while to raze the nearly new structure.  I recently found a couple of photos I had taken:

The expansion & dome were completed. St. Louis was not awarded an expansion team.  Instead the Rams relocated from Los Angeles, California.  It was not until 2003, over a dozen years later, that the Renaissance Grand & Suites opened to replace the loss of the Sheraton. Conventions expected by the expansion didn’t come due to the lack of a convention hotel.  Brilliant!

Of course the Renaissance Grand convention hotel has had it’s own issues, from earlier this year:

Each decade the numbers get bigger and bigger.  We had a convention hotel, then we didn’t and then we did again.  The most jobs created through all this were for demolition companies and consultants.

Poll, Do You Care if the St. Louis Rams Leave St. Louis?

Chip Rosenbloom &  Lucia Rodrigue will be selling their 60% stake in the St. Louis Rams NFL team.  They inherited the controlling interest when their mom, Georgia Frontiere, passed away in January 2008.  The remaining 40% share is owned by Stan Kroenke, a Columbia Missouri native.

If a local/Missouri buyer is found the Rams are probably staying put for a while.  But if an out of town buyer takes a majority share it is likely they will seek to move the team when their lease in St. Louis expires.

My poll this week asks simply if you care.  You have only 3 choices:

• I don’t want them to leave.
• I do want them to leave.
• I don’t care if they stay or go.

Many factors may play into your decision.  You may enjoy the games or you may not like football but think our civic pride depends on having an NFL team.  Or you may think a football team is too costly to the community.  Or you may just not care.  The poll is located in the upper right of the main page.

I personally don’t care if they stay or go.  Although if they leave I’ll probably find the views of loss as highly irritating.  If the Rams stay, no doubt I’ll find the probably dome replacement equally irritating.  Either way I think in 5 years we will face questions as a community: can we live without an NFL team or will we be willing to fund a new stadium?  There is no place downtown for a new stadium so location would be debated.

Stay or leave I see the existing Edward Jones Dome as empty and hopefully razed.  The four city blocks occupied by the current dome are needed to reconnect downtown to the near-North neighborhood.

I see the area shaded above as being rebuilt and filled in with active streets.  If we can get rid of I-70. after the new Mississippi River bridge opens, we have a chance to reconnect an even bigger portion of our city.  See Reconnecting St Louis to the Mississippi; Don’t Cover the Highway, 86 It. Maybe in five years we can get rid of the convention center as well — that would be six more blocks to be reclaimed and rebuilt. 

St. Louis Neighborhood Mixed-Use Circa 1909

The term “mixed-use” is a relatively new term.  Before Euclidian zoning was universally adopted to keep uses (say residential & commercial) apart, St. Louis had buildings that freely mixed it up.  And they did so beautifully:

Many of you have probably seen the Oscar Schneider Studio on the 3300 block of California.  This 5,000+ square foot four-unit building sits on a lot that is just inches over 40 feet wide.

The Cherokee Street commercial district runs side to side in the above aerial image.   The building is marked “A.” As you can see it is closer to Utah on the North than to Cherokee.  Additional “mixed-use” storefront are on the corner at California & Utah.

The storefront facade is old, but not original.  The Vitrolite glass was not yet available, to my knowledge,  in 1909 when this building was constructed.  This was likely a 1930s or 1940s remodeling.

Photography was so different back then.  They used this stuff called film.  Photography was expensive so you made the most of it.  I found a great collection of images online taken by Oscar Scheider at this studio, they were restored from glass negatives.  View the collection here.

This property is within the Gravois-Jefferson Streetcar Suburb National Register Historic District.

Gravois–Jefferson Streetcar Suburb Historic District
(added 2005 – St. Louis County – #05000115)
Grovois and S. Jefferson, S. Jefferson and S. Broadway, Meramac, S. Gran and Gravois, St. Louis (Independent City)
(7180 acres, 4635 buildings)  [Source]

Yes this area was considered a streetcar suburb.  Mixed uses in the suburbs.   The single-family house to the South was built 5 years earlier.

Our ideas about mixing residential & commercial soon changed.  What used to be normal developmemt now requires numerous hearings & variances to get approved.  I can’t imagine the owners of a single-family home today accepting a four-unit building next door that contains three residential units and one commercial unit.

They had it right 100 years ago — build it compact, mix it up and have fixed-rail transit very nearby.

City of Ballwin’s Sales Tax Receipts in Decline Prior to Smoke-Free Law

We’ve all heard it before.  St. Louis suburb, the City of Ballwin, passes a smoking ban and restaurant sales decline after the effective date.  You know what?  It is true.  Sales & tax receipts have declined since the law took effect on January 2, 2006.  There, I said it.  That is the part, and the only part, the pro-smokers what you to know.  They use this to scare other cities into believing that they too will have a reversal of fortunes if they pass a smoke-free law. What politician will vote for something they’ve been told will reduce their city’s budget?

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.“

Numbers can be manipulated to show just about anything.  So when someone says that sales declined after a certain point you have to ask what were they doing prior to that point?  Were they ascending prior to that point?  Are their other factors responsible for a decline?

The fact is the City of Ballwin’s receipts had been in decline for several years prior to their smoke-free law.  A friend of mine, a graduate of Saint Louis University’s Masters in Urban Planning & Real Estate Development program working in real estate and economic development consulting, pulled sales tax data from the Missouri Department of Revenue (source) and created the following charts for me to use:

In reading the above note the blue line represents all sales in Ballwin measured based on the values on the left side.  The red line represents restaurant sales as measured by the values on the right hand side.  The are plotted together to see how they fall relative to each other.  The vertical line shows the point when the smoke-free law took effect.  As you can see all sales and restaurant sales had been in decline for years before the smoking ban.

The above shows restaurant sales as a percentage of all sales.

Sales per establishment appear relatively unchanged.  Of course some may have seen a big decrease while others saw a big increase.  But the sky over the City of Ballwin did not fall as is claimed by many.

The number of establishments has varied before and after the law took effect.  Do we see a trend of lots of business closures?  No.

All four charts can be viewed in greater detail here.

A month ago,  comments on Clayton’s discussion of going smoke-free on STLToday.com the City of Ballwin was used as an example of why the smoke-free laws should not be enacted — the sky will fall.

Bill Hannegan   May 5, 2009 2:04AM CST
Harry Belli, owner of Harry’s West in Ballwin, recently wrote to Mayor Goldstein and the Clayton Board of Aldermen detailing the economic hardship the Ballwin smoking ban caused his business:Dear Mayor Goldstein, I am writing you on behalf of Bill Hannegan with Keep St. Louis Free. He asked me to give you my opinion on the discussions regarding the smoking ban. A little history about myself. My name is Harry J. Belli. I presently own Harry’s Restaurant and Bar in downtown St. Louis. I also own the Sidebar on Washington Avenue and owned Maggie O’Briens Pub for 30 yrs. I owned and operated Harry’s West in Ballwin on Kehrsmill and Clayton Roads. We were open at the Ballwin location for 10 years. The Ballwin location had always had the policy of no smoking in the dining area, but allowed smoking in the bar/lounge and patio areas. Our customers were always given the option of separate smoking and non-smoking areas. The alderman in the City of Ballwin approached us about the smoking ban and we told them of our concerns. I can tell you, I believe we were right. The original plan was no smoking inside and within 25 feet of our building. This plan included no smoking in the patio area. We did get them to change that part of the plan and at least allow smoking in the patio area. The aldermen said that by banning smoking we would get the non-smokers to come in. Unfortunately, this was not the case. We saw no increase of either diners nor bar patrons seeking out a non-smoking environment. Subsequent to the smoking ban, Harry’s West lost between 10% and 15% of our revenue within the first 30 days. That was $2000-$2500 per week or approximately $130,000 per year. What kind of financial slope would the City of Clayton be in if it were to lose 10% to 15% of it’s tax base? I can assure you that it is not a good position to be placed in. We could not overcome that loss and eventually closed the Restaurant. We employed 40 people that lost their jobs and the City of Ballwin lost tax revenues. However, I am sure that the surrounding municipalities enjoyed their windfall. We were definitely not the only dining establishment to close their doors and to my knowledge, no restaurants and bars are eager to open in Ballwin. The problem with banning smoking by municipality is that the establishments are anywhere from a couple of miles or sometimes yards away from establishments that allow smoking, giving the non-smoking establishments an unfair disadvantage. It just makes no sense, unless the ban is imposed state-wide. I believe that if the restaurants and bars give their customers the option to dine in a smoke-free environment and their smoking customers the option to eat and drink in the bar/lounge/patio areas, that you accomplish the best for both and don’t lose your hard earned dollars, not to mention jobs and tax revenue for the City. I also believe that a municipality ban will discourage new businesses from wanting to open up shop in an area that will put them at a distinct disadvantage….. Sincerely, Harry J. Belli

A response was enlightening:

Enlighten Me   May 5, 2009 10:03AM CST
Mr. Hannegan -With all due respect to business owners and Harry Belli, Mr. Belli does not know what’s happened in Ballwin after their Clean Air Ordinance went into full effect on January 2, 2006. Your constant repeat of Belli’s letter to Clayton is getting old…real old. Here are the real facts:As quoted in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch Suburban Journal news article on June 28, 2007, “Tom Aiken (Ballwin’s City Planner) said life after the ban has remained status quo. After reviewing business license fees, which are based on gross receipts, two years prior to and one year following the ban, there was no dramatic difference in any business’ numbers, Aiken said. Aiken said that while some residents attributed the closing of several businesses to the ban, those restaurants’ sales histories showed a decline in business several years prior to the legislation. He said restaurant sales throughout the city had both decreased and increased with the ban, but the difference in percentage points was so little that it was impossible to conclude whether either was a result of the no-smoking ordinance”. Staff has recently reviewed numbers to date and this trend…or lack thereof…continues. Harry’s West lost significant lunch crowd when Citicorp moved to Wentzville and dinner crowd when Chesterfield Valley exploded with development of retail and restaurants. Let’s continue.French Quarter Bar: When Ballwin was considering their ordinance, the owner of the bar said he would be shut down by it in three months. Today, three years later, it is still a thriving business with live music offered often. Ashley Daniels, general manager of the French Quarter Bar and Grill in Ballwin, said her business is booming. We are absolutely more successful now than we were before the smoking ban,” Daniels said.More: Red Lobster, Lone Star and O’Charleys – These chain restaurants have relocated to Chesterfield Valley and operate there as a 100% smoke free restaurant voluntarily. There has been much discussion by the cities located in the Manchester Road corridor of the negative effect the booming Chesterfield Valley development is having on all retail and restaurants. Harry Belli has stated on several occasions that the Chesterfield Valley was negatively impacting Harry’s West. Chili’s, Krieger’s Pub and All Stars: Often cited as establishments that closed because of Ballwin’s law but Chili’s was located in Manchester, Krieger’s in Ellisville and All Stars in Chesterfield. The Ballwin postal area extends from Des Peres on the east to Wildwood on the west…far beyond Ballwin’s city limits. When one uses “Ballwin” as a location, it doesn’t necessarily mean within the city limits.Existing, New and Expanding Business in Ballwin – Mi Lupita, a Mexican restaurant in Ballwin, saw a 10% increase in sales after the ordinance went into effect said the restaurant’s assistant manager Raul Haro. They increased their space as well. Sky Music Lounge, a live music bar in Ballwin located in the Barn at Lucerne opened post-ordinance and last friday expanded by adding a sports bar. The owner embraced the idea of smoke-free air and patrons come from all over to hear live music in a smoke-free atmosphere. Harry’s West was located at the same intersection. Charlotte’s Rib and Fortel’s were smoke free before the CAO and remain at the same intersection today. Lone Wolf Coffee Company just opened in Ballwin in late 2008 also near the Barn at Lucerne. Senor Pique, a Mexican restaurant that began in Manchester, has recently moved to Ballwin in the vacated O’Charley’s space. Manchester does not have a smoke-free ordinance. The restaurant is very busy and will be so tonight for Cinco de Mayo. Candicci’s just received the green light (April ’09) to operate in Ballwin. Applebee’s has retained their Ballwin location but closed its restaurants in Wildwood and Chesterfield.Finally, Ballwin’s CAO has been in full effect for over three years and their police have written NO ordinance violations. This is the REAL story about Ballwin. It’s a shame that opponents to Clean Air can’t see through the smoke.

The above commenter knows that other factors, such as competiton from Chesterfield and Citicorp’s move, has impacted Ballwin’s businesses.  Taken together with real sales data from the Missouri Dept of Revenue (above) shows that the City Ballwin may be a good case study afterall.  If your receipts are declining they will likely continue to decline regardless of a smoke-free law.  Just wanted to clear the air.

The Future of a Tiny Vacant Lot on Cherokee Street

For decades a handsome 3-story building stood over the SE corner of Cherokee & Texas (map).  The building served as home to the Empire Sandwich Shop.

By 2005 the Empire was closed.  The building’s owners, unable to sell the property, “gifted” it to the City of St. Louis.  Within months the roof caved in.  9th Ward Alderman Ken Ortmann was faced with a “heartbreaking” reality: emergency demolition of the building.

In the 3 years since the building came down the city owned corner has changed little.  The ground is uneven and bare.  It is a hole in an otherwise mostly intact and up and coming commercial district.  The other three corners at the intersection are in the 20th Ward represented by Ald. Craig Schmidt.  Furthermore the South side of Cherokee Street is the Gravois Park neighborhood while the North side is Benton Park West.  Add in the Cherokee Station Business Association and you quickly get a lot of interested parties.

In October 2008 it was announced “the Incarnate Word Foundation has agreed to invest $25,000 to seed what those who care about the neighborhood decide would be most effective in answering these questions.”  A meeting was held to get ideas.  Out of that came three concepts: a free wi-fi network for Cherokee Street, a community garden and a plaza on this vacant corner lot (more info from Cherokee Street News).  In November a community vote on the 3 concepts was held.

The plaza on the vacant city owned lot won the vote, eventually.  Voting took place over a couple of months.  The plaza idea was announced the winner in late January (view).

Alderman Ken Ortmann refused to release the lot, he wants to keep it available for new construction.  He supports grass but with the city staying in control of the lot.  I agree the lot needs to have a building.  There is no such thing as a temporary plaza.

A couple of people brought the issue to my attention.  I called Ald. Ortmann to discuss.  I’ve been at odds numerous times with Ald Ortmann before but in this case I think he is right to hold out for a new building. I agree with him that a miscommunication occured.  This is why email makes such a nice record.

So what is the wait?  Yes, the current economy is a mess.  But 3 years later no grass?  No RFP (Request for Proposals) issued by the city to unload the lot and get a new building?

Further reading:

• Cherokee Street at Texas Avenue: A Lot of Contention (RFT 4/16/09)
• Posts at Cherokee Street News on the plaza dubbed the ComeUNITY Hub

All this talk of Cherokee Street has me thinking I need to find a smoke-free place there for some good Mexican food!