How Brooks Goedeker Changes Neighborhoods
Date Posted: September 8, 2022
Posted In: News, Projects,
From St. Louis Magazine: For a hype man, Brooks Goedeker is not an amped-up guy—not really ever, but specifically not on the November afternoon I’m riding shotgun in his Ford Explorer. We’re rolling east on Chouteau toward Grand (both wearing masks) and he’s making the case—in his slow, quiet way, and as an ambassador for Saint Louis University and SSM Health in their bid to lure private investment to Midtown—that sure, this industrial patch of the city may look bleak, but it could be The Next Big Thing in the city’s central corridor, that belt of prosperity between Forest Park and the Arch. Or, to use Goedeker’s phraseology: “It’s totally set up to succeed.”
That’s tough to refute, by this point in the day. We’ve just visited the Element Westin hotel (a $40 million project) and City Foundry ($346 million), on the north side of Highway 40, and then, on the south side, the Armory building ($55 million), Steelcote Lofts ($9.5 million), and the adjoining Mill Creek Flats site ($26.5 million). Right outside Goedeker’s driver’s side window, just across from the new $550 million SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital, is the site of the proposed 14-acre Iron Hill complex ($335 million), which is expected to draw a big-box tenant—a huge deal to the many Midtown and downtown residents who bemoan the lack thereof. And running through this area, besides the MetroLink and the 70 Grand bus route, will be the future Brickline Greenway, a bicycle/foot path designed to connect the whole central corridor, with spurs shooting north and south.
“We’re finally connecting the fabric,” Goedeker says, with that South City vowel shift that makes the last word fyabric. He holds the wheel steady, hands at 10 and 2. “We’re finally connecting the districts. Finally.”
He’s giving me this tour as the executive director of the Saint Louis Midtown Redevelopment Corporation, a legal entity birthed by SLU and SSM. His job is to recruit and manage redevelopment in the 400 acres that surround us, an area that SLU/SSM pitched to the Board of Aldermen as “a natural eastward extension” of the growth spurred by the Cortex Innovation District and a way to connect SLU’s main campus to the new hospital. In that sense, it’s a massive infill project, the kind of thing you’d expect from research universities and hospitals, or “eds and meds” in urban-planning lingo. But I don’t expect what he shows me next.
Goedeker turns us toward a neighborhood in the redevelopment area’s southeastern corner. He calls it the Gate District West. Its residential section north of Park comprises only six blocks: old brick homes, newer townhouses, and vacant lots in between, some with “Coming Soon”–style signs. SLU used to own the vacant lots, Goedeker explains, yet it recently decided to put them back on the market—and to allow the mostly African-American residents already living there to decide what kind of private development should fill them up. This move surprised some neighbors. One remarked to me later: “They could’ve said, ‘It’s our land; we can do whatever we want on it.’ But instead they brought the community in and asked what we wanted. I was positively shocked.”