South Florissant Road and West Florissant Avenue bear similarities beyond just their names.
Both four-lane arterial roads, just a few miles apart, traverse multiple north St. Louis County municipalities, with some stretches packed with storefronts and others serving as gateways to nearby suburban residential neighborhoods.
The roadways were also where protests and unrest erupted a decade ago in response to a white Ferguson police officer killing Michael Brown Jr. in 2014.
But 10 years later, the roads are worlds apart.
West Florissant saw the worst of the destruction, said Dellwood Mayor Reggie Jones, who was first elected in 2013.
“It was unbelievable the anger people had,” he said. “I can remember coming home at night and just seeing devastation to places that were once thriving businesses and gathering places and literally sit there and just watch some of them go up in flames.”
Dellwood, a neighbor of Ferguson with a population of roughly 5,000, saw similar destruction, Jones said. Here, 13 businesses burned, he said, quickly adding that figure eclipses the damage in Ferguson.
It’s a point Jones said he fought to highlight to the media that descended to the area because he wanted to make sure his city would also see economic development money.
“I didn’t want people to forget about Dellwood and just soak everything into Ferguson, which still kind of happened,” he said.
‘It takes years to recover’
Since then, Dellwood has made strides in rebuilding. Of the 13 businesses that burned down, only one came back, he said — an O’Reilly Auto Parts. Jones said the city fought to attract new tenants to those sites.
“It takes time,” Jones said. “Even though things happened basically overnight, it takes years to recover.”
Today, only one of those 13 sites doesn’t have a development plan, he said. The rest are beginning to bear fruit.
Earlier this year, the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis opened a $10 million, 42-unit senior living facility on the same lot along West Florissant Avenue that used to have an Auto Zone. Every unit was filled the day it opened, said Michael K. Holmes, executive vice president for the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis.
“We’re looking at what’s next,” he said, describing a new north county senior living center. “It’ll be bigger, probably 100 or more units.”
The organization also plans to break ground Friday on a $10 million business plaza on the other side of West Florissant that will have a bank, restaurant, storefronts and multipurpose space that could host community meetings or small receptions.
The Urban League also helped build the Ferguson Empowerment Center in Ferguson, which helps residents with job placement, on the site of a QuikTrip gas station that burned on West Florissant.
Holmes said these developments are the result of the commitment from Michael P. McMillan, the Urban League’s president and CEO, to invest and rebuild on the lots affected by the unrest a decade ago.
“If you don’t react or do something immediately, people move on,” he said.
This commitment may spur other businesses and organizations to follow suit and invest in the area, Holmes hopes.
Jones, the Dellwood mayor, also notes there are business plazas that have been rebuilt with new tenants and others that were long vacant have been filled in.
It’s still a work in progress.
“We are still recovering,” said Idowu Ajibola, who owns African Depot, a small grocery and retail store tucked behind an auto shop and across from the senior living facility on West Florissant.
Ajibola has been in this space since 2006 and ran the pharmacy next door before selling it in 2021. He said the unrest spurred him to carry fewer beauty supply products because they were frequently stolen.
“The building was broken into. The doors were broken,” Ajibola said. “We had to do a lot of close down [for] repairs.”
These days, traffic to his store is growing more consistent as people search for his unique African products, such as Ghana yam or garri, flour made from cassava root. Still, Ajibola said there could stand to be more shops directly around his store on West Florissant.
“We need some more business, family places, grocery stores around here,” he said. “And shopping areas.”
Ferguson Mayor Ella Jones (no relation to Dellwood’s mayor) agrees and adds a sit-down restaurant to that list.
“Just as much as South Florissant is growing, we need West Florissant to grow,” she said.
Reimagining West Florissant
One way regional leaders hope to promote new growth is through a long-talked-about redesign of West Florissant that will bring greenery, raised grass medians, islands where pedestrians can safely cross the busy road and other improvements.
The project dates back to 2013, and Dellwood Mayor Jones said it has taken years to secure a crucial grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
“We applied every year, but it was not until Joe Biden’s administration got in office, we got to meet with Pete Buttigieg and his department, and we were awarded the grant,” he said.
The $30.4 million project is fully funded, said David Wrone, public information manager of the St. Louis County Department of Transportation and Public Works. He said federal grants account for $21.8 million and local funds, the majority coming from St. Louis County, make up the remaining $8.6 million.
Construction is set to begin in fall 2025 and expected to take a few years.
In preparation for the redesign, the cities of Ferguson, Dellwood and Jennings have each adopted comprehensive zoning ordinances that will help guide new developments along the corridor.
Dellwood Mayor Jones calls the zoning law “a great asset” and said it will help the city avoid allowing businesses it doesn’t want along West Florissant, like payday lending facilities, and promote ones it does want, like a sit-down restaurant.
“Everybody would like to shop, play and eat and don’t go too far from home,” he said.
A 'Black business haven'
The street redesign and new zoning are a start, but more funding is always needed, said Ferguson Mayor Jones. She said her No. 1 goal in the coming years is to help West Florissant develop the vibrancy that has flowered along South Florissant Road.
“It’s [thousands of] cars that pass West Florissant every day,” she said. “We need them to stop. If we don’t have a reason to stop, they’re going to keep going.”
But replicating South Florissant’s vibrancy in other north county business corridors may not be as easy, said Tony Davis, who owns Pop Pop Hurray!, a gourmet popcorn and ice cream shop on South Florissant. Small businesses do better when they’re next to some kind of anchor that acts as a main draw for traffic, he said.
“They’re not built to survive on their own,” he said.
Since he opened his shop four years ago, the stretch around his business has developed into a “Black business haven,” he said, easily rattling off roughly a dozen businesses nearby, including mainstays such as Cathy’s Kitchen and recent additions like the Hive Cafe.
“It’s an energy there,” Davis said. “That’s a real concentration of Black-owned businesses in such a small area. I don’t know of any other place like that in St. Louis.”
Davis said he was struck by the outpouring of support he received when he opened in 2020. The previous tenant, a Quiznos, had moved out after being vandalized in the unrest that followed George Floyd’s murder in May of that year, he said. When Davis took over, the space was covered in glass.
“I remember how happy people were because it was something that was bright, vibrant, kid friendly. And something that was opening in a time that everything was closing,” he said.
As a father of three, it was important to him to open a place that reflected what he wanted to see in his community. Davis encourages other people considering opening new businesses in north county to do the same.
“Create the stuff that we want outside of what we typically get, the stuff that we have to go outside of the community [for],” Davis said.
Community resources
Davis has the type of energy that Beverly Jenkins sees more broadly among people and organizations across north St. Louis County.
“Whatever they feel like is missing, they’ve decided to create it,” she said. “And I think that’s beautiful.”
Jenkins and her husband, Ken, both pastors in the area, did the same thing with Refuge and Restoration, their nonprofit, whose CEO is Jenkins. It runs the R&R Marketplace, a $20 million redevelopment of a previously vacant Dellwood stripmall.
The 90,000-square-foot site now hosts a plethora of services to help promote economic mobility and access, including a bank, child care facility, addiction recovery and treatment, employment training and coworking space.
“These were the opportunities we felt like were missing in [the] community,” Jenkins said. “Spaces that our community was traveling to or utilizing in other neighborhoods or communities but was not accessible in their own.”
Providing this kind of access, especially to a bank that’s interested in investing into community-based ventures, has proved essential, Jenkins said. Since the opening last September, she said she’s had many interactions with community members, some who even have lucrative jobs but still struggled to finance new businesses.
“We’re already creative enough. We already know what it is that we want,” Jenkins said. “We understand how to do business, but we don’t necessarily have access to the capital to get it done.”
Even the Jenkinses faced a challenge in securing financing for the marketplace. The idea for it came before the protests and unrest in 2014, which intensified their commitment to seeing the project through.
“It took us these many years because, honestly, there’s not a lot of private equity investments in communities that people forget about,” she said.
That long timeline reflects the strategic economic disinvestment that happened across north St. Louis County communities for decades, Jenkins said.
More than only Ferguson
And this reality isn’t confined to the city or immediate area around where Michael Brown lived, said Jessica Carter. The conditions and challenges that were scrutinized intensely in Ferguson after his death are also present in other north St. Louis County municipalities, she said.
“Ferguson was not the only [place] that needs the additional support of our officials,” Carter said.
Carter is the site director for the North County Community Nexus, a forthcoming redevelopment of the old Hathaway Hills Shopping Center on the border of Jennings and Bellefontaine Neighbors.
The nearly $10 million project by A Red Circle, a nonprofit that promotes community betterment in north St. Louis County by responding to racial equity issues, is still in its early stages but has secured a $3 million grant.
And there’s already activity at the intersection of Lewis and Clark Boulevard and Jennings Station Road. A small garden along the road is producing cucumbers, collard greens, watermelons and other food.
“The neighbors, they love it,” Carter said. “It’s not for us at all; it’s for the community.”
Healthy foods are a cornerstone of this project. There are plans for a demonstration kitchen to help teach those in the surrounding community how to make healthier foods on their own, Carter said.
About 10,000 square feet of the shopping center will be transformed into a grocery store, to provide a high volume of nutritious produce from local farmers and other providers for an area Carter describes as a food desert.
The nearest grocer is a few miles away, meaning many people in the surrounding area shop at the nearby convenience store for a lot of their needs, Carter explained.
“We’re all not privileged enough to get from A to B without any restrictions,” she said.
Similar to the R&R Marketplace in Dellwood, the goal of the Nexus is to bring economic access and wellness to part of north St. Louis county. The development will also feature a small-business incubator and spaces for entrepreneurs to lease, she added.
The services that will eventually be housed in this development directly reflect what the community members living around it want to see, she said, adding they deserve as much access to these resources as any other part of north county.
“Mike Brown wasn’t confined to one city,” Carter said. “It happens all over.”
