A St. Louis developer is making a push to bring more retail activity to the heart of downtown.
Oliver Properties has plans to develop roughly 9,000 square feet of the former Copia Restaurant & Wine Garden at 1122 Washington Ave. into a food hall with multiple tenants. The firm had acquired the property earlier in the year and had been working on the right fit for the space, said Oliver Properties owner Alex Oliver.
“The retail space as a former restaurant ran all the way through from front to back of the entire building,” he said. “Unlike most of the properties downtown, the building doesn’t go all the way to the alley. So it created this patio space.”
Those details meant an attraction centered around food and beverage would be a good fit, Oliver said. But the size could be challenging for a single tenant, he added.
“[For] a single restaurateur, that’s a lot to bite off, especially in downtown,” Oliver said. “And there’s already quite a few sit-down restaurants along the way.”
A food hall, with multiple operators, could help to diversify the risk for an individual establishment and offer quick-serve food options that cater to lunch, happy hour and early evening crowds, he said. The developer is in talks with potential tenants but declined to share more specifics since no deals are finalized yet, Oliver said.
The food hall concept is part of about 35,000 square feet of retail space Oliver Properties owns. The rest of its portfolio, which focuses on Washington Avenue and the immediate surrounding streets, includes about 400 apartments in nearby buildings and a few surface parking lots, Oliver said.
The developer has an eye toward developing a more unified retail experience along one of the more prominent business corridors downtown, he said. Part of that has included purchasing the ground floor retail space in different buildings and not necessarily the apartments above, Oliver said.
“As [Washington Avenue] faced its challenges, it had a fractionalized ownership,” he said. “Every property had a different owner, so they were focused on just, ‘How do I optimize my revenue in this one space?’”
That meant there wasn’t much intentionality in terms of which retail tenants should open, Oliver explained. But with the cohesive ownership he is trying to create, Oliver said more attention can be paid to how potential tenants interact with each other and drive foot traffic.
“It’s an established retail strategy that you need anchor tenancy, that is a traffic driver,” he said. “Retail does well with other retail.”
