On a recent windy afternoon, Kranzberg Arts Foundation’s Mary Ann Srenco gave a walking tour of the Walls off Washington, the foundation’s sprawling mural project on the eastern edge of Grand Center.
The multi-artist opus began in 2022 on the rear walls of two Washington Avenue buildings, hidden from the street but offering a brightly colored welcome to people parking in the lot there.
The art has since expanded across the road and now wraps around the corner in two directions along North Leonard Avenue.
“You put beautiful art on the wall and it just transforms and changes a place,” said project curator Srenco. “Ten years ago, there wasn't anything here. The explosion of what has happened is incredible.”
The murals of the Walls off Washington, numbering 34 and counting, form the most immediately eye-catching aspect of the transformation in this once-neglected microneighborhood.
The Kranzberg Arts Foundation invested $50 million over the past 10 years to purchase and repurpose old buildings. The nonprofit launched multiple performance spaces, art galleries, a high-end coffee shop and a cocktail lounge where patrons relax to the beats of visiting DJs.
The foundation’s leaders say it’s now time for more public dollars and private investment to lift up this neighborhood within a neighborhood.
“Over the next decade, Grand Center will no longer be America's most exciting emerging arts district. It will be the best arts district in the world,” said Kranzberg Arts Foundation Executive Director Chris Hansen.
“We built the environment and we've centralized the art and the industry. Now we have to improve the public conditions,” he added, citing broken sidewalks, poor street lighting and lack of wayfinding signs.
The foundation issued a call earlier this year for $225 million in outside investment in “Grand Center east” over the next decade. Hansen said the number is flexible but investment in that range would yield 400 new jobs and 200,000 additional visitors to Grand Center annually.
“We want developers seeing this as a place where they don't need incentives, that the market conditions are right for them to come down and be successful,” said Hansen. “It just needs a little push. We’re so close.”
A rapid transformation
While Grand Center has long offered a concentration of leading St. Louis arts attractions — including the Fabulous Fox Theatre, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s Powell Hall, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis — activity formerly petered out beyond Jazz St. Louis, just east of Grand Boulevard.
A mostly dead spot was left between there and the Locust Business District on the western flank of Midtown.
No longer.
A nonexhaustive list of KAF’s recent building projects east of Grand Boulevard begins with the 150-seat Marcelle Theatre in 2015. The .ZACK complex, housing a 194-seat theater, rooftop event space and a restaurant, opened the next year. In 2019 came the High Low, with a cafe featuring Blueprint Coffee, an art gallery, space for literary happenings and offices for KAF’s writers in residence.
The building known simply as 3333 Washington Avenue opened in 2021. Now late-night denizens find Sophie’s Artist Lounge there — and, of course, more art. The current show in its gallery celebrates the history of St. Louis hip-hop.
The rehearsal studios and offices elsewhere on the block include the headquarters of Metro Theater Company and St. Louis Shakespeare Festival. The Walls off Washington murals guide pedestrians from one new hot spot to another.
The two-block-by-two-block patch of eastern Grand Center, where auto dealerships once thrived, is also the chief staging ground for KAF’s annual Music at the Intersection festival, which jammed its way through its fifth year in September.
KAF is now in a soft launch for its latest venture — the Key Burger Bar & Boogie on Olive Street, in two historic buildings that the previous owner, St. Louis University, had slated for demolition. Its rear wall faces .ZACK, across N. Leonard Avenue.
In the front room of the Key, staff members sling burgers and beers amid red-and-black murals by Cuban-born illustrator Carlos Demora and his collaborators.
The images make visual references to local sports teams and the venue’s history as a gathering spot for St. Louisan Latinos, when it was the club Dante’s.
Making good on its titular promise of boogie, the Key schedules performances by dance bands in its adjacent space.
Grand plans gone awry
The Kranzberg Arts Foundation’s ambitious vision is not the first for a revamped Grand Center.
A 2013 master plan authored by the Great Streets Initiative, a project of regional planning agency East-West Gateway, proposed a path toward better traffic flow and an enhanced visitor experience.
Among the recommendations was a call to widen the sidewalks along Grand Boulevard by eliminating parking spaces. Other proposals, like persuading arts patrons to arrive in the neighborhood earlier — rather than right before showtime — were intended to prevent the street from becoming a bottleneck on nights when both the Fabulous Fox Theatre and Powell Hall presented shows.
So, how did that part go?
“Not too well. It's the same as it was before we started,” said Paul Hubbman, manager of the master plan effort, with a wry chuckle.
The traffic indeed swells up in intense bursts around showtimes. But leaders of the Fox built a parking garage endorsed by the master plan, and the recent $140 million renovation and expansion of Powell Hall included a private drive that absorbs some of the automobile traffic from people dropping patrons off at shows.
The $65 million transformation of the former Missouri Theatre building on Grand Boulevard into the Angad Arts Hotel, spearheaded by prominent St. Louis developer Steve Smith in 2018, is the sort of reuse of a historic property called for in the 2013 plan.
Yet the more dramatic and coordinated reinvention of the district envisioned by its authors didn’t happen.
Planners hoped to begin a series of infrastructure improvements with what they thought would be an easy win — a streetscape project on Washington Avenue.
“The funding part of it actually was easy. The money came. But there were a lot of cost overruns, a number of bickering arguments came up, and it just wasn't a very smooth process,” Hubbman said. “I think at that point, advocacy went away.”
Two years later, the Kranzberg Arts Foundation began making big moves a few blocks to the east.
Renaissances aren’t free
Tim Weber is the sort of entrepreneur Hansen and KAF want to see more of in the neighborhood.
Weber is the former general manager and booker at the much-missed Mississippi Nights club on Laclede’s Landing and managing partner of the Old Rock House just south of downtown.
Now he’s also managing partner of the Sovereign, a music venue on the eastern edge of Grand Center. The Kranzberg Arts Foundation is his landlord. With a two-day-old occupancy permit in hand, Weber rushed to open the club in time to be a key location for this year’s MATI festival in September.
Weber plans to produce up to 150 shows a year at the 1,200-capacity venue. It’s become clear to him that the Sovereign is also meeting an untapped demand for event space.
“A really wide swath of St Louis wants to come and do stuff here. I've been hit up for more corporate events and parties and DJ shows and private parties in the last six months with this place than the last 15 years with the Old Rock House,” he said.
“We've got three fashion shows currently on the books. I’ve never done a fashion show at the Old Rock House,” Weber added.
The bookings can’t come too quickly.
Smith, the developer of the Angad Arts Hotel, announced plans for the Sovereign in 2019. Weber was on board as a “hired gun” to manage the space, Weber said.
Following the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the original deal fell apart. Smith moved on to the Armory, the short-lived entertainment complex nearby in Midtown.
The Kranzberg Arts Foundation then put Weber in touch with Arch 2 Park, an equity fund under the umbrella of Greater St. Louis Inc. It focuses on civic-minded development projects in St. Louis that might not attract the interest of commercial banks.
KAF bought the building, Weber’s team converted it into a music venue, and Arch 2 Park provided some of the financing. Weber put his “life savings and then some” into the venture, he said.
The Landmarks Association of St. Louis issued a loan to support KAF's development of the Key Burger Bar & Boogie, in two now-adjoining buildings that form the last architectural remnant of the outer fringe of Mill Creek Valley.
Projects like the Sovereign and the Key help build economic momentum, said Arch 2 Park fund manager Dustin Allison.
“It's that type of investment that helps to engender additional confidence in a neighborhood. People are looking around, saying: ‘OK, where's the next place? Oh, they're investing there? Maybe they're seeing something I don't see. Let me go check that out and see if I can find an investable opportunity,’” Allison said. “There’s a bit of a herd mentality.”
From potential to progress
Leaders of the Kranzberg Arts Foundation would like to see a Community Improvement District — a tax mechanism directing money to a designated area — created for Grand Center. It’s another unrealized recommendation made in the 2013 master plan crafted by Great Streets.
“Our team fills the planter boxes,” Hansen said, “picks up the trash, sucks up the leaves in the public spaces to pick up the deficit in infrastructure and public services on behalf of the community — to ensure that we're not all walking around in dirty streets and walking around without security.”
“We’d like to do less and less of that every year,” he added, “because others are doing more.”
The foundation would prefer to stay focused on programming and supporting local artists and organizations.
Since 2013, KAF has taken out more than $15 million in loans for real estate purposes from Busey Bank, Simmons Bank, Reliance Bank and the Kranzberg Revocable Trust, according to tax documents. It put $2.5 million into the Key Burger Bar & Boogie.
Hansen estimated that the foundation provides the equivalent of up to $3 million in market-rate rent annually to arts organizations using its office spaces free of charge.
Grand Center boosters see the possibility for an even brighter future on its eastern end, but only with combined efforts by entrepreneurs, arts organizations, neighboring universities and city government.
“They've got to show: Hey, you can be successful here,” Allison said of players like Weber and KAF, “but we as a community also have to drive more folks to Grand Center. This is such a gem and a great amalgamation of our arts institutions. I think folks will, over time, start to see the business case for it.”
But as it is today, the stretch of Grand Center sitting east of its namesake boulevard already shows more life than it has in a long time.
On a recent afternoon, city workers were repairing a damaged streetlight. Caution tape surrounded several breaks in the sidewalk.
The Kranzberg Arts Foundation plans to convert the uneven gravel patch behind the Key into an outdoor patio, with artwork attached to a nearby fence and new murals painted on the back of a facing building. For now, the scene there is gray and gritty.
Around the corner, the Sovereign is still getting on its feet.
Weber has complemented his early rush of special-event bookings with live concerts at a slower pace than what’s demanded by his goal of 150 shows a year. After a mid-month week with two, the Sovereign has a pair of December performances remaining on its online calendar and 10 more shown through early May.
Legends’ Gallery next door has an art show examining the cultural influence of “The Wiz” on view through late January. At the Key Burger Bar & Boogie, self-described party band Dirty Muggs plays on Dec. 26. Sophie’s Artist Lounge is set to host five more DJ performances this month.
And coffee at the High Low is still hot.
