Efforts to revitalize areas of the Hyde Park neighborhood are underway, thanks in part to federal coronavirus funds a city agency will use to invest in north St. Louis
Be Well Café and Market on Salisbury Street will open this summer. The business will include space for a culinary incubator, pavilion and co-working space aimed to foster women- and minority-owned businesses.
“The hope is to make this area the gateway to a beautiful thriving neighborhood, a destination, a place where businesses will want to come and become a part and families can raise their children,” said Be Well Café and Market Executive Director Fatimah Muhammad.
The pavilion will open early next year. Muhammad purchased the property from the Land Reutilization Authority, the city’s land bank, before turning it over to the Be Well Café nonprofit several years ago.
“This area specifically has been disinvested, disenfranchised and neglected for at least four to five decades,” Muhammad said. “We wanted the community to see it can be done, and this is how you do it.”
The Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District and Resource Environmental Solutions helped develop and renovate the building and land. Part of the development will include green infrastructure such as a rain garden to prevent flooding.
The project received $354,500 in grant funding from the St. Louis Development Corporation as part of its Economic Justice Accelerator program. The initiative is aimed at eliminating blight and creating jobs in neglected communities.
St. Louis officials have allocated about $246 million in federal coronavirus funds to invest in neighborhood developments. About $37 million of federal coronavirus aid has been allocated to the development corporation’s small business north St. Louis grant program.
“There are hundreds of projects right now similar to what Be Well Café is moving forward here in Hyde Park across north St. Louis City,” St. Louis Development Corporation CEO Neil Richardson said. “We're excited to get in the weeds with many of those businesses, understand their business plan and find ways to give them whether it's capital or technical assistance to be able to achieve their full goals.”
Richardson said the agency is reviewing about 700 applications for the north city grant program.
The development will hopefully be a model for other potential business owners and community members to apply for resources in their communities, Mayor Tishaura Jones said.
“This is the revitalization and a renaissance of north St. Louis that needs to happen, that has needed to happen for decades,” Jones said. “All of our city can’t succeed if over half of it is left to fail.”
Eric Schmid contributed to this report.
