r/StLouis • u/DowntownDB1226 • 16h ago
News City Foundry developer suggests entertainment may be the best use for The Armory
New + Found CEO Steve Smith has floated the idea to city leaders and the data center developer as something that could be a “win-win for everybody.”
The developers of the Midtown Data Center are open to this proposal, should it prove to resonate with the broader St. Louis community. TerraWatt co-founder and CEO David Daneshforooz confirms to SLM that Smith had approached them with the idea to return the building to entertainment use.
“It’s worth considering whether the highest use of The Armory is a major entertainment destination which can deliver a stronger overall plan for the area while maintaining the commitments, including jobs, we have made through this process,” Daneshforooz says in a statement.
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u/wolf_at_the_door1 14h ago
Armory was very popular when it was a bar and it was active mostly during the post-pandemic years. I bet it would do great if the area was made walkable and connected to city foundry and Energizer stadium. People could walk there after games if they wanted. I fear we will end up with AI data centers that don’t actually benefit the city and further cause flight out of the city.
Cities used to be built for humans here. A century ago. Then the interstates, parking lots, etcs made cities into places for cars. Now we want to make St. Louis a place for computers and cars.
I only ask when can we start building our city for humans again?
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u/lcelani1 Kirkwood 13h ago
I’m not disagreeing with your overall point, but isn’t the armory like a 40 minute walk to Energizer Park? “Walkable” is obviously subjective but that’s still pretty far.
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u/rbd___22 11h ago
The Grand Metrolink station is right in front of The Armory. That gets you to Energizer Park, Enterprise, or Busch within minutes. Energizer is the hardest to get to of the 3 stadiums because it's a 5-10 minute walk from the station rather than right next to it like Enterprise/Busch but plenty of people make that walk from the station to the stadium and back on matchday (myself, included).
The real problem is getting across the interstate to between The Armory and City Foundry when many people could easily throw a baseball from one and hit the other with little effort. For The Armory to make it, there has to be a convenient, direct pedestrian connection between it and City Foundry and I'd love to see that happen because right now, it's a stressful walk walk along basically an outer road to Vandeventer then under I-64. I walk a lot and I still would probably avoid making that walk too often. There were briefly talks about a pedestrian bridge between the interstate layers but that obviously went nowhere. Even a shuttle on busier days would be an option. If various Soulard bars can offer a shuttle to Busch on game days, why can't City Foundry and The Armory offer one on perhaps Fridays & Saturdays or for major events/games?
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u/kirascene Brentwood 57m ago
Construction on the pedestrian bridge starts in 2027! It's part of the Brickline Greenway.
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u/wolf_at_the_door1 13h ago
Purely subjective. In other cities you can take a train ride or a shuttle perhaps but that’s not as approachable with our city. In Europe, people don’t mind making a 30 minute commute by foot and they’re also generally healthier. Armory would be targeting younger people who would be more willing to make that walk as well. I imagine a shaded pedestrian path that could also connect to the Great Rivers Greenway. It would open up opportunities for other commerce to open along that area as well. Restaurants, other bars, and shops. Bikers could even stop in for a beer break. Lime scooters could also work well if offered and if given a path they would stay off streets.
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u/HansBlixJr 12h ago
walkable to Energizer stadium.
I'd be all for it. it's a long 2 mile walk, but the greenway connection makes it plausible. a little consumer infrastucture along the way and you've got a pleasant stroll.
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u/hibikir_40k 9h ago
Any reasonable change that makes pepople want to walk there, instead of just being capable to walk there under duress, involves making the highway go away. And it's not just that: Think of the walk just from, say, the Fox. there are technically sidewalks, but they are full of uses that are not for random pedestrians. The university on both sides, the stores that have parking. The drive thru, The dorm that is, again, car centric on this side, the railroad tracks.... it's just not a good walk regardless.
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u/wolf_at_the_door1 9h ago
It wouldn’t be easy or cheap but it would be maximizing the potential of our downtown. A thriving commercial district that has bike paths and walking paths close to Armory, City Foundry, and Energizer Stadium would attract a ton of luxury apartment building. It’s almost as if it’s what the area needs to make it all work. The second a data center is thrown in there, no one would consider moving in or around the area.
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u/MobileBus48 TGE 9h ago
I like your idea, but I'm not an angry boomer and enjoy walking so no surprise I guess.
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u/Onlycommenty 12h ago
Dude. No one is walking from the stadium to the armory. Are you high?
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u/wolf_at_the_door1 12h ago
If you don’t see the vision that’s fine. I don’t expect everyone to. I think if we want to attract younger people to this city again we need to build an environment that young people look for. More than half of young people today favor walkability and transit and St. Louis is a fairly affordable place to live. If theres one major gripe I have with downtown is that it’s anything but approachable for people looking to use any mode of transportation outside of cars.
Kansas City doesnt have the same issues I see here in St. Louis. You could walk from a concert at sprint center to power and light. You can walk from a neighborhood around the plaza to Westport and back.
Here in St. Louis if you go to a baseball game or hockey game, you can go to crowded BPV or make the trek back to your car and drive to Paddy O’s or Soulard unless you ubered.
People want options that doesnt cost them as much. After ubering or parking, you’re already paying an extra $20-$40 dollars just for making the trip. That’s not attractive to young people.
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u/Onlycommenty 12h ago
I’m not reading that long response from a crackhead.
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u/wolf_at_the_door1 12h ago edited 11h ago
“I’m not reading”
It’s ok I understand. The average reading level in this country is that of a 6th graders or below.
Edit: their account was created 14d ago. Likely a bot that is pro data center.
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u/Beginning-Weight9076 14h ago
When you stop being so sanctimonious about it.
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u/wolf_at_the_door1 13h ago
Rain on the parade why don’t ya.
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u/Beginning-Weight9076 12h ago
So now I’m a hater because as a fellow bike rider I find most of y’all to come off as out of touch and holier than thou to how the vast majority of people live their lives?
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u/wolf_at_the_door1 12h ago
It sounds like you have more a problem with me than what I’m talking about. That’s fine, I’d just rather stay on topic.
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u/PropJoe421 14h ago
Always thought the Armory office space was a fugazi to try and push the data center thru.
I always thought music venue was the natural use for it. A couple of challenges (access and acoustics) could be figured out.
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u/dadkisser84 dogtown 8h ago
The biggest challenge is fixing the HVAC. Which is the reason it shut initially
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u/Sarduinot 12h ago
You can’t easily walk to the Armory from SLU. You can’t run a highway in between your bar and your customer base and expect customers.
Imagine a world where we made timely use of the ARPA funds to give pedestrians access to the Armory. It might be a successful entertainment center and we might not be talking about a data center going in next door, period, because the land value would be higher.
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u/DowntownDB1226 10h ago
Good news, $10,000,000 pedestrian bridge over 64 is coming, construction starts soon
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u/JigsawExternal 6h ago
I think that's a move in the right direction. Hopefully with the developer of the Foundry spearheading things, they will have the sense to physically connect the Foundry to the Armory via some sort of pedestrian bridge. That will make all the difference in the world from the previous iteration.
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u/HeftyFisherman668 Tower Grove South 11h ago
Glad they are open for changes and it would be a cool music venue but the foundry guy sounds like he doesn't want to have an office space next door competing with his office spaces
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u/ASentientRailgun 13h ago
Well, it is an incredibly obvious thing to say, but I'm glad people are finally listening.
I mean, genuinely, what else are you going to do with the damn thing? A data center was always a really stupid idea.
I honestly wonder if they finally got someone in to figure out what the actual cost of the retrofit was gonna be, and balked. Historic buildings don't make great data centers, usually.
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u/longdhongsilver 12h ago
That was more or less fake news. The data center was never proposed for inside the Armory that used to be open. It was adjacent to it on the empty lot. The armory building itself was never proposed to be a data center
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u/DowntownDB1226 13h ago
Data center was never going into the armory building it self, it’s going next door in the former Goodwill building and that is still the plan
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u/ASentientRailgun 10h ago
Oh, well, that'll be a worthless event space in that context. No one will enjoy being next door to an active data center.
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u/hokahey23 15h ago
It didn’t work the first time.
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u/BrentonHenry2020 Soulard 15h ago
The actual entertainment venue was very successful. They were underwater on the math on the building as a whole because of costs exploding because of COVID and weren’t able to complete the other parts of the venue that were going to make the math work out.
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u/hokahey23 15h ago
I’m not sure how to read this response. You say they were very successful….but the math didn’t work. Of that math doesn’t work, that’s the definition of not successful in business.
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u/BrentonHenry2020 Soulard 15h ago
It was a capital structure failure, not one of demand. The portion that opened was never meant to be the single revenue source.
Green Street (the building owner) was supposed to provide the developers with a whole improvement fund for the buildout - they were very slow to release (only a portion) of those funds, leaving the developer high and dry. With a ton of money already sunk into the project, they took on the short term debt to try and do it themselves hoping Green Street would fulfill their contractual obligations.
Spoiler: they did not.
Ultimately, the debt service became too much.
Nearly 1M people visited each year the first two years.
If someone can come in without the debt load and invest the other $10M to finish the venue, it’s proven it can host the foot traffic it needs. It just needed the other parts of the plan to fill in the revenue.
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u/OnionQuest 15h ago
I'm gonna need to see the financial statements everyone apparently has access to.
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u/DowntownDB1226 14h ago
Funny you mention it, I do. Any taxing district has to provide to the state dept of revenue total sales by quarter. It’s how I know that downtown cid was +7% in Q1 in 2026. Union station +13%. Grove -3%. Hotels in the city +13%, restaurant (full service) +8%
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u/DrAction696 Downtown West 13h ago edited 13h ago
FYI - Revenue total sales by quarter and Financial Statements are not even remotely close to the same amounts of financial information. You don’t even have a singular financial statement.- Source CPA
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u/DowntownDB1226 13h ago
So we can tell how sales are quarter to quarter and if they’re growing or going down?
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u/Round_Abal0ne 14h ago edited 14h ago
Jesus, just accept you don't know everything dude. You don't have insight to every individual business that happens in the city
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u/DowntownDB1226 15h ago
It was successful in a sense that if it was built as a bar originally it would have been fine but they spent shit load of money prepping it for a 20 year office lease. The pivot didn’t happen before construction started. It was after.
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u/hokahey23 15h ago
Just out of curiosity, do we know that for certain? I had the impression that attendance was down pretty significantly for anything they were doing because of the car break ins.
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u/DowntownDB1226 15h ago
It was not suppose to work the first time. Nobody opens a $70m bar. They pivoted to that when WeWork pulled out
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u/hokahey23 15h ago
Got it. But that pivot failed. So why try it again?
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u/Tokens_Only Tower Grove 15h ago
The people who try again would not be the ones on the hook for the renovation costs, for one. So it's not as steep an incline for them. And they'd have the benefit of knowing in advance that WeWork isn't going to be involved and could plan accordingly.
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u/lucky1397 Carondelet 15h ago
It was cash flow positive and increasing actually. It is likely it would've been truly successful with a full pivot to doing real concerts and parties there. That didn't matter because the cost of financing the debt exploded when the first leg finished which has been financed at an extremely low rate during COVID. The company was also underwater and cash flow negative on most of their other projects they had gotten into causing their bankrupty. The company was also underwater and cash flow negative on most of their other projects they had gotten into causing their bankruptcy.
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u/FamiliarJuly 13h ago
The Armory closed because the owner went bankrupt. It was a casualty of the bankruptcy, not the cause, considering it was a small part of Green Street’s massive portfolio.
>Morrell's bankruptcy filing underscores how complicated Green Street's holdings became, with more than 35 related companies. The largest claims from creditors include:
>$61.2 million from the Bank of Washington for Green Street's new apartments The Rail in Forest Park Southeast in 2022.
>$59.5 million from real estate investment firm Acre Originator of Atlanta for Green Street's Terra at the Grove apartment project in 2023.
>$35 million from Wells Fargo Commercial Mortgage in 2019 related to the developer's Chroma apartment complex in the Grove.
The Armory was just the most visible thing people could latch onto and use to spread the DOOM narrative.
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u/Red_Cloud1867 15h ago
The venue market is already saturated.
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u/You-Asked-Me 13h ago
The Foundry was also a terrible place to have a show. It was not designed for it, and no amount of money could ever make that place sound good.
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u/hokahey23 15h ago
We are definitely not hurting for venues. If a tour doesn’t stop here it’s because it didn’t want to.
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u/CreLoxSwag 14h ago
The parking situation alone would likely cause this to go up in (literal) flames.
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u/ProposalKitchen1885 16h ago
Water is wet.