The Railway Exchange Building was the heart of downtown St. Louis for a century. Every day, locals crowded into the sprawling, ornate 21-story office building to go to work, shop at the department store that filled its lower floors or dine on the famous French onion soup at its restaurant.
Today, the building sits empty, with many of its windows boarded up. A fire broke out last year, which authorities suspect was the work of copper thieves. Police and firefighters send in occasional raids to search for missing people or to roust squatters. A search dog died during one of the raids last year when it fell through an open window.
“It’s a very dangerous place,” said Dennis Jenkerson, the St. Louis Fire Department chief.
It anchors a neighborhood with deserted sidewalks sprinkled with broken glass and tiny pieces of copper pipes left behind by scavengers. Signs suggest visitors should “park in well-lit areas.” Nearby, the city’s largest office building—the 44-story
Tower, now empty—recently sold for around $3.5 million.
Cities such as San Francisco and Chicago are trying to save their downtown office districts from spiraling into a doom loop. St. Louis is already trapped in one.
As offices sit empty, shops and restaurants close and abandoned buildings become voids that suck the life out of the streets around them. Locals often find boarded-up buildings depressing and empty sidewalks scary. So even fewer people commute downtown.
This self-reinforcing cycle accelerated in recent years as the pandemic emptied offices. St. Louis’s central business district had the steepest drop in foot traffic of 66 major North American cities between the start of the pandemic and last summer, according to the University of Toronto’s School of Cities. Traffic has improved some in the past 12 months, but at a slower rate than many Midwestern cities.
On a recent Tuesday morning, few people are on the streets on a 15-block stretch that makes up much of the southern portion of the St. Louis office district. Two empty storefronts exist for each open one. The office district’s northern half is a bit more lively, but not by much. Good luck finding a clothing store. There isn’t even a McDonald’s. Violent crime is rare, but car break-ins are common.
The price for the AT&T Tower, three blocks from the Railway Exchange, was a sliver of the $205 million it sold for in 2006. Its value has been falling for years. In 2022, it changed hands for just $4 million.
Jack O’Connor, who tends bar downtown at Hayden’s Irish Pub, looks out on the Railway Exchange Building across the street. Last year the city demolished a bridge connecting the building to the parking garage across the road because people kept using it to break in to the Exchange building. After intruders kicked and sawed through the plywood covering ground-floor windows, a security firm recently installed steel plates. But people keep breaking in.
“I once saw like six teenagers with skateboards and GoPros get in there,” O’Connor said. A police officer showed up and berated the kids. “They just kind of sauntered off,” he said. “But they’ve been back.”
When the pandemic broke out in 2020 and millions of employees got used to working from home, pundits predicted the demise of big coastal cities. But office districts in New York, Miami and Boston have bounced back better than skeptics feared. The nascent boom in the artificial intelligence industry is even starting to attract some businesses back to San Francisco.
It’s the cities far from the coasts that are suffering most. Six of the 10 U.S. office districts with the steepest drop in foot traffic between 2019 and mid-2023 are in the Midwest, according to the University of Toronto.
As in other Midwestern cities, the St. Louis office district has suffered a slow demise for decades. Population loss, competition from newer offices in the suburbs and failed urban planning left behind a glut of dreary, empty buildings and wide, dangerous roads. The business district has few apartments. There are some tourists, but not enough to make up for missing office workers.
“It’s a classic chicken and egg kind of deal,” said Glenn MacDonald, a professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis’s Olin Business School. “People don’t go there because there’s nothing to do. There’s nothing to do because people don’t go there.”
The St. Louis office district’s downward spiral picked up steam when the department store—by then a
Macy’s—shut down at the Railway Exchange Building in 2013 amid a wave of department-store closures in downtowns across the country. Not long after, offices in the building—the city’s second biggest after the AT&T Tower—emptied out.
Four years later, AT&T moved out of the building that carried its name.
Nearby shops and restaurants suddenly had fewer customers, so they closed or moved. Next came the parking garage across the street from the Railway Exchange.
