Up St. Louis!

For sure, St. Louis has been seeing some great strides in urban progress. I'd be remiss not to mention the news of Centene moving their corporate headquarters from Clayton to downtown's Ballpark Village, which gives the BV a new direction in, and impetus for, life. It has been mentioned in almost every urban blog in the city:

Urban Review STL
St. Louis Business Journal
STLtoday.com
Mayor Slay's Desk
PUB DEF
clearview
STL Rising
Vanishing STL


In other news, the Power House is about to be renovated:

At Home
STLtoday.com


Lumiere Place is almost finished:

Lumiere Place's website
St. Louis Business Journal

In other news this week, Wachovia bought A.G. Edwards, and is moving their headquarters to St. Louis. Admittedly, whether they actually move to the city of St. Louis, or out to a suburb is still unknown, and if they move A.G. Edwards's [significant] staff out of the city, it will be a major blow to the city's economy. However, it would seem more practical to move into A.G. Edwards's existing infrastructure, which was expanded by 1,000,000 sq. ft. in 2003. There is plenty of land nearby the current headquarters that can be further developed if necessary. Hopefully we'll see an influx of new jobs and residents in the city. Although losing a large corporation like Wachovia is a major event for a city of any size, Charlotte has seen unprecedented growth over the past decade, so hopefully they'll absorb the loss with little trouble to their city's economy.

Also this week, Pyramid Companies announced a $450 million dollar project to renovate and develop 6 blocks downtown (an area completely encompassing our old offices... man I wish we still worked downtown!) into a mixed use district to be called the Mercantile Exchange (presumably due to the nearby Mercantile building which anchors that area):

KSDK
STLtoday.com
Pyramid's website
Dawn Griffin
UrbanSTL
life as interns


Also huge downtown revitalization news that is the less recent, but still worth mentioning, Crown Village development, which has been going like gang busters ever since they got their funding a little more than a month ago.

What's New in Old North
Crown Village website
UrbanSTL
Ecology of Absence

Wow, what a great time for the city of St. Louis! I can't wait to see all of these projects at their completion. St. Louis is really becoming a destination city again.

UPDATE: For the record, STLtoday.com has published an article today that sums up this great week of announcements... but in a more professional, thorough, journalistic fashion than my lowly 'blog. The blog being a device so informal its very name is derived from a contraction which was adopted immediately after it was invented. [I strenuously object to Wikipedia's claim the the word blog is a portmanteau. It's not a portmanteau, it's a contraction. Web log... weblog... 'blog. A portmanteau would be like wog or something.]