The Side Project Rumor That Showed How Far Frenchtown Has Already Come

In May 2026, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Side Project Brewing, the Maplewood cult favorite that RateBeer twice ranked the second-best brewery on earth, had bought a building in St. Charles and was planning a tasting room, a food truck lot, and an outdoor patio. The location: a stretch of North Second Street in Frenchtown, sitting across from the old American Car Foundry campus and a few doors from the city's proposed new municipal complex.

Two days later, Side Project co-owner Cory King told St. Louis Magazine there was nothing new to report. The building had been sitting in the brewery's name for two years already, he said, and neither he nor anyone at Side Project knew the property would come up at a City Council meeting. A city-hired economic development consultant, Adam Glosier, had told the council the plan for the building was to turn it into exactly what the Post-Dispatch described. Whether that plan belongs to Side Project or simply to the site remains genuinely unresolved.

That ambiguity is the more interesting story. A brewery this decorated does not need to confirm anything for its name to attach itself, however loosely, to a specific corner of Frenchtown. The fact that a city planning consultant could describe a brewery-and-food-truck build-out for that building, unprompted, and have it sound entirely plausible to anyone paying attention, says something about how legible Frenchtown's comeback has become. The neighborhood has developed a recognizable next move, and enough people now recognize it that a rumor about the region's most acclaimed brewery didn't strike anyone as far-fetched.

The Corner Everyone's Suddenly Talking About

The building at the center of the rumor sits near North Second and North Main, directly across from the American Car Foundry campus, the sprawling industrial site where the St. Charles Car Company built freight cars starting in 1874 and where, at its 1890s peak, roughly 1,300 workers turned out railcars sold nationwide. That company merged into the American Car and Foundry Company in 1899, and the campus stayed industrial for most of the twentieth century.

Today one building on that same campus, a 1940s structure of about 36,800 square feet, operates as the Foundry Art Centre. Instead of demolishing the old train car factory, the region's arts community and city officials built artist studios on a mezzanine level with glass storefronts facing the floor below, so visitors can watch working artists rather than just browse a gallery wall. Studio space rents for $250 to $1,000 a month, which is not a typo compared to commercial rents almost anywhere else in St. Charles County.

That building is the proof of concept. It answered the question of whether an old industrial shell on this campus could actually support a functioning creative business, years before anyone floated a brewery for the building across the street.

What the City Already Put Money Behind

Frenchtown's revival is not purely private enthusiasm. Back in 2024, St. Charles started buying its way into this corner, and the plans on file go well beyond one building.

The parking purchase came out of a study that identified Frenchtown's lack of public parking as the main obstacle to attracting the coffee shops, retailers, and restaurants the city says it wants there. The city's own twenty-year plan calls for wider sidewalks, more public art, and a higher levee along the Missouri River, on top of the parking work. Whether the bond issue has since passed isn't something this piece can confirm, but the 2024 commitment of cash to land and planning is already on the public record. None of that spending guarantees Side Project or anyone else builds a taproom on that specific block. It does mean the city had already decided this corner was worth subsidizing well before the brewery rumor surfaced.

The Bars That Got There Before the Rumor

Good News Brewing did not wait for a bond issue. The Frenchtown location at 1121 North Second Street opened inside the old Frenchtown Heritage Museum building, and rather than displace the museum, the brewery built around it. The taproom keeps a retired AT&SF caboose as part of the décor and calls the combined space a "brewseum." Co-owner Dan Tripp has said the brewery wanted a spot in St. Charles but deliberately avoided Main Street, aiming instead for what he called a neighborhood place where people walk their dogs, and for the eclectic, art-district feel the neighborhood already had a reputation for.

That decision predates the Side Project rumor by years. So does La Belle Vie, the restaurant that opened on North Second and has become, by local accounts, a fast favorite with the people who actually live around it rather than visitors driving in for an event. So does the coffee roastery that now operates out of what was a vacant hardware store, and the roughly 30,000-square-foot indoor climbing gym that took over a former steel foundry building in 2020. Frenchtown's adaptive reuse habit was already established well before anyone discussed a brewery for a building near North Main.

The pattern across all of these projects is the same: take a structure built for nineteenth or twentieth century industry and give it a use nobody in Frenchtown's factory-era heyday would have predicted, without tearing down the shell that makes the building interesting in the first place. A caboose in a taproom. Artist studios behind glass on a factory mezzanine. Climbers on a wall where furnace crews once worked. Once you notice the pattern, a brewery rumor for the building across from all of it reads less like speculation and more like the neighborhood running its own playbook one more time.

What This Means If You Already Call Frenchtown Home

None of this requires anyone to decide whether Side Project actually opens a taproom on North Second Street. The building has sat under the brewery's name for two years without a public announcement, and it may sit that way for a while longer. What's already true, independent of that outcome, is that Frenchtown residents are living next to a neighborhood the city has committed real money to reshaping, on a timeline measured in decades rather than a single election cycle.

A few things worth watching if you're already in the neighborhood rather than evaluating it from outside. The parking study's recommendation for roughly 240 new public spaces across a dozen lots would change where you park for a Friday night at Good News or a Saturday afternoon at the Foundry Art Centre, especially once construction on any of it starts. The $84 million City Centre Complex proposal would mean city government activity moving into the American Car Foundry campus itself, which tends to bring daytime foot traffic that a neighborhood built mostly around nights and weekends doesn't currently have. And the murals already on North Second Street, including work by local artists Kenzie Wolk and Elizabeth Londen, are worth a walk regardless of what happens with any of the bigger projects. That kind of street art usually shows up before the investment dollars do, not after, and Frenchtown has had it for a while now.

The Side Project story will probably resolve one way or another before the year is out, either with an announcement or with the building quietly changing hands again. Either way, the neighborhood around it has already made its case.

If you're weighing a move into the St. Charles, Dardenne Prairie, or O'Fallon area and want a read on what a specific block or corridor is actually doing before you commit, Kristen Weld has spent years watching these Missouri and Illinois Metro East neighborhoods change one building at a time. Let's Connect.