Why the Lot Next to The Boulevard Sat Empty for a Decade, and What Finally Filled It

Drive south on Brentwood Boulevard past the Galleria and you will pass two sites that have been under some form of construction fencing, demolition scaffolding, or "coming soon" signage for what feels like your entire time in Richmond Heights. One is the vacant lot just south of The Boulevard's original Crate & Barrel and Maggiano's strip. The other is the old two-story Nordstrom, gutted and being rebuilt inside the mall itself.

Both sites finally have real answers this year. Neither answer is what residents were originally told to expect.

The Lot That Kept Changing Its Mind

The empty parcel south of The Boulevard has been "about to become something" since at least 2016, when Chicago-based Condor Properties and Edwards Realty moved to acquire the land under the name CE Boulevard I LLC. At the time, NextSTL reported the plan called for a $78.9 million mixed-use project with up to 95,000 square feet of retail and dining, 30,000 square feet of office space, and somewhere between 50 and 165 residential units. A 23-year tax increment financing package was recommended to help make it happen.

That version did not get built. A later round of planning, covered by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Building Blocks column, scaled the project up to roughly $100 million, with about 200,000 square feet of new retail, 100,000 square feet of office space, 75 apartments, a parking garage, and a sky bridge connecting the office building to the garage. The target opening was the end of 2019. Developer Sol Barket, a St. Louis native and founder of Condor Partners, described the existing Boulevard as

a great brand that appeals to many residents and visitors in the St. Louis region

and said the next phase would build on it.

That version did not get built either.

Here is what actually changed hands and broke ground, according to a St. Louis Post-Dispatch report from July 3, 2026:

Look at the middle column. The cost roughly doubled from the 2016 pitch to the 2019 target, then nearly doubled again under the $195.6 million estimate a 2024 city report put on the current plan. But the office space did not just shrink between the second and third versions. It disappeared entirely.

What's Actually Going Up Now

The project that is finally moving forward belongs to Midas Hospitality, the local developer that bought the land back in 2022, working alongside Minnesota-based Life Time. The plan calls for Life Time Living: 263 apartments, a 110,000-square-foot "athletic country club," a 30,000-square-foot pool, and retail space at 1120 South Brentwood Boulevard. It will be Life Time's first residential project anywhere in the St. Louis region. The city of Richmond Heights has already approved $34.9 million in tax incentives for the development, though a construction timeline had not been disclosed as of the July report.

Life Time already operates fitness clubs in Frontenac, Ellisville, and Creve Coeur, so the brand is not new to the region. What is new is pairing that fitness format directly with apartments, on a site that two earlier developers had pitched as an office and retail complex.

Across Brentwood Boulevard, the Mall Made the Same Bet

You do not have to walk far from that lot to find the same pattern playing out a second time. Nordstrom closed its Galleria location in August 2025, ending a long run as one of the mall's anchor department stores. According to reporting cited by Hoodline in April 2026, the Galleria was running at about 83 percent occupancy in 2025, the same year Nordstrom pulled out, a number that does not read like a mall in crisis. The departure looks less like a building problem and more like department stores losing their footing as a format.

What is replacing the full Nordstrom footprint is not another department store. Construction crews were actively converting the entire two-floor space into an "experiential retail concept" as of that April report, with a Nordstrom spokesperson confirming to KMOV/First Alert 4 that DICK'S House of Sport would eventually move in. The format mixes sporting goods retail with turf fields, batting cages, climbing walls, event areas, and rentable activity time rather than standard aisles of merchandise. No opening date had been made public as of that reporting.

Dillard's and Macy's remain the Galleria's other anchors, and the mall's beauty cluster, Sephora, L'Occitane, Lush, and Bath & Body Works, is still intact, according to a current Galleria tenant summary. A separate Nordstrom Rack store still operates nearby, so the brand has not left the corridor entirely. It is specifically the full-line department store model that got swapped out for a place built around movement rather than browsing.

Why the Office Space Vanished

Put the two stories next to each other and the pattern is hard to miss. Two different property owners, working on two different sites under two different ownership groups, both looked at what this stretch of Brentwood Boulevard needed and landed on the same answer: not more square footage for people to commute to, and not more square footage for people to shop in, but square footage for people to work out, gather, and live in.

That shift lines up with something the city has been trying to fix for a long time. Richmond Heights peaked at 15,622 residents in the 1960 Census and had fallen to just 8,603 by 2010, according to figures cited in earlier reporting on the neighborhood's redevelopment push. The city now describes its population as nearly 10,000, a slow climb back from that low point, built in large part on apartment projects like the original Boulevard. Another 263 units at Life Time Living continues that same math. An office building does not add residents. An apartment building does.

What This Means If You Already Live Here

If your daily walk, drive, or dog route already passes this corner of Richmond Heights, here is the practical version of all this: expect construction activity to continue on both sites without a firm end date yet announced for either one. The Life Time Living project has incentives approved and land in hand but no publicized groundbreaking date. The Galleria's DICK'S House of Sport conversion is further along physically, with crews inside the former Nordstrom space, but also without a confirmed opening.

What is worth watching for as a neighbor rather than a shopper is the shift in what actually shows up at street level once both open. A fitness club and 263 new households bring a different rhythm to a block than a nine-to-five office tower would have. So does a sports-and-activity anchor in place of a traditional department store. The corridor is not getting smaller. It is getting rearranged around a different set of daily habits than the ones it was originally planned around a decade ago.

If you have questions about how development like this tends to ripple into home values or rental demand in the surrounding blocks of Richmond Heights, Maplewood, and Brentwood, that is exactly the kind of local pattern worth talking through with someone who tracks it closely. Kristen Weld has spent more than 17 years watching how projects like this play out across the St. Louis market. Let's Connect if you want a read on what it means for your corner of the neighborhood.