Laclede's Lament

Tolen says that retailers couldn't last because the LLRC never pushed the district as a shopping destination. Advertising promotions concentrated on the nightlife, leaving the retailers to fend for themselves. Nightlife attractions drew the twentysomethings, but by day, the Landing was largely silent.

"Tom [Purcell] didn't fight for retail," maintains Tolen. "Any time I would bring it up, I was ignored."

Lois Lobbig and her husband, Donald, have owned Gibbol's Costumes and Novelties for 24 years and have little good to say about Purcell or Clark's efforts to make retail viable in the Landing.

"They'd go outside the area to buy their supplies," she says. "One time during a Mardi Gras celebration they went out and bought masks. They never even asked us if we had them. Why wouldn't they buy the masks from us?"

"It's a tough nut to crack," counters John Clark. "The last retail that I remember that was serious retail and not bullshit retail -- I know, retail's retail -- was Overland Trading." The small shops that attract only tourists, he adds, have had a hard time enduring the winter season.

"I don't know how you can make it work," muses Clark. "The Arch is packed, but it all happens in three or four months."

Through thick and thin, Nan Tolen stuck it out, and even contemplated opening a grocery store in the Landing. She says she constantly heard talk of condominiums that never materialized.

"We were promised and promised, and I said I'd believe it when I see it. But I never saw it." Disillusioned, she closed the shop last year, saying bitterly, "It had become a cut-throat community."

Tom Purcell defends the sluggish pace of the Landing's evolution. The buildings are occupied, he points out, and there are some major employers, including Metro and Access US, an Internet service provider.

"In 1981, you have three buildings," says Purcell. "Now you have 25. We have a million feet of office space, and we're at about 90 percent occupancy. We showed that rehab had a demand and could be done.

"We showed that there was demand for mixed-use. It could be office, it could be commercial, it could be hotel -- and now it's being residential. We gave credibility to the riverfront. I think sometimes we forget sometimes what we started with: 100 percent vacant, total obsolescence."

Still, says Rich Frame, the Landing faces an uphill battle.

"The problem with districts," Frame concludes, "whether it be Washington Avenue or the Landing or this Bottle District or Ballpark Village, is that all of them hang on for a while. And then all of a sudden: poof."

In the late 1990s, Sam Glasser was the only inhabitant of Laclede's Landing, living in a loft in the Old Judge Coffee Building, which he owned. "I look back on it as a funny little era of my life," recalls the New York City native. "I could have made a significant impression when I was voting. I could have skewed the census."

When he first approached the LLRC about turning the top floor of his building into a residential loft, the St. Louis developer says he was baffled by the opposition he encountered.

"In any city in America, that would have been the loft district. They were nineteenth-century red brick buildings, five, six stories. For some reason, under Purcell's aegis, it never went residential. It was weird."

Until recently, notes Purcell, the notion of housing on the Landing was impractical. The one residential complex overlooking the river, the Mansion House, had struggled. "We always had the plan, commercial, office, hotel and residential and always stuck with the plan," insists Purcell. "Those things happen at different times. But we have remained loyal to our original idea."

Glasser finally convinced the board to allow him to build his dream loft, and he grew to love his neighborhood. "I knew it intimately," he recalls. "I loved it, especially in the winter, when you'd have it all to yourself. The sound of horses -- clip-clop-clip-clop -- down the old streets was very charming, like old Europe or something.

"There was a mist that came off the river in the wintertime. The arch grounds were pretty much left to me, since nobody else lived down there. It was like owning a little city."

Now this little city is in the hands of John Clark. Sitting in the back room of his restaurant, Jake's Steaks, Clark jokes about being the Landing's solitary resident. "It's a very lonely thing," he says with sarcasm. "Out in the middle of nowhere with the tumbleweed, nothing to eat, nothing to drink, nothing to do. I'm bored."

A straight-shooter who speaks without concern for politics or propriety, Clark has worn many hats on the Landing. He opened rock club Lucius Boomer in 1978, Jake's Steaks in 1991, and seven years later, he bought from Glasser the Old Judge Coffee Building.

Clark says he never wanted to head the LLRC, but when Purcell retired from the post in 2003 after 27 years, the corporation needed someone to take charge.

"The joke," Clark recalls of a board meeting late last year, "was they threw the keys across the table. 'Here, you do it.' And I said, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm just bitching about the way you're doing it. I don't want to do this crap.'" The next day, he changed his mind and accepted the position.