21 St. Louis Malls and Stores That Are Gone But Not Forgotten

Streetside Records
If you wanted a record store with a great selection that had none of the annoying record store vibes, Streetside Records was your favorite place in St. Louis. Instead of hiring only music nerds, this place also hired kids who were happy to help customers — but also happy to goof off a bit, too. The CD selection was primo and because they bought CDs off of the public, the selection was always changing, too. It was like each Streetside location had a whole new inventory each week, which kept St. Louis shoppers coming back for more. This photo shows the ones that was on the Loop, near the Tivoli. (RIP to the Tivoli, too.)

Famous-Barr
Every St. Louisan of a certain age has fond memories of visiting the Famous-Barr location in downtown St. Louis on the corner of Olive and North Sixth streets. It was the first air-conditioned department store in the country and considered a cosmopolitan destination back in the golden age of downtown when it was bustling with business and shoppers. Hundreds of people shuffled past the big display windows each day on their way to work, with many stopping to stare at the enchanting designs. Sadly, that magic didn’t last. Famous-Barr was sold to Macy’s in 2006 and Macy’s closed the downtown store in 2013.

Union Station Mall
Union Station is still open and thriving, thank goodness, but the Union Station Mall experienced a slow, painful death. It opened in 1985 after a $150 million renovation of the former train station, with amenities including a hotel, restaurants and a food court. But the mall couldn’t survive the retail apocalypse and the stores closed one by one. The space has since been redesigned to host something much better, though: the St. Louis Aquarium.

Nagle’s
Nagle’s loved weirdos and weirdos loved Nagle’s. The Florissant five-and-dime stayed strange to the end, too. When it closed in 2016, long-time shoppers flocked to the store to score discounts on everything from lava lamps to a farting alarm clock. Back in the 1980s, this bizarro shop was the best spot in town to get Troll dolls. They had every kind available and in every color, too. It was also the best place to stop if you were throwing a party because the balloon section was huge and there were so many gift options.

National
St. Louis grocery shoppers are currently split into two gangs: Team Schnucks and Team Dierbergs. Team Schnucks says their stores are the best because they’re affordable and they’re everywhere (even, gasp, the city). But Team Dierbergs says they’re the best because they’re not actually expensive anymore, but they still provide a slower, more relaxed grocery-buying experience.
But back in the day it was National stores that were the kings of St. Louis. This cheap grocery chain had everything, and it was all dirt cheap. They even had their own line of inexpensive basics. The Nationals stores were sold to Schnucks in 1995 and our wallets have been crying about it ever since.

Library Ltd.
Library Ltd. hopped around St. Louis a bit before landing on the corner of Forsyth Boulevard and Hanley Road in Clayton. The beloved bookstore was unlike any other in town because the selection was outstanding. While at chains like Borders you’d find the same stuff in stores across the nation, Library Ltd. always carried weird St. Louis-specific books along with a huge ever-changing collection of photography books and the hottest titles of the time. The multi-level store was wonderfully quiet, and the employees didn’t mind if you camped out all day researching something for your college paper or just getting lost in your favorite book. It was the perfect cross between a bookstore and a library.

St. Louis Centre
When it opened in 1985, St. Louis Centre was the largest urban shopping mall in the entire country. The downtown mall had more than 150 stores and 20 restaurants inside and not only did it have a Dillard’s and a Famous-Barr, it was also the corporate headquarters of the May Company — the company that owned Famous-Barr. The mall was very popular until the St. Louis Galleria was redeveloped in 1991. St. Louis Centre survived all the way until 2006, when the struggling ol’ girl was finally put out of her misery.

Northwest Plaza
Northwest Plaza opened in 1965 and was once the largest shopping center in the world. Designed by Louis Zorensky, it was originally an open-air mall that featured four department stores, 210 shops, a movie theater and 9,000 parking spots. Northwest Plaza closed in 2010.

Crestwood Mall
This is definitely the most-missed dead mall in the entire St. Louis area. Always crawling with teenagers, Crestwood Mall was the perfect place to loiter during the golden era of “meet you at the mall.” Opened in 1957, it was the first major mall in the St. Louis area and it lived on (in some form or another) all the way until May 2016, when it was demolished. The land it was on sat unused for a long time, but now it’s the hottest property in Crestwood with a brand new Dierbergs built on the spot with an expensive new neighborhood of McBride Homes being built right next door to it.

Jamestown Mall
Jamestown Mall was once the hottest place to be in Florissant but it’s now one of the area’s most missed dead malls. It was half-dead long before its closure in 2014 but for a while there, it had everything. It had Sears, Famous Barr and Stix, Baer & Fuller as anchor stores and there was a movie theater, too. Old ladies loved to grab lunch upstairs in the restaurant at the Dillard’s and kids loved to kick it on the main level at Aladdin’s Arcade. The inside of the mall was filled with large sculptures and plenty of greenery, giving it a uniquely lush look for a retail location.

Herman's Toggery
All of the fanciest men in town used to shop at Herman’s Toggery. Located in the heart of Maplewood, Herman’s was the best place to shop if you were on a mission to look dapper. They had suits displayed in the windows and a large selection inside. You’d probably have to save up before a visit, though. Herman’s was not necessarily known as affordable.

Stix, Baer & Fuller
Stix, Baer & Fuller was St. Louis’ favorite department store. Most people couldn’t afford the high-end fashions offered there, but that didn’t stop them from getting dressed up and going downtown to pretend like they could afford them. (The first location was on Washington Avenue between Sixth and Seventh streets and it took up an entire city block.) The store was high-style, too, with a gorgeous interior and an opulent atmosphere. The company operated from 1892 until 1984, but found it impossible to compete with national chain department stores like Famous-Barr and it was later sold to Dillard’s.

Ben Franklin
The Ben Franklin arts and crafts chain was the best because not only did they sell glue and paint and all of that good stuff, they also served as a five-and-dime store. That meant that alongside canvases and crayons, you could buy weirdo doll heads, little joke books or a cheap plastic flower vase. This photo shows a Ben Franklin in Bowling Green, but everybody knows that the best Ben Franklin shop anywhere was the one in Webster Groves near the Bob Cassilly-designed apple chairs in Old Orchard Park.

Circuit City
Like, why go to Best Buy when you could go to Circuit City? Not only could you get hot deals on the best electronics of the time, they also had a large selection of compact disks available back when that was an important thing to have. Even if you were stuck somewhere out in the deep suburbs without a good record store nearby, you could count on Circuit City to have all of the latest music. You could even swing by Circuit City on the day that Radiohead’s OK Computer was released in 1997, buy it, then spend the day listening to it and getting lost in the matrix while your heart explodes. (Oddly specific, huh?)

Sports Authority
You might’ve thought that just the Sports Authority near your house closed, but – nope – all of the stores in the chain closed in 2016. At its peak, Sports Authority had 463 stores in 45 states and Puerto Rico. Here in St. Louis, we always dropped into Sports Authority to find great deals for kids who played on team sports. They had a great variety of colorful baseball and soccer gear along with a good selection of hockey stuff, too, along with a ton of Cardinals and Blues merchandise.

Venture
Back before Target took over the world, one of the best places to shop for clothes and housewares and pretty much anything else you needed was Venture. They had some of the best cheap kids’ clothes around your grandma was really into getting clearance bedding there and stocking up on mixing bowls, too. If you put your trust in Venture, their bold striped design would always lead the way to deals. (And kids love the frozen drinks there, too.)

Steinmart
Steinmart was such a retail monster that it survived the internet and Amazon. It was finally taken down by the pandemic in August 2020, but before that it was a mighty department store chain that was a favorite with St. Louis shoppers. Kind of like a fancier Ross store, Steinmart was stuffed with clothes, decor and more. If you had a good eye, you could even spot some designer deals at Steinmart, too, and they seemed to always have piles of Cardinals gear on hand for rabid fans.

Borders
Yeah, it was a chain, but we loved the crap out of it. A big room stuffed with every book you could ever want and some nice squishy chairs in which to read them? Borders was the pre-internet dream. Now you can order all of these books (for much cheaper) from Amazon or just have them zapped to your Kindle in a matter of seconds, but at Borders you got to smell that book smell while browsing shelves full of things you didn’t even know you wanted until you saw them. It was a different time. There were many Borders locations across St. Louis, but the one in Brentwood was the best. Why? We’re not sure, but the vibe was chillest there.

Service Merchandise
This store had all the best stuff. Everyone loved this place because it was basically the perfect gift-buying store. They had toys, sporting goods, jewelry — basically anything that would be just right to stuff into a stocking or wrap up with a little bow on top. They were also known for the extremely helpful employees who seemed specially trained to walk clueless husbands through buying gifts for their wives. We thought they’d be around forever, too, because they were early adopters of the internet, but the company shut down in 2002. Clueless husbands have been crying ever since.

Wild Oats
This Colorado-based hippie grocery company was a big hit in St. Louis before all of the granola moms got obsessed with Whole Foods. Wild Oats was crunchy before crunchy was cool. They offered gluten-free and dairy-free options before those could be found in most stores and it seemed like all of the employees wore brown suede Birkenstock clogs. The juice bar was always poppin’, too. We hear that Ozzie Smith frequently stopped in for a wheatgrass shot at the Chesterfield location.