Barriers & Blessings Ep. 2: How the Golden Era of Shopping in St. Louis (and School Fortunes) Moved West
Barriers & Blessings — How Commercial Prosperity Shapes School Success, is a continuation of FTF’s Still Separate, Still Unequal advocacy & accountability tool for Education Equity.
By: Cristian Vargas, MPH, and Karishma Furtado, PhD, MPH
The stories that we tell ourselves about education inequity often ignore the historical trends and present-day structural factors that can make or break student success. Instead, a burden of blame is typically forced onto the shoulders of individual Black and Brown students.
Barriers & Blessings — How Commercial Prosperity Shapes School Success, is a continuation of FTF’s Still Separate, Still Unequal advocacy & accountability tool for Education Equity. Follow along with us for this latest series, where we’ll detail the central relationship between commercial property development and education outcomes, and the disproportionate impact that relationship has on students across the St. Louis region.
Check out the rest of the Barriers & Blessings series:
• Episode 1 • Episode 3 • Episode 4 • Episode 5 •
Once upon a time, St. Louis was a shopping mecca. For those who had access to its rarefied department stores, it was a sight to behold: floor upon floor upon floor of retail abundance. In the early 1900s, St. Louis was home to three retail giants: Famous-Barr (now Macy’s); Scruggs, Vandervoort and Barney (now bankrupt); and Stix, Baer and Fuller (now Dillard’s). Famous-Barr came to be from a merger between William Barr Dry Goods Co. and the Famous Clothing Store in 1911. A few years later, Famous-Barr moved into the iconic Railway Exchange building in downtown St. Louis, which at the time was the largest building in the city and one of the first air-conditioned department stores in the country. It offered 10 floors of shopping and entertainment, including 7 restaurants.
Christmastime downtown was especially magical due to the competition among the department stores to lure shoppers. Massive and lavish window displays drew in passersby. One year, Famous-Barr had three small bears in the windows. Another year, it featured the animals of the 12 days of Christmas. The 9th floor was a full Santa’s Village. The stores and their pageantry showcasing extravagant merchandise became important symbols of the downtown economy, and Famous-Barr’s financial success, especially, catapulted it to its status as one of the largest department stores in the world at the time.
Eventually, the post-WWII economic boom and White flight out of the city encouraged Famous-Barr to begin expanding. The growing economic influence of the ever-expanding suburbs ignited an arms race between the “Big Three” retail giants as each tried to woo this powerful customer base. The proliferation of shopping centers would shape the economic landscape in St. Louis for decades to come.
Retail Heads Westward
“Local officials recognized very early the peril and promise of their proximity to St. Louis, and they used zoning to draw commercial (especially professional) interests out from the City… The results were impressive: A number of longstanding St. Louis firms moved their corporate headquarters out to Clayton, tax revenues climbed, and investors new to the area saw Clayton as an attractive suburban alternative (newer construction, safer, closer to suburban homes and golf courses) to the downtown.” — Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline
With the downtown business district approaching its peak, Famous-Barr opened its first suburban expansion in Clayton in 1948 and would continue to expand in subsequent years. Clayton was quickly becoming a bustling commercial hub, and businesses located in the city took notice of the rapid outward migration from the urban core. Stix, Baer & Fuller (now Dillard’s), one of Famous-Barr’s other major St. Louis-based competitors, opened the Westroads Shopping Center in Richmond Heights soon after, which would later become the St. Louis Galleria. Business boomed as the suburbs continued to draw commerce and customers away from the city’s center. Attempts to revitalize downtown retail markets, such as the 1985 grand opening of the St. Louis Centre, fizzled out as suburban shopping centers continued to multiply.
After a $45 million renovation and expansion that transformed Westroads into the present-day Galleria in 1986, the downtown business core declined even further. Eventually, in 1991, Famous-Barr decided to relocate from Clayton to the Galleria to serve as its second anchor. They also continued to operate their almost defunct downtown location until 2006, when Macy’s acquired Famous-Barr. After years of anemic sales performance, Macy’s decided to close the building for good in 2013. The suburbs were the new promised land.
Commercial Wealth Flows into West County Schools
These commercial windfalls, in combination with high home values, has enabled the Clayton School District and its West County neighbors to far outspend their regional counterparts. The evidence shows that more school funding consistently results in better outcomes for students, as seen in higher test scores, higher graduation rates, and higher future incomes. And given the overreliance on local property taxes to fund schools in Missouri, prosperous businesses in these districts directly translate into better-resourced schools. As we will see, these commercial riches did not flow so easily everywhere. In the next episode, we’ll follow Famous Barr’s ill-fated attempt to move north.
Revisit Episode 1, and be on the lookout for Episode 3 which will continue the story on July 28th.
Want to Know More? Check out these Resources:
- Still Separate, Still Unequal: A Call to Level the Uneven Educational Playing Field in St. Louis by Forward Through Ferguson. An in-depth tool examining the root causes of education outcome disparities in our region.
- 5 Things to Advance Equity in State Funding Systems by The Education Trust. An overview of evidence-based recommendations for improving funding equity between low-poverty and high-poverty school districts.
- Find the data for this episode here.
- Meet our friends working in the education equity space: the Education Equity Center of St. Louis, an organization that advances a regional approach to achieving full racial equity in education by building anti-racist capacity towards systems-level practices and policy changes.
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