In May, University City's mayor stood in front of cameras to talk about the largest Target in the St. Louis area opening inside the Market at Olive development. A month earlier, a room full of Clayton neighbors had sat through a Plan Commission hearing where the biggest worry was delivery trucks clogging an alley behind a coffee shop that hadn't opened yet and might not open until October. Both stories are about growth in the same stretch of the county, in the same spring. Neither one explains the other.
Clayton and University City share a neighborhood, and both have added real square footage this year. But the way that growth happened splits into two models that have almost nothing to do with which side of the map you're standing on. One track belongs to people who already run something nearby and are opening a second or third address a few blocks over. The other belongs to a project that took years and public financing to reach a ribbon cutting, with an anchor lineup that was locked in long before a single storefront opened its doors. Knowing which track you're looking at tells you something practical: whether a business is likely to still be there in five years, and whether showing up to complain about parking will actually change anything.
The corner that sat empty for five years
The Starbucks at Hanley Road and Wydown Boulevard in Clayton closed in 2021. A corporate franchise attempt to bring it back fell through, and the space sat dark for years on a corner that otherwise gets steady foot traffic. What finally filled it wasn't a chain. It was Matt McGuire, who already owns Louie and Wright's Tavern and opened Box Hill Grocer in Clayton last year. In April, Clayton's Plan Commission and Architectural Review Board approved a conditional-use permit letting McGuire convert the old Starbucks into Gigi's Cafe, a coffeehouse by day that turns into pizza and an Italian-style bar at night, directly across the street from his own steakhouse.
The plans call for about 2,200 square feet and 45 seats inside, plus patio room, with McGuire aiming for an October 2026 opening if construction and the final council vote stay on schedule. What stood out at the hearing wasn't the menu. It was how much the meeting resembled a conversation between neighbors rather than a zoning formality. A resident named Karen Fairbank raised concerns about parking and delivery trucks on the corner, then added, "I really want them there. I'm not objecting to it at all." McGuire, for his part, told commissioners he'd consider adding Sunday hours after members suggested it might benefit the neighborhood, something he hadn't originally planned. That's a business owner adjusting his schedule in real time because a room full of neighbors asked him to.
A sandwich outlived the restaurant it came from
A few blocks away, the same pattern shows up again. Dan Powers spent years running Boogaloo, the restaurant his father Tom Powers founded in 2005 with chef Mike Johnson, known for swinging bar seats and a sandwich menu built around a Cuban called the Cubaniche. Boogaloo closed in mid-2024, one of the restaurants that didn't make it back after the pandemic. In January of this year, Powers opened Toast & Thyme at 231 S. Bemiston, on the ground floor of the Bemiston Tower, in the space that used to be Metro Java Coffee House. The buildout needed only minor updates, with new crystal-and-steel chandeliers as the most visible change, and the 45-seat counter-service room now serves the Cubaniche again alongside a weekday menu built for office workers on a lunch break.
Like Gigi's, this is an operator filling a storefront based on what he already knows works nearby, on a short runway, with a menu shaped by direct feedback rather than a corporate test kitchen three states away.
Five miles west, the math runs on a different clock
Now compare that to Market at Olive, the 50-acre development at the southeast corner of Interstate 170 and Olive Boulevard, led by Seneca Commercial Real Estate and construction firm Clayco. University City approved up to $70 million in tax-increment financing for the project back in 2018, eight years before this year's biggest openings. Costco arrived first, in late October 2022, as the project's original anchor. Dierbergs opened its 28th store there on May 5 of this year, a 75,000-square-foot location employing more than 100 associates. Target followed in mid-May with what became the largest Target store in the St. Louis area, close to 148,000 square feet with its own two-level parking garage, adding about 270 jobs and a projected revenue figure the mayor put at around $60 million a year.
Both Dierbergs and Target had walked away from the project once before eventually returning. When the mayor went back to them years later, he told them the permitting and planning work was already done and the site was ready to go. Target's answer, by his account, was simply: "You are right." That's the difference in a sentence. The anchor roster at Market at Olive, which now also includes Chick-fil-A, Panera, Raising Cane's, First Watch, Chipotle, 7 Brew, Jersey Mike's, Sport Clips, AT&T, and Chase Bank, was negotiated as a package years in advance. None of those tenants showed up because a neighbor asked for Sunday hours.
The Loop's version of growth looks like Clayton's, not Olive's
The interesting wrinkle is that University City isn't only running the anchor-project model. The Delmar Loop had its own wave of small openings this spring that looks almost exactly like what happened in Clayton. Steven Pursley, who owns the acclaimed south city ramen shop Menya Rui, opened Kishimoto Mendo at 6394 Delmar, a tonkotsu-focused spot roughly twice the size of his original location. That same spring, University City also gained Dumplings Plus and CIBO Italia. These are operators expanding on their own terms, in existing storefronts, on a timeline measured in months rather than years.
The one detail that complicates a clean split: a new location of Corner 17 opened not on the Loop strip itself but inside the new Dierbergs at Market at Olive. Even a wave of small, operator-driven openings has one foot planted inside the anchor project a few miles away. And the Loop has its own capital-scale project underway too. LOCAL on Delmar, a five-story, 259-unit residential building with street-level retail and an outdoor dining patio, is finishing construction on the Loop's western edge near Washington University this year. It's smaller than Market at Olive, but it runs on the same clock: years of planning and financing before a single lease gets signed, with a tenant mix decided long before move-in day.
What the split actually means if you live here
The honest version of this neighborhood isn't "Clayton is quaint and University City is corporate." Both places are running both models at once. The single-operator additions, Gigi's Cafe, Toast & Thyme, Kishimoto Mendo, Dumplings Plus, CIBO Italia, move fast, answer to actual neighbors in public meetings, and can shift hours or add a Sunday shift within a season because one person is making that call. The capital-project additions, Market at Olive's anchor lineup and LOCAL on Delmar's 259 units, took years of land assembly, financing, and tenant negotiation before anyone could walk through a door, and the site plan was fixed well before most residents knew the project had a name.
If you're hoping a business changes something, that distinction matters. Showing up to a Plan Commission meeting moved the needle on Sunday hours at a 2,200-square-foot cafe. It's a different conversation entirely when the anchor list was locked into a TIF agreement back in 2018.
Kim Jones tracks this kind of detail across every corner of West County, the small openings and the years-long anchor deals alike, because understanding how a neighborhood actually grows is part of understanding what it's like to live in it. If you're weighing a move into Clayton, University City, or anywhere nearby, Kim Jones is worth a call before you start touring houses. You can also start with a home valuation to see where your own corner of the market stands.
