Cortex Aims High
BY NICOLAS HINSCH
Of all of the neighborhoods in the City of St. Louis, few are changing faster than the area of midtown between the Washington University Medical Center and Saint Louis University. Previously pockmarked by post-industrial ruins, it is rapidly becoming a new hub for the science and technology industries in St. Louis. Its transformation is largely thanks to the efforts of Cortex, a development agency formed by a consortium of institutions including Washington University, Saint Louis University, UMSL, BJC Healthcare, and the Missouri Botanical Garden that is seeking to breathe new life into the neighborhood and contribute to local economic development.
After many years of slow progress, the district has begun to develop rapidly over the past year, and more projects are just over the horizon. Most notably, a former telephone factory has just been converted into a new office building known as @4240, which will be anchored by a startup accelerator called the Cambridge Innovation Center. In a coup for St. Louis, this location will be the accelerator’s first outside of its original home in the Boston metropolitan area and is designed to house up to 100 new startup companies.
If all goes as planned, this project will soon be joined by TechShop, a co-operative workshop space where members can access professional-grade tools and equipment for prototyping new devices. This project found a champion in Jim McKelvey, a Washington University alumnus, fixture of the St. Louis technology scene, and co-founder of the mobile payment company Square. McKelvey used a TechShop location in California to develop the prototype of his company’s signature credit card reader.
Several more projects are in the pipeline for the more distant future, and a new MetroLink station is planned at Boyle Avenue, which would provide a link from the district to other key destinations in the Central Corridor as well as Lambert Airport. While bringing new incubators, office space, and amenities to midtown is welcome news in itself, Cortex’s true ambitions are much greater: to create a more authentic and desirable urban neighborhood that is active at all times of the day. In order to accomplish this goal, Cortex is pursuing retail and residential projects to complement the new offices and laboratories.
Perhaps the most well known project planned for the Cortex district – and the one most immediately relevant to Washington University students – is St. Louis’s first IKEA store, which will surely supply future generations of students with an abundance of affordable particle-board Swedish furniture. This store, to be built just west of the Saint Louis University campus, is likely to spur additional retail development nearby when it opens in 2015. The district has also recently issued a request for proposals from developers to build a new mid-rise residential development immediately north of the prominent grain silos in the area, and additional housing projects are expected in the future.
While the sudden emergence of all of these projects has been encouraging, there are signs that Cortex’s vision of a walkable, truly mixed-use community may not be fully realized. The new IKEA store is a traditional auto-oriented big box that one might expect to find in Brentwood and will do nothing to make the area friendlier for pedestrians. Similarly, a new BJC office building constructed adjacent to the future MetroLink station is surrounded by a parking lot and green space. If Cortex continues to develop as it has so far, it may fall short of its goal to create an urban neighborhood and instead create what amounts to a glorified office park.
Cortex’s redevelopment efforts are to be commended and are clearly bearing fruit. It seems likely that Cortex will meet its goal in bringing new economic vitality to midtown St. Louis. It remains to be seen if its projects will add up to something more than the sum of their parts.