11.15.2006 4:31 pm
Shopping, stadiums and a stump speech
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
The RCGA leadership trip to Atlanta is over, I’ve caught up on sleep and cleaned out my inbox. Now it’s time to pull a few final tidbits of information out of the notebooks and the memory banks.
- While we were listening to the developers of Atlantic Station (see previous post), Scott Schnuck played hooky to do a little shopping. The Schnuck Markets CEO wanted to check out a Publix supermarket that’s part of Atlantic Station’s first phase. He came back underwhelmed after seeing aisles nearly devoid of shoppers. Presumably, he said, Publix was convinced that Atlantic Station will be a viable development and wanted to get in early, before a competitor can get a foothold. Atlantic Station is eventually supposed to house 10,000 people but isn’t nearly there yet, as its major residential towers have yet to be built.
- We had lunch in the club section of Turner Field, site of a glorious Braves victory (over the Astros) that sent the Cardinals into the playoffs. But the first thing that one notices isn’t the Braves logo, the statues of famous players or the giant Coca-Cola sign. It’s the acres of parking around the stadium. The land, less than 10 minutes’ drive from downtown and adjacent to an interstate highway, has to be tremendously valuable, but apparently no one has yet come up with a Ballpark Village proposal for Atlanta. As a result, the stadium seems cut off both from downtown and from the residential neighborhood next door.
- After each presentation by an Atlantan, a member of the St. Louis group was selected to give a response. Most of them repeated the speaker’s main points and made a brief comparison to the situation back home. St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley used his time to give a partly autobiographical state-of-the-county speech. It was well received by the St. Louis delegates, with some saying it helped them get to know Dooley better. But one person, whom I’ll allow to remain anonymous here, came up with the quip of the trip. He said out loud, “That’s OK, Charlie, the election’s over. You won, remember?”
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David Nicklaus has covered St. Louis business for more than 25 years. His column appears three days a week on the Post-Dispatch business page. 
Wait a minute, you are telling me Scott Schnuck wandered off during a talk about a dense transit driven development to go look at a Grocery store? I understand that is the family business and all, but when you hear about that, it is clear why so many DESCO projects are so poorly planned and could never be connected to the words urban, dense, or transit driven. Maybe Scott shouldn’t have wandered off to po-po the Publix, he might have learned a thing or two about how to develope a Schnucks that doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb inside the City limits.