Recently I was sitting in a hotel room in the shadow of Denver International Airport day-dreaming about the future of a different airport.

For the past couple of years, St. Louis civic leaders have touted a "China hub" concept for Lambert-St. Louis International Airport, a possible longshot of an idea that would revitalize a struggling Midwestern industrial city by making it the center of cargo traffic from China and elsewhere.

One of the hawkers of the concept, Dick Fleming, the outgoing head of the Regional Chamber and Growth Association, is fond of calling the China hub concept the "big idea."

In 1989, Mr. Fleming and I both lived in Denver, and he was selling a similar vision.

It was the year my daughter Alisha was born. Mr. Fleming and others were seeking to revitalize the landlocked, aging Denver airport by building a new one northeast of the city, in pasture nearly two counties away.

Some saw hope; others a boondoggle. The entire airport effort, along with Mr. Fleming's sometimes-abrasive personality, contributed to a change of scenery for the civic leader.

Mr. Fleming left Denver and came to St. Louis in 1994, the year the fancy new Denver airport finally opened. At the time, it was seen by many as a bit of a civic embarrassment.

But today my daughter works at the front desk of a hotel in the burgeoning business community surrounding what has become a vibrant economic engine, and Mr. Fleming is in St. Louis talking airport redevelopment again.

Denver looks nothing like it used to. The old Stapleton airport property is being redeveloped as a "new urbanist" community. And hotels, restaurants and ancillary businesses are popping up all around the new Denver International Airport.

In some ways, Denver did what St. Louis hopes to.

Make no mistake, the two cities are fundamentally different. The China hub project pales in comparison to building a new multi-billion-dollar airport. The construction costs alone of that project gave the Mile High City's economic engine a mighty jolt.

But here's the similarity: Both projects, while risky, promised big payoffs. Denver's worked. St. Louis'? Check back in 20 years.

There were a lot of good reasons for Denver to inject itself into the international marketplace, and it was smart to do so when it did. The combination of the new airport that opened in 1994 and the spectacle of the 2008 Democratic National Convention put that city on the world stage in a way it never had been before.

The executive vice president of Denver's chamber of commerce, Tom Clark, told me earlier this year that the convention was like the cherry on top of an economic ice cream sundae that had been more than two decades in the making. And it started with the dream of the airport, said Mr. Clark.

St. Louis failed in its attempt to get a 2012 national political convention. Last week, Gov. Jay Nixon and state lawmakers announced that the Missouri Legislature will go back into special session to try to pass a jobs bill that includes incentives for the China hub project. Maybe that's a scoop toward building our own ice cream sundae. Or maybe it will melt. There's only one way to find out.

St. Louis is asking the same question Denver did: If we build it, will somebody come?

— Tony Messenger