City Walk construction set to begin
21 hours ago • By Tim Bryant
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Delays over, construction is about to begin on City Walk, a $75 million Central West End apartment building with a Whole Foods Market on the first floor.
“It’s very exciting,” said Tony Kirk, who lives just east of the City Walk site, which is at 100 North Euclid Avenue.
Bruce Mills, whose Mills Properties is developing City Walk, said construction will begin in early November. He said construction will take 22 months, meaning that City Walk, with 177 apartments, will be completed in late summer 2015.
City Walk “is lined up and ready to go,” Mills said. His company needed years to get to that point.
Maplewood-based Mills Properties bought the site in 2004 and later demolished the 11-story Doctor’s Building there. Mills hoped to replace it with a condo tower, but the housing market collapsed and the corner remained bare. In 2010, neighbors’ complaints about the muddy pit on the vacant lot prompted Mills to level the ground.
City Walk’s initial plan was for a six-story apartment building.
The project grew a year ago when Mills said he had a tentative deal with Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods for a leased store at City Walk. But the developer had to cope with an unsuccessful campaign by the United Food and Commercial Workers union for a “neutrality agreement” with the grocer.
Whole Foods said in February it would proceed with the City Walk project but added it could get out of its lease if required to stay neutral during any effort to unionize workers.
The grocer — with about 340 stores, including those in Town and Country and Brentwood — has no unionized workers, and the company has opposed efforts to unionize its workers.
Keith Stewart, a Whole Foods spokesman, said this week the company has nothing to add about neutrality agreements but is “incredibly excited about the opportunity to serve the Central West End.”
Resolving the union issue and Mills’ decision to add a seventh floor — and nearly 20 more apartments — further delayed City Walk. The cost also rose from $60 million to $70 million and, finally, “to about $75 million,” Mills said.
Whole Foods will occupy the entire ground floor. The store will have a basement, where workers will receive shipments and prepare dishes sold upstairs.
City Walk also will have a multilevel parking garage hidden from the street by the apartment building. Residents’ parking spots will be on the same floors as their apartments.
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