By Betty Burnett
After years of disinvestment, an economic renaissance began to unfold in both the St. Louis region’s center city and in some surrounding urban areas in the mid-1980s. One Bell Center and Metropolitan Square, which opened in 1989, helped to change the look and feel of the City. The magnificently restored St. Louis Union Station opened in 1985 and the Fabulous Fox Theatre, having become dilapidated after closing in the late 1970s, reopened in 1982 to rave reviews. Rehabbers transformed Soulard and old, abandoned downtown warehouses began to attract the interest of loft developers. The suburbs continued to expand in all directions and business parks sprouted everywhere.
The RCGA, under the dynamic leadership of its president, Jim O’Flynn, helped to rally the region’s business and civic communities for region-wide economic development. After O’Flynn left the RCGA in 1986 to become president of the Auto Club of Missouri, Ned Taddeucci was recruited to head the RCGA. During his tenure as president from 1986 to 1994, Taddeucci was a strong advocate for regional cooperation on a host of economic development, transportation and public policy issues, supported by an outstanding group of business and civic leaders who knew how to get things done.
Mid-decade statistics confirmed what everyone already knew—manufacturing in the region was down, but income from wholesale and retail trade, financial services, and health care services was up. Business technology seemed to change monthly and everyone scrambled to keep up, buying fax machines, cellular phones, data processors, and computer imaging systems. The RCGA, seeing the speedup in communications, redesigned Commerce Magazine to reflect what would become known as the information explosion.
Nationally, business expanded and contracted via mergers, spinoffs, buyouts, and hostile takeovers. Venture capital flowed to start-ups by entrepreneurs, and the RCGA encouraged the development of incubators such as Center for Emerging Technologies and formed a Small Business Commission to supply practical help to new and old ventures.
In the national competition for corporate facilities, the region’s reputation for being “the most affordable in the nation” with a skilled labor force wasn’t enough of an edge. The RCGA launched an aggressive “Sold on St. Louis” campaign that made obvious the advantages of locating a business in the
center of the nation with an intermodal transportation hub.
Transportation, always an RCGA priority, became even more so during the eighties and early nineties. After years of work,
two RCGA pet projects were realized: the light rail system, MetroLink, opened in 1993 and the Alton Clark Bridge opened the
following year.
When the football Cardinals left St. Louis in 1987, the RCGA formed
a Sports Committee (now the St. Louis Sports Commission), primarily to stump for a domed stadium. Two years later, with the region’s love for sport firmly in mind, the Committee made a bid for the 1994 U.S. Olympic Festival. St. Louis was
chosen, and during ten days in July, 4,000 of the nation’s best amateur athletes competed in 37 venues, from Carlisle Lake in Illinois to the new Rec-Plex in St. Peters, bringing national coverage and millions of dollars in revenue to the region.
Economic diversification efforts intensified in the early 1990s following a series of major layoffs at McDonnell Douglas and Chrysler, as well as the departure of General Dynamics and Southwestern Bell.
Taddeucci told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “Economic development is a slow, sometimes tedious process, in some instances requiring years of work before results become evident.”
It was this persistence that got the region through the roller coaster ride of the early
nineties.
Trying to be flexible by looking backward and forward at the same time, realizing that information had become the region’s most useful commodity, in the mid-nineties the RCGA set one item at the top of its agenda: Prepare for the 21st century.
