The nonprofit Gateway Arch Park Foundation announced last week it is under contract to buy the landmark but long-vacant Millennium Hotel in downtown St. Louis.
The hotel, located between the Gateway Arch and Busch Stadium on Fourth Street, was built in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
For years, it was a big focal point for tourists and St. Louis Cardinals fans. It sits only a couple of blocks from the Route 66 alignment of downtown St. Louis.
St. Louis Public Radio talked to Ryan McClure, executive director of the Gateway Arch Park Foundation:
The foundation will work with the city, the St. Louis Development Corporation and Greater St. Louis Inc. on a plan to redevelop the property, which has sat unused since 2014.
McClure did not disclose how much the property cost, the conditions inside or share a timeline for how the redevelopment may progress. […]
McClure said the foundation doesn’t intend to own the property long-term, but rather this move was about a local organization regaining control of the site.
“The Gateway Arch Park Foundation is not a real estate developer,” he said. “Our goal is to get this into the hands of a developer that is going to do the right thing here.”
City officials had pressured the previous owners to do something, anything, to the hotel.
The hotel’s main tower is 28 stories tall and once featured a restaurant on the top floor, called Top of the Riverfront.
A second tower that was 11 stories was built years later. In all, it contained more than 700 rooms.
About 18 months ago, an urban explorer checked out the closed hotel:
The Millennium originally was known as Stouffer’s Riverfront Inn and later the Regal Riverfront Hotel before being acquired by Millennium Hotels and Resorts in 1999. It was also known as The Clarion Hotel. Tiernan Design designed the hotel, and it was built by William B. Tabler Architects.
(Image of the Millennium Hotel in St. Louis by Warren LeMay via Flickr)