7 Things Missouri Shopping Malls Had That Nobody Will Experience Again

The St. Louis Blues once practiced hockey on ice built right into a Hazelwood shopping mall.

That rink is gone.

So is almost everything else a shopper could once wander into between two big anchor stores.

These are the things Missouri shopping malls had that nobody will experience again.

1. Sit-Down Diner Inside a Discount Store

Cape Girardeau’s West Park Mall anchored one end with Venture, the discount chain headquartered in O’Fallon, Missouri, from 1984 to 1998.

The store did far more than sell discounts.

Instead of a simple snack counter, Venture built a full sit-down diner right into the store, a few aisles from the auto parts and school supplies.

Shopping worked up an appetite.

Venture opened its first Missouri store in Overland in 1970 and grew past 90 locations before it anchored malls across the state, West Park Mall included.

The whole chain filed for bankruptcy in 1998, and every one of those in-store diners closed along with it.

No sequel ever opened.

2. Shopping Under a Hometown Department Store’s Name

A mall anchor used to belong to a St. Louis company instead of a chain headquartered somewhere else.

David May merged two St. Louis stores into Famous-Barr in 1911, and the store’s second suburban branch opened at Northland Shopping Center, a mall, in 1955.

Charles Stix and the Baer and Fuller families had already run Stix, Baer & Fuller since 1892.

The store joined Crestwood Plaza as a third anchor in 1967.

Neither name survived.

Stix, Baer & Fuller became Dillard’s in 1984, when its parent company sold off the whole division.

Famous-Barr lasted until 2006, when its owner sold out to Federated Department Stores and every Missouri store became a Macy’s.

3. The French Onion Soup Stand

Famous-Barr, the department store that anchored Missouri malls from Northland Shopping Center to Crestwood Plaza, built soup stands right into its stores.

Executive chef Manfred Zettl’s French onion soup, thick with long-simmered onions and melted Swiss cheese, came from those stands, a few aisles from the sale racks.

You could slurp while shopping.

That soup disappeared in 2006, the same year Macy’s took over Famous-Barr and closed out the name for good.

A downtown St. Louis restaurant revived a modified version of the recipe in 2018, but the soup stand built for shopping between spoonfuls never came back.

4. Miniature Golf Course in the Mall’s Basement

Northwest Plaza, the St. Ann, Missouri mall built around Famous-Barr, JCPenney and Sears, spent decades as an open-air shopping center before new owner Paramount enclosed and expanded it in 1989.

The upgrade went further.

The renovation added more than 200,000 square feet of retail space, plus a food court, a movie theater, and a 40,000-square-foot Tilt! arcade with a full 18-hole miniature golf course tucked into the basement below.

Shoppers could putt a round between errands.

The arcade and its indoor course closed around 2007, and Northwest Plaza’s last store shut down in November 2010.

5. Shopping Inside a 19th-Century Train Shed

St. Louis Union Station opened in 1894, decades before shoppers ever walked through it as a mall.

Its history page still calls it the largest, most beautiful terminal in the United States, built to handle 22 railroads under one roof.

The trains eventually stopped, and in 1985 the massive train shed reopened as a shopping mall.

Shoppers browsed a food court and dozens of stores under the same iron and glass roof that once sheltered locomotives.

That’s history with a receipt.

The station’s rehabilitation remains one of the largest adaptive reuse projects in the United States, and the mall itself lasted until it closed to the public in 2016.

A $45 million aquarium opened in the same train shed in 2019, and no shopping mall has occupied it since.

6. Indoor-Outdoor NASCAR Go-Kart Track

St. Louis Mills, the Hazelwood, Missouri mall built in 2003, put a go-kart track branded for NASCAR, the stock car racing league, inside its walls instead of another row of stores.

NASCAR Speedpark ran both an indoor track and an outdoor track under one roof.

Shoppers raced between errands.

The track closed in 2014, years before the rest of the mall around it emptied out completely in 2019.

7. NHL Team's Practice Rink Inside the Mall

St. Louis Mills mall in Hazelwood, Missouri, once built an entire ice arena into its walls, and the St. Louis Blues used it as their practice rink.

The rink, known as Ice Zone, also hosted public skating sessions and youth hockey leagues on the same ice the National Hockey League team trained on.

Pucks replaced the parking spots.

The Blues eventually left for a new $68 million practice facility the team and Maryland Heights built just for hockey.

That rink at St. Louis Mills sat idle until the whole building closed to the public in 2019, and the space runs as part of a business park instead of an arena today.

The Decade-Empty Mall

Jamestown Mall in Florissant, Missouri, opened in 1973 with Sears and Stix, Baer & Fuller as its first two anchors.

A movie theater from General Cinema Corporation opened inside the mall on July 12, 1974.

JCPenney and Famous-Barr joined as anchors by the mid-1990s, giving Jamestown Mall four full department stores under one roof.

The mall's owner sold it in 2003 with the building already about 30 percent empty, and the anchors followed one by one.

Dillard's closed in 2006, Sears in 2009, and Macy's in 2014.

Jamestown Mall itself closed to the public on July 1, 2014.

The doors shut for good.