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Recovery center to give vacant north St. Louis school new life

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A former St. Louis Public Schools building in north St. Louis that’s been vacant for two decades is now set to get new life as an addiction treatment and recovery center.The roughly $22.7 million rehabilitation of the old Eliot School by Jubilee Community Development Corp. will establish the Jubilee Wellness Center, with room for 75 beds to help men recovering from substance use disorder.“Everybody is affected by the fentanyl epidemic,” said Andy Krumsieg, administrative pastor of Jubilee Community Church. “It hits every family. Almost all of us know somebody that has been addicted [to opioids].”Krumsieg said he sees many people in the neighborhoods around Jubilee Community Church, located at 4231 N. Grand Blvd., contend with the challenges of substance use, mental illness or homelessness. Sometimes it’s a combination of all three, he added.“They have no place to go,” he said, adding that means many often seek refuge in vacant or abandoned buildings or sleep in the open.

Brian Munoz

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St. Louis Public RadioAndy Krumsieg, administrative pastor at Jubilee Community Church, speaks about the rehabilitation of the historic Eliot School on April 25 in St. Louis’ Fairgrounds neighborhood. The roughly $22.7 million rehabilitation of the old school by Jubilee Community Development Corp. will establish the Jubilee Wellness Center, a center with 75 beds to help those recovering from substance use disorder.

Brian Munoz

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St. Louis Public RadioAndy Krumsieg, administrative pastor at Jubilee Community Church, walks down stairs at the Eliot School on April 25 in St. Louis’ Fairgrounds neighborhood.

But the new wellness center, once completed, will offer a place to facilitate recovery from addiction in a region that only has a handful of detox beds, Krumsieg said.“We won’t be an official detox center, but we’ll do 90% of what a detox center will do,” he said. “We just don’t have the medical level of what is happening in a detox center.”The development project marries desperately needed addiction recovery services with the revitalization of the one of the first school buildings designed by prolific St. Louis architect William B. Ittner, said Joel Fuoss, principal at Trivers, the architect firm on this project.“To do this in a new building, it would be successful from their programming,” he said. “But metaphorically it wouldn’t quite resonate the same.”The school, built in 1898, has sat empty since 2004. Jubilee Community Development Corp. acquired the building in July 2022, according to city records.The building’s exterior hides those two decades of vacancy well; the wear over that time becomes more apparent on the inside.Small pieces of rubble blanket the floors, betraying any nearby footsteps, and tiny cracks ripple through the old lead paint peeling away from the walls it used to cover. Immense and intricate graffiti stamps the insides of different cavernous rooms.

Brian Munoz

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St. Louis Public RadioThe Eliot School on April 25 in St. Louis’ Fairgrounds neighborhood. Jubilee Community Development Corp. has plans to restore some of the old murals in the building.

Brian Munoz

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St. Louis Public RadioA second-floor classroom in Eliot School on April 25 in St. Louis’ Fairgrounds neighborhood. Debris and graffiti are left behind from the decades this building sat vacant.

But just beneath these surface layers is a remarkably solid building for its century-and-a-quarter age. Fuoss notes there’s hardly any evidence that the building is in need of stabilization.“The building is sitting on the bedrock, which is why you don’t see a lot of settlement,” he said. “The bones [and] the core are strong — a lot of things you could say about north St. Louis. The core is there, it needs a lot of the other attention, and a lot of that’s doable. It just takes some work and some money.”The symbolism of the project to restore a beautiful and prominent building is not lost on Fuoss.“What it says to restore some of your architectural treasures is imperative to [what] it says to the rest of the community,” he said. “For that to be ignored and to just let it go to waste also has a statement too.”Already some eight to 10 40-yard dumpsters of debris have been removed from the building, Krumsieg said. While walking through, he points out different elements waiting to be restored, like an old Tuskegee Airmen mural and some of the original flooring.Krumsieg expects construction will take 12 to 15 months to complete, but there’s still the challenge of getting all of the funding together for the project. St. Louis’ Community Development Administration has already allocated money to the project and could award more in the future.

Brian Munoz

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St. Louis Public RadioJoel Fuoss, principal at the St. Louis-based Trivers architecture firm, on April 25 at the historic Eliot School in St. Louis’ Fairgrounds neighborhood.

Brian Munoz

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St. Louis Public RadioThe Eliot School last month in St. Louis’ Fairgrounds neighborhood.

The project will also apply for New Markets Tax Credits, Historic Tax Credits and congressional appropriation, Krumsieg said. He said the amount of financing from those sources will determine what kind of fundraising is needed.“We welcome partnership from anywhere and everywhere, but nobody is coming to save us, and we have to have our skin in the game,” he said. “And we do.”Krumsieg added it’s no different from many of the other projects the church has taken on in recent decades, including an organic farm, launching a lawn care and landscaping business, managing hundreds of apartments and establishing addiction recovery homes.“Virtually everything we’ve taken on, we didn’t have the resources to do it,” he said. “But we knew we should do it and we went forward knowing that things would come together.”This new facility will extend the addiction treatment and recovery services Jubilee already provides by offering a place of employment for those who are moving through the program, Krumsieg said.This is a critical part of the church’s approach to addiction recovery, which has helped hundreds of people, said Bryan Moore, senior pastor at Jubilee Community Church.

Brian Munoz

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St. Louis Public RadioThe gym inside Eliot School on April 25 in St. Louis’ Fairgrounds neighborhood. This space will be revitalized into a multipurpose use at the Jubilee Wellness Center.

Brian Munoz

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St. Louis Public RadioThe Eliot School on April 25 in St. Louis’ Fairgrounds neighborhood.

Ample examples of success telegraph hope and a starting point for those who need help, and Moore said many of the men who go through Jubilee’s recovery program become leaders in it and can help guide others to recovery with an intimate understanding of that challenge.“It’s very important for us to have these success stories because any time a man comes in and he’s saved, he goes back out there and gets five or 10 other men,” he said.The new facility in the revitalized school will house the first phases of recovery, while the final phases will shift to the roughly 45 beds Jubilee already has across four recovery homes, Moore said.He admits the church’s recent success in responding to addiction in the community came after years of too many community members dying from opioid overdoses in the north St. Louis neighborhoods that surround Jubilee.“I was losing men that looked up to me, that respected me and who called me pastor,” Moore said. “We literally, not figuratively, stepped over bodies of men that we were responsible for.”Moore calls this “the price of ignorance,” in responding to a struggle that he and his church saw frequently but in ways that weren’t effective, he said.“Being overly spiritual about a very practical condition,” Moore said.The COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns offered Moore and the leaders at Jubilee time and space to reflect and determine if their programs to help north St. Louisans suffering from substance use were working, he said. Moore also took note of the number of churches concentrated in north city and questioned if his organization was really benefiting the community.“Maybe there’s so many sick people because there’s so many churches that had overpromised and underdelivered, and were ill equipped to handle the true measure of the problem,” he said.

Brian Munoz

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St. Louis Public RadioThe Eliot School on April 25 in St. Louis’ Fairgrounds neighborhood. The revitalization of the school included removing a partition in this room.

Brian Munoz

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St. Louis Public RadioThe Eliot School on April 25 in St. Louis’ Fairgrounds neighborhood.

Coming out of the pandemic, Moore said he and his church resolved to address addiction and the root causes of it in the community differently than before. In 2021, they welcomed a mobile clinic from the Assisted Recovery Center of America and in 2022, built out a physical space for the addiction recovery provider, Moore said.“We realized [people with substance use disorder were] coming through the door, instead of just feeding [them], let’s treat [them],” he said. “Because [they] were coming through the door constantly.”Krumsieg said the addiction recovery programming shifted to focusing first on the way addiction affects someone’s physical body and mind.“Oftentimes as Christians we have tried to do the theology part as the foundation,” he said. “While it is the foundation, it can’t be the first thing you work on.”Moore explained their partnership with ARCA helps get those in the community dependent on substances access to Naltrexone (also known as Vivitrol), an opioid antagonist that binds to the opioid receptors in the brain without activating them.“You can’t get high if you wanted to,” he said. “You can OD, but you can’t get high.”It provides the time and space for Moore and leaders in the church’s addiction recovery program, many of whom he said were once dependent on opioids themselves, to help others address the trauma that may have contributed to the addiction over time. Then they can pay it forward.“Most of the men who go through this program, they don’t leave,” he said. “They become stakeholders in the community. They become invested in the community and watch out for the other men.”

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Laclede’s Landing is moving from nightlife hub to neighborhood

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Laclede’s Landing has cycled through many identities throughout the history of St. Louis. Now, some people involved with its redevelopment in recent years hope the landing’s next one will be as a residential neighborhood.The small district tucked directly north of the Gateway Arch National Park has quietly undergone a massive redevelopment with more than $75 million pouring into the rehabilitation of many of the historic buildings at the landing.“We are starting to feel that momentum, especially in the last really 60 days. Things have drastically changed around here,” said Ryan Koppy, broker and owner of Trading Post Properties and the director of commercial property for Advantes Group.Advantes alone shouldered the rehabilitation of six of the historic buildings, which now sport a mix of apartments and retail or office space, he said. Four of those buildings are completed, and of the 119 apartments available, about 90% are filled, Koppy said.“It just shows you what kind of demand we do have for the area,” he said. “We’re separated from downtown a little bit, and for the tenants, their local park where they’re walking their dogs, it’s a national park.”

Sophie Proe

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St. Louis Public RadioInterior of the Peper Lofts at Laclede’s Landing on Aug. 16

Another 40 apartments are set to come online next year along with some retail space, Koppy said. He added he’s noticed a wide range of people who are considering and moving into the newly refinished apartments.“It’s very mixed, surprisingly,” Koppy said. “We have a lot of young professionals, maybe on their second job out of [university], we have some empty nesters too.”Part of the newfound momentum comes from a new market, the Cobblestone, and coffee shop, Brew Tulum, opening recently and bringing more foot traffic to the area, said Brandyn Jones, executive director of the Laclede Landing Neighborhood Association. She added that more apartments are set to come online within the next few months.“We have a great riverfront area here and so there are plans in the works to activate those spaces, bring people in,” she said.That could be more daytime events, like a farmers market, music festivals (one of which is happening this weekend) or just bringing in food trucks to Katherine Ward Burg Garden, Jones said. It’s a departure from the identity the district held a few decades ago as a hub for nightlife and entertainment.“That’s part of what connects so many people to Laclede’s Landing,” Jones said. “It’s important to tell the story of where we’re evolving. It won’t be what it was in the same exact way, but it will still be fun, and it can be fun early morning, midday or late night.”It’s a view shared by Koppy.“It’s grown up, it’s a bit mature,” he said. “We’re not going to have 3 a.m. bars here anymore because we have residents here.”Koppy added that Advantes is joined by other developers working to rehabilitate buildings in the district.“We all work in unison,” he said. “If I get a call and [a client is] asking for something and maybe the square foot doesn’t really match up with what I have available, but I know it matches up over there, they’re getting a very warm welcome and introduction.”

Sophie Proe

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St. Louis Public RadioRyan Koppy looks out the window of Brew Tulum Specialty Coffee Experience on Aug. 16 at the Cobblestone on Laclede’s Landing in downtown St. Louis.

This push toward making Laclede’s Landing a residential neighborhood also comes alongside broader conversations about the future of downtown St. Louis more generally as it looks to move away from a dependence on office space. While the city as a whole continues to lose population, downtown added about 1,700 people between 2010 and 2020, according to U.S. Census data.“It’s been wonderful timing to have all that going on, that stress that you’re not just in downtown to work has been critical to part of this rejuvenation and energy down here,” Jones said. “Sometimes people forget Laclede’s Landing is part of downtown, really the original downtown.”And success in the small district could spread beyond its small confines and potentially serve as a model for success, Koppy added.“My idea is, if we could get all the great things of St. Louis coming in through here, we can eventually spread that,” he said. “We understand we can’t change the whole world, but we’ll just make the effort to try and change the world around us.”

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St. Louis barbecue festival Q in the Lou canceled

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The largest barbecue competition and tasting festival in St. Louis, Q in the Lou, has been canceled. The event was planned for Sept. 6-8, but organizers decided to cancel it due to poor ticket sales and insufficient corporate sponsorship.The traveling festival had low attendance in Denver last week, said Sean Hadley, a festival organizer.“We made the tough decision to cancel Q in the Lou,” said Hadley. “We’re seeing a lack of support … it’s just not there.”The traveling event first came to St. Louis in 2015 and drew hundreds of people to downtown St. Louis for barbecue, live music and a “major party.”“It shut down out of the blue … I’ve gone every year,” said Scott Thomas, local chef and food blogger. “It’s brilliant. You could take a tour of some really amazing barbecue restaurants and competition barbecue guys all in one place.”In a late July news conference, city officials touted Q in the Lou as a significant tourism draw and a boost for downtown revitalization.“Bringing a signature national festival back to downtown St. Louis … is making us stronger,” Greater St. Louis Inc. CEO Jason Hall said then.Less than a month later, ticket holders from every festival stop learned they’d be refunded. On Monday, organizers privatized the Q in the Lou website and deleted its social media accounts.Conner Kerrigan, a spokesperson for Mayor Tishaura Jones’ office, said city officials are disappointed the festival won’t be back this year.“St. Louis knows how to throw a festival … bringing people together to celebrate our culture is one of the things we do best as a city,” Kerrigan said in a statement. “Should Q in the Lou try to come back next year or any year after that, they’ll have the support of the Mayor Jones administration.”

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Alton’s Jacoby Arts Center likely to relocate permanently

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The Jacoby Arts Center, a staple of Alton for many in the Metro East community, will likely permanently move out of its downtown building at the end of September.Its departure and relocation from the historic building that the arts center has called home for the past 20 years has created a tense situation for not only the arts center’s supporters but also the local development company working to revitalize Alton’s downtown that owns the building.“It’s an unfortunate situation,” said Chad Brigham, the chief legal and administrative officer with AltonWorks, the real estate company owned by another prominent local attorney working to develop the town. “I wish there wasn’t misunderstanding and disappointment in the community. It’s difficult sometimes to clarify that.”When news of the likely departure spread in June via a letter from the Jacoby Arts Center to its supporters, an outcry on social media quickly followed. Some assumed it would be the end of the arts center.“There’s a lot of feelings right now that I think are more about the building itself than there are about the Jacoby Arts Center,” said Valerie Hoven, vice president and treasurer of the nonprofit arts center’s board.For supporters of the Jacoby, moving from the building and likely never returning will be a sad affair. Exactly what’s next for the arts center remains unclear. However, Jacoby board members believe this will not be the end of the organization. It will likely look different though.

Sophie Proe

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St. Louis Public RadioThe Jacoby Arts Center earlier this month in downtown Alton

Sophie Proe

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St. Louis Public RadioThe Alton-based Jacoby Arts Center features more than 75 St. Louis-area artists and their work.

The history of the buildingFirst dubbed the Madison County Arts Council, the nonprofit arts center renamed itself after the Jacoby family gave it the current building in 2004. AltonWorks founder John Simmons purchased the Jacoby Building in September 2018, according to property records from the county.Managing the large building, at 627 E. Broadway, became too expensive for the Jacoby Arts Center. In 2018, the organization approached Simmons to purchase it, said Dennis Scarborough, a past president of the board and a downtown business owner.“Of course, it sounded really, really good,” Scarborough said of Simmons’ purchase. “He took over the insurance, property taxes, all those kinds of things that were really, really getting into our budget, and he rented it to us at a fair price.”The two parties entered into a lease agreement initially for five years. Since then, Simmons has spent more than $1 million in upkeep, taxes, insurance and more on the building. The lease has been extended twice until the end of September this year.Over the six years, Jacoby paid $1,500 per month, which covered a portion of the utilities.“It’s been wonderfully generous of AltonWorks,” Hoven said.Because the building is aging and needs repairs, Brigham with AltonWorks and those connected to the arts center have long known the Jacoby Arts Center would need to relocate — at least temporarily.

Renovations on the Jacoby building will begin this fall. They’ll include modernizing the aging building, repairing the old elevator and putting in apartments on the second and third floors.

News of the likely departure and controversyRenovations will begin this fall. They’ll include modernizing the aging building, repairing the old elevator and putting in apartments on the second and third floors.In May, it became clear that a preliminary proposal for the arts center to return to the building after renovations finished in 2026 would not work for them, Hoven said.She estimates the first floor and basement of the Jacoby Arts Building span roughly 20,000 square feet.

Chad Brigham is a business and legal adviser for AltonWorks.

AltonWorks’ initial idea floated to the arts center would only provide 2,553 square feet, according to both Hoven and Brigham. While the board calculated the price for the new space to be at least triple the current payment, Brigham said there was never a specific price discussed.“No discussion in terms of actual rent price,” he said.AltonWorks didn’t make a specific rent offer because the organization doesn’t even know itself, Brigham said.In addition to cash from John Simmons, there will be loans, tax increment financing and state tax credits to cover the $20 million in building renovations. The entities financing the cost of renovations will also help determine the rent when the construction is complete, Brigham said.Regardless, the price required to return will be too much for the arts center to pay, Hoven said. Also, the organization would like to maintain the many programs it offers to the community — a rentable event space, a dark room and a clay studio, for example — in the future.“For us to really meet the needs of the community and be sustainable, we need a space where we can offer some of those programs — the artists’ shop, and other spaces that offer some kind of income as well — so that we can continue to give money back to the community,” she said.AltonWorks offered at least two other locations as possible alternatives from their vast stock of buildings along Broadway to house the arts center during the roughly 18 months of construction. Those alternatives came with similar deals requiring the Jacoby to cover only utilities, Brigham said.“We did put in a great deal of work behind the scenes in trying to find an interim solution,” Brigham said. “We wanted to find a place for them to go, where it was easy for them to continue programming, whether it’s 100% of it or some portion of it, that would work for them.”Initially, the arts center hoped to keep the basement during the renovations, Hoven said. When it became clear the preliminary offer to return was for much less space than the arts center anticipated, the letter to the community was sent.“The letter that came out was merely showing our surprise,” Hoven said. “Don’t misinterpret it as panic. Don’t misinterpret it as desperation.”

Sophie Proe

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St. Louis Public RadioA smorgasbord of radios are displayed at the Jacoby Arts Center in Alton.

The commentary on social media was passionate. Some critics of AltonWorks said the organization has good intentions but hasn’t executed those plans. Others said Jacoby hasn’t planned well enough for the future.For Brigham and the AltonWorks team, some of the criticism has been disappointing.“I thought that there were some decent solutions. Were they perfect? No, but they were very, I thought, very good solutions,” he said. “And the fact that it has come to the point that it is right now is a bit hurtful.”AltonWorks remains committed to the arts, Brigham said. John Simmons remains one the largest donors of the Jacoby Arts Center, Hoven and Brigham said.“I don’t think there’s ever been a question of our support of that organization — of our affinity for that organization,” Brigham said. “While some of the events were unfortunate, some of them were encouraging. The entire community rallied around the Jacoby Arts Center. That’s a good thing. It’s a good thing to have a love for the arts like that in a downtown community.”Sara McGibany, the executive director of Alton Main Street, an organization aimed at preserving the town, said AltonWorks should be commended for its vision. In many ways, her organization and AltonWorks share a vision for a thriving downtown.Even though AltonWorks hosts public meetings, McGibany believes the current situation lacks true community engagement.“We really think that if AltonWorks can get past some of the communication hurdles — and harness the community’s passion and shift to more of a bottom-up decision-making process that centers on community input — then we can turn around the growing sentiment of distrust that’s happening now,” McGibany said.Scarborough, the past board president and downtown business owner, echoed the praise for Simmons and his support of the Jacoby Arts Center. With the Jacoby likely moving, the future looks bleak, though.“It’s a community arts center that does a lot of good work,” Scarborough said. “The community is going to suffer, and they’re going to be missed by the community if they’re not there.”

Eric Lee

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St. Louis Public RadioShalanda Young, director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, talks to Illinois U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinski, D-Springfield, during a tour of a construction project by AltonWorks last April in Alton. AltonWorks, who is building the LoveJoy Apartment Complex is receiving over $1 million in federal funding.

What does the future hold?AltonWorks will continue forging ahead with its ambitious plans to revitalize Alton. The organization hopes to conclude construction on the Wedge Innovation Center, which will have a restaurant, retail and co-working space, this fall. Lucas Row, a mix of apartments and retail space, is scheduled to be completed next spring.The remainder of the arts and innovation district, currently named after the Jacoby, will also move forward.“I believe in two years it’s going to be a much different place,” Brigham said of Alton. “It’s going to be thriving. It’s going to be new businesses, new tenants — and it’s going to be a nice proof of concept for what you can do in a small community like that.”The Jacoby board recently formed a strategic planning committee. Its task: figuring out what’s next for the arts center. The committee will reevaluate what space the Jacoby needs, what programs it wants to offer to the community and how they want to make that a reality.Keeping the arts center is essential for board members like Hoven. In her experience, it’s been a place where local aspiring artists get their start.“Art is one of the only ways to show your true authentic self,” Hoven said. “And there’s more people than I realized who do not get that opportunity every day.”The Jacoby will shut its doors to pack over the next month. Hoven said she’s optimistic the board will have concrete plans by the end of September when their lease officially ends.“Alton is such a fabulous and supportive community,” she said. “We still have lots of great options, so that the Jacoby Arts Center will continue to thrive in Alton and beyond.”

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