The Armory, planned as a huge St. Louis entertainment center, closes indefinitely

The Armory, the nightlife venue on Market Street that opened in 2022 as the planned anchor for a renewed Midtown entertainment district, has closed — for now.

Leaders of the Armory said Wednesday they are closing the business temporarily while seeking additional financing. They hope to build out more of the planned but as-yet unrealized elements of the 250,000 square foot complex.

The venue will be closed for at least a month and likely longer. Jacob Miller, who runs the entertainment complex on behalf of Brick + Bev, a company affiliated with building owner Green Street Real Estate Ventures, said the Armory will be closed “indefinitely.” He said it will take “months, not years” to find additional funding and re-open.

“We’re going to get this thing going again. I love the building, and I love the city, so there’s a lot of motivation to fix this,” Miller said.

The Armory employed about 100 people, most of whom learned of the abrupt closing this week.

Green Street is behind the venture, in a historic building that housed the 138th Infantry division of the Missouri National Guard in 1938 and was later the site of the St. Louis Tennis Club.

The real estate developer launched hospitality management agency Brick + Bev in 2022, led by Miller, to run the Armory’s programming. The company rents the 250,000 square foot Armory building from Green Street, Miller said.

In a 2022 announcement for the planned entertainment complex, Green Street said the Armory would become one of the largest such venues in the region, including a rooftop beer garden, two-story slide and multiple event spaces available to rent. Additional plans called for a nightclub complete with roller rink. The developers said that when fully built, the complex would employ 400 people. The announcement also promised the Armory would be the future home of the St. Louis Tennis Hall of Fame.

The Armory does include an expansive bar it describes as the largest in St. Louis, and hosts bands and events there, but many of the plans for the facility still reside only on the drawing board two years after opening. Yet its financial feasibility always depended on Green Street building all aspects of the planned complex, the Armory’s leaders said.

“The first phase that we opened was never meant to live on its own. Even if we could have added just the rooftop [beer garden], this whole picture would be different,” Armory Chief Operating Officer Jimmy Smith said in a statement.

With only one of the Armory’s many planned pieces up and running, it was impossible to create enough revenue to pay down debt and keep the operation afloat, Miller said.

“We are working on a way to restart it, but to restart it as it was originally envisioned,” said Miller. “[Brick + Bev] agreed to pay this enormous amount of rent, but in exchange the landlord was going to fund 100% of the tenant cost to open the whole building. The landlord did not meet their funding obligations. In fact, they only funded a small portion of what we have opened.”

Other local companies have made complaints about Green Street in recent years. The company and its affiliates have faced at least 10 lawsuits for breach of contract. Some are related to work that contractors did at the Armory.

“We’ll attract millions of people into the city”

Green Street CEO Philip Hulse said in 2022 that the Armory would be the anchor for an emerging entertainment district along the nexus of the planned Brickline Greenway, which planners intend will create an unbroken pedestrian path from Forest Park to the Gateway Arch, and Midtown to Fairgrounds Park.

Green Street purchased acres of property surrounding the Armory, Hulse said, with plans to develop a renewed entertainment district.

“We’ve expanded our district from Grand [Boulevard] all the way back to Vandeventer [Avenue], and we bought everything along that path. We’re going to revitalize this into a mixed-use entertainment district that will attract literally millions of people into the city,” Hulse said.

Green Street representatives could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.

Miller said he credited Hulse with leading the effort to develop the Armory. “This guy invests in things that are good for the city. He had the vision of this incredible addition to the community, and that’s one of the things that attracted me to the project,” Miller said.

“I don’t know whose fault it was,” he added, “but I got the wrong end of the stick.”

The St. Louis Board of Aldermen authorized $4.7 million in tax increment financing for the development in 2022.

The pause and potential restart of the Armory as an entertainment complex is just the latest plan for redevelopment of the large building. An earlier plan called for Green Street to build office space there, with anchor tenant WeWork — the national coworking venture that filed for bankruptcy in 2023.