The sunken garden -- click for larger version.

The Stix Baer and Fuller store.

Typical tile pattern on the Stix store, with early demolition damage.

Bow tie tile pattern overlooking the sunken garden.

River Roads Mall
Halls Ferry & Jennings Station Road, Jennings
1961

Barely a mile distant from Northland Shopping Center, River Roads likewise stood in the ring of declining postwar suburbs surrounding St. Louis.

Sited at a busy intersection, the mall was developed by Stix Baer and Fuller with Stix as the main anchor, a main mall corridor, and a smaller anchor at the opposite end (Food For Less). An additional anchor was later appended to the north and occupied by JC Penny. Several outlot buildings also stood on the vast site.

Dillards purchased the Stix chain in 1983, and the River Roads location closed a year later, never to reopen. Amid changing demographics, rising crime rates, and competition from ever larger and more distant malls, JC Penney moved out in 1995, and the mall was shuttered. Interior cleanout began in the spring of 2006, though wholesale demolition operations would not reach the main building until fall of that year. Demolition was ongoing well into 2007.

The original plans for the cleared site called for redevelopment by Pyramid Construction, with multiple enterprises including over 200 units of single family housing, fifteen businesses, a seniors' home, and a city hall facility. Pyramid's 2006 closure and the subsequent economic downturn of 2008 have kept the site vacant.

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