× Expand Photography by Matt Marcinkowski Atomicdust’s open office.

“Could you make it breathe fire?” asked a hotshot Washington University neuroscientist. Designers at happyMedium had come up with an app to be used on patients’ smartphones in a global clinical trial, and the doc wanted to wow an MIT audience with a demo.

They didn’t just make it breathe fire. They added a fog machine and lasers.

A small company that doesn’t bother to publicize itself, happyMedium’s more extreme than its name, wildly intelligent and 180 degrees from corporate conformity. Founder Dan Pollmann rattles off a few projects: “cameras that you can put on things that fly around” (for example, a 360-degree high-def, heat-sensitive camera ball that could be mounted under a helicopter); an app for JOANN Fabric & Crafts that has 4 million users and once beat Tinder in downloads; a smart fly rod that interests Orvis because “it basically teaches you how to fish”; and global work for “a century-old innovation company” he won’t name.

Head east from happyMedium's Locust office—past the branding geniuses at Atomicdust, the motion pictures being made at Bruton Stroube, artist Bill Kreplin’s quieter studio, several web design companies, Ansira’s data-driven marketing, Fusion Marketing, and Stealth Creative—and you reach Tenth Street, where designers and copywriters from 2e Creative are sipping scotch at Tiny Bar, tucked into the lobby of their rival Elasticity. (Why have a static waiting area full of empty chairs when you can build camaraderie with a bar?)

In nine years, Elasticity has expanded “from three guys with an idea to more than 30 people in four cities,” says principal Aaron Perlut, one of those three founders. They make such a point of being based downtown that, seven years ago, they actually turned down an offer of free space in St. Louis County.

“Being in a city sends a cultural message to creative thinkers,” Perlut explains. “Most of the agencies doing significant national work are somewhere between downtown and Midtown. There’s a creative core here, because there’s a certain grit and creative element you can’t replicate in something like New Town.”

× Expand Photography by Matt Marcinkowski Brainstorming at Elasticity.

Downtown’s Golden Age

In 1924, Winston Churchill, half a century old and already sporting the jowls of a bulldog, gave the keynote address at an international advertising conference in London. Singling out St. Louis as “far ahead of other cities,” he said its Ad Club was doing “the best and most constructive work for advertising of any ad club in the world.”

St. Louis’ universities turned out sharp grads who stayed in town, working amid big, successful companies—not just shoes and (prohibited) booze but also a thriving garment district and arts scene—in a lively downtown. We were in the heart of the country, and we could feel its pulse.

By the ’70s, St. Louis’ advertising scene—soaked in beer money and sharply clever—rivaled Madison Avenue’s. Local firms helped McDonald’s create the Happy Meal; told the world, “This Bud’s for you”; baptized Mr. Goodwrench; came up with earworm jingles for Maull’s Barbecue Sauce and the Mayrose Meat Man.

Jim Mayfield, now a St. Louis partner and group creative director for FleishmanHillard, remembers that in the 1990s, no matter what kind of creative agency, “we were all working for the brewery,” he says. “It was one of our main reasons for being. If you did a lineage map, I think at one point everybody touched a beer program. In every photographer’s portfolio there was a sweating bottle with ice chips.”

Then came The Great Clumping, with creative firms gulped by larger ones even as their biggest clients were undergoing global mergers—or leaving town.

St. Louis’ future fell from the giants’ hands.

Plenty of talent stuck around, though, even after D’Arcy Advertising left and Gardner Advertising closed and the famous Anheuser-Busch and Ralston Purina in-house creative shops were disbanded. And as communication went digital and video got hot and marketing came into its own, the scale shifted again. Boutique niche firms popped up downtown, cocky and original, with fresh young creative talent joining or challenging the legacy spinoffs.

Their work charmed and distracted us, but St. Louis was so used to being tossed about by the big guys—and desperately shoring up biotech and courting the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and Amazon—that nobody gave a second’s thought to the subtler difference that a cluster of small design firms could make.

Nor had I. The idea for this story came from a quick freelance gig for PGAV, an architecture and planning firm that designs destinations (aquariums, zoos, theme parks, museums…) all over the world. Its president, Mike Konzen, had just signed an 11-year lease for two floors in St. Louis Place, and he wanted a list of other creative firms downtown because he was hoping it might serve as a recruitment tool. “We’re growing about 10 percent a year, and we’re competing against Disney and Imagineering to recruit talent,” he explained. “St. Louis has had a lot of buzz and hype around biotech, but there’s also this quiet entrepreneurial revolution in all forms of creative design—and if it lives anywhere geographically, it’s downtown.”

Honestly? I thought he was reaching. Half my family worked in advertising back in that Midcentury golden era, and I’d grown up hearing the jingles and slogans, the tales of three-martini lunches and fever-pitch deadlines. The era was definitely over. Maybe architecture was different, or was he picking up heat in the digital marketing and postproduction shops? I shrugged and started compiling company names.

I found way more than I’d expected.

And after I handed over my list, I kept digging: This was starting to look like a city mag story. Konzen, it turned out, wasn’t the only one interested in the creative presence downtown. Missy Kelley, CEO of Downtown STL, already had the list I’d just blown three weekends compiling.

Her list is even longer, spanning graphic design, fashion design, architecture, digital marketing, advertising, PR, video, photography, and video game design. “Eleven of the largest architecture firms in the metro region are downtown,” she tells me, “and seven of the 10 largest advertising/marketing/PR firms.”

Jamey Edgerton, senior vice president of the St. Louis Economic Partnership, has been tracking the phenomenon, too. “There’s this unofficial hub of digital arts creativity in St. Louis,” he tells me, throwing out example after example.

Is it a stretch to think of cautious, resigned, settled-down St. Louis branding itself a design hub? “Not necessarily,” says Eric Rhiney, associate professor of marketing management at Webster University, “because I don’t think people necessarily think about St. Louis at all! Look at Austin: They were able to become what they are because they weren’t known for anything. It’s a lot easier to build brands when you’re not trying to replace an old one.”

We wouldn’t be the first to focus on design, either. Detroit started with a Creative Corridor Center, incubating filmmakers, ad agencies, digital media, branding agencies, architects, and designers, then setting them into an “innovation district” in the city’s downtown and midtown. Other small creative companies soon moved in from the suburbs.

When St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson hears that we now have more than 130 creative design firms downtown, she quickly asks for a copy of that list.

Before Krewson moved to City Hall, she was PGAV’s chief financial officer; she knows the difference a cluster of creative firms can make for the region. “Curating a creative workspace—that doesn’t happen by accident,” she remarks. “You have to make that happen—and there are opportunities here to do that.”

What Do Design Firms Want?

“Creatives like urban density.”

In 21 interviews, that sentence is uttered, almost verbatim, at least 20 times.

“OK, why?” I start asking, bored with writing the same words.

“It’s about stimulus,” says Jeff Insco, president and executive creative director of the sassy UpBrand, which substitutes a paper airplane for the “a” in its name. “We use what’s around us as sources for inspiration.” He’s thrilled that his firm is next to the renovated Central Library. He emphasizes the role of all the “collision points” when people in creative fields happen to meet on a downtown street: “It’s like energetic electrons bumping into each other.”

Kelley hears a lot of talk about “the energy and the architecture and running into other creative types, bouncing off ideas. When you’re in a suburban strip mall, that doesn’t happen.”

David Johnson, president of the entertainment production company Coolfire Studios, confirms it: “Just being able to be around like-minded firms makes a difference. Seeing people when you’re having coffee at Blondie’s—‘Hey, what are you working on? I should give you a call…’

Coolfire’s been downtown from its start, 16 years now. “Clients will sit in our edit suite for weeks on end, and the proximity to their offices makes it easier,” Johnson says, adding that downtown’s density has “natural potential for clustering” that isn’t possible in the scattered suburbs.

Perlut’s Elasticity email signature reads, after the heading Fax: “That’s amusing.” A line at the bottom reads: “Random quote inserted to appear thoughtful.” He hires people who are equally irreverent, eager to stretch the boundaries of custom and convention. “We like the diversity that is downtown—the kinds of companies, the kinds of people,” Perlut says. “We seem to generally share a DNA that prefers urban density, in an environment that feels and smells authentic.”

You can’t get more authentic than downtown’s tightly packed 19th- and early–20th-century buildings, heavy with brick and ornamented with terra cotta and limestone. Historic architecture is as much a part of the atmosphere as the river, the city’s French and Spanish history, the low syncopated wail of jazz and blues...

To a creative firm, that stuff matters. Plunk a medical insurance coding firm in an office park, and all you need are good coffee and good benefits. Designers soak up atmosphere: They parade silly toys across their desks, hang real art, exult in a gargoyle downspout or minimalist steel sculpture, seek out new experiences on their lunch breaks.

That, at least, is the stereotype. I’m sure there’s an actuary out there who props a skeleton at his desk when he goes on vacation and a secretary who won’t miss a gallery opening. But what’s reliably true is that the more matter-of-fact businesses don’t feel the same need to focus on atmosphere, perhaps because visual stimulus and novelty aren’t essential to their jobs.

× Expand Photography by Matt Marcinkowski Developer Jassen Johnson in Downtown West.

When I talk to developer Jassen Johnson, he’s fresh from meeting with several agency directors about public art for the Locust Business District, and he’s still a little giddy about “how cool it was to have all these amazing creative minds in the room, brainstorming about their own backyard. Like-minded people who can enjoy each other”—no more stuffy stifled-yawn meetings—“talking about things that, if we do them really well, will put us on the dance floor nationally.”

He has a good talent pool for brainstorming: Not only do these firms create first impressions for a living, but their people also care passionately about the urban environment around them. That means “local makers. Restaurants—not chains. Retail and coffeehouses.” Inspiration, hardscaped into your surroundings.

“Other districts have spent a lot of time and money on streetscaping,” he notes, “but we didn’t necessarily want to have all the same color street pavers. We’re not shooting for uniformity. We want to be as urban as possible.”

“We underestimate,” he adds, “how the built environment can help the process of creativity.”

Stop Sprawling and Sit up Straight

Anybody who thinks clustering creative firms downtown isn’t good for the region is shortsighted, Insco declares. “Every great region has an epicenter; you don’t have a New York City region if you don’t have Manhattan. The numbers don’t lie: As downtown goes, the region goes. Frankly, it’s frustrating to a lot of us to see people think we can turn our attention elsewhere and continue building highways and big facilities out west and think that sprawl is going to be good in the long run. To have a suburban or exurban experience, there has to be something it’s tethered to.”

Insco spent the first decade of his career in Manhattan. “I’ve been in St. Louis for 17 years now,” he says, “and I’ve seen a lot of progress—but it isn’t as fast as it is in other parts of the country. There’s something gumming up the system, and I can’t figure out what it is. Perhaps the solvent is money, but as long as we keep letting it bleed out west, north, south, and east…”

I ask people at Cannonball, a creative powerhouse out in Clayton, just what it would take to bring the company downtown.

First, Stacey Goldman, the firm’s strategic officer, gives a strategic answer: “A buyout of our current lease. A highly competitive per-square-foot lease rate with an improvement budget to make the space fit our needs. No earnings tax. Garage parking.” Then she adds more wistful desires: “We’re currently surrounded by high-rises filled with bankers and lawyers, making us a square peg in a round hole. We’d love to be part of a walkable area that was filled with creative businesses and had a neighborhood vibe, connecting us to places to live, places to eat and drink and exercise. We’d also love to be connected to all the other areas around downtown via some sort of mass transportation.”

Goldman includes “security to ensure the safety of our employees” on her list. But when I talk to people already downtown, they’re more troubled by the perception of crime than panicked about its presence.

“In New York, I had bullets ricochet off my building,” Insco says with a shrug. Then he pauses. “Crime here, I think, has to do with deeper-seated cultural issues, and perhaps that’s what’s holding this city back as much as anything. There are people out in the county who have an almost intractable view of what downtown is all about. I don’t know how to change that, other than significant investment and those old opinions’ dying off as people come in who don’t have the baggage. They come with fresh ideas, and they say, ‘This place is awesome. I can get around; there’s all this culture and history…’”

David Johnson says there have been only four or five incidents in the dozen years he’s been at Coolfire—although “that’s four or five too many. It’s a negative, and it needs to be fixed so people can come and go freely and not worry about being mugged.”

To the west, in Midtown Alley, “there have not been any muggings,” says Jassen Johnson. “Gunshots at a bar and car break-ins. That’s it. Trust me: I know, because I get the calls.”

As for the perception of crime, many folks downtown blame the media. There’s crime in the suburbs, too, but it doesn’t get reported with the same numb horror, Kelley says. When a crime is committed someplace like Ballpark Village or the stadium, it’s big news, “because people have a personal identification with those places. It feels like, ‘Oh, whoa. That could have been me.’”

× Expand Photography by Matt Marcinkowski A library in PGAV’s renovated office.

In Search of Sticky Streets

PGAV carried out a $3 million renovation of its doubled space in St. Louis Place, on Broadway between Pine and Olive, with FleishmanHillard and Rodgers Townsend DDB St. Louis right upstairs. The old office structure was ripped out in favor of large open work areas, a ton of conference rooms and sociable areas (even the tiny tabletops are whiteboards), quiet spaces, a hospitality lobby, a wellness room, and a huge kitchen with a cork map of the world filling one wall and photos of employees pinned to places they’ve gone. (PGAV gives them $1,800 a year for self-directed growth. A zoo designer went looking for snow leopards in the Himalayas—and actually found them. An artist went off to Europe to learn calligraphy; another went to the Galapagos…)

Conventional downtown office space left over from the Fortune 500 days can, obviously, be reimagined. What Konzen finds urgent is the kind of place-making that will transform the surrounding streetscape.

“You could be walking through the most creative place in the world and have no idea, because it’s all hermetically sealed,” he notes. First, we need “a strong branding of downtown as a hub of creative enterprise. For folks to want to be part of it, they need to know that it exists.”

Then, he says, we need what urban designers call “sticky environments,” where people can’t help but stop and linger. To be truly walkable, we need safer pedestrian spaces, calmer traffic, better-integrated bike lanes, pedestrian-scale lighting, clear wayfinding, immaculate cleanliness, and shared focal points, whether they’re street performers or dramatic fountains or murals.

I gather complaints from passionate downtown agency directors: The sidewalks are too narrow; there aren’t enough benches; there isn’t enough outdoor dining and amusement; too many people are still homeless. There’s that weird pattern of downtown flooding for ball games or conventions, then emptying. There’s the speed at which it empties on a normal weeknight instead of being full of people hanging around to grab a beer or visit a gallery.

Maybe we just haven’t reached critical mass yet and we need a few more exhibits and event spaces and film festivals downtown. More public art installations are in the works, and the freshly renovated Kiener Plaza is already whirling with events.

Beyond that, the dozens of fine artists with downtown studios could be an important part of a design district, Konzen thinks—not only because they’re easy for design firms to pull them in on projects, adding a bit of visual genius or refinement, but also because their work wants to be visible. They could help give downtown a distinct mood, the way Cherokee’s bright and raw and the Loop’s funky and Maplewood’s hipster and Clayton’s sleek.

“We haven’t even agreed on a demographic we want to attract,” moans developer Amos Harris, principal at Spinnaker St. Louis and the force behind the Mercantile Exchange downtown. “You develop differently if you’re focusing on visitors than if you’re focusing on workers under 40 or workers over 40—and things that appeal to all three groups should be made a priority.

“Between 30,000 and 40,000 people work downtown, and you’d never know it,” he continues, working up steam. “We don’t have enough reasons to go out on the street. We have not invested in our public spaces.”

For that, we’d need more deliberate planning and design, says Sarah Coffin, an associate professor who directs urban planning and development in the school of social work at Saint Louis University. The city of Chesterfield puts more energy into planning, she suspects, than the city of St. Louis: “We cut straight to development; we’re very transactional. All the focus is on the latest big project.”

We also need the creative companies to know about each other so they can collaborate and cross-pollinate. In June, Downtown STL organized an event called One.Square.Mile. for that express purpose, highlighting all the creative firms downtown and the cool work they’re doing.

Still, Coolfire’s David Johnson has noticed a bit more territoriality than collaboration. He wishes St. Louis creative firms were as easy with each other as the tech startups. “I think that tension was bred when Anheuser-Busch was here,” he says. “They’d spread their work across multiple agencies and make them compete, and if someone jumped ship, it created animosity.”

“I think it was A-B’s way of staying at the top of their field,” says Mayfield. “They’d throw out what we called creative jump balls, and the best idea wins.” The big clients’ power was incontrovertible: “This was back when A-B also owned the theme parks, and Ralston Purina owned cereal, ski resorts, Wonder Bread, Hostess…”

Now that the ownership’s based elsewhere, Johnson thinks “it’s forcing people to go out and shape their own business and maybe cooperate a little more… Anything we can do to get out of our own way.”

Even bike-sharing feels like a step forward to Perlut: “The more progressive elements we can add, the better. The taxi commission’s effort to keep Uber out was an embarrassment to St. Louis—it sent the message that we were behind the times—and it was broadcast nationally.” He shrugs. “For better or for worse, we’re a pretty conservative town. We need more that’s quirky and unusual, like City Museum or Thaxton Speakeasy.”

The catchphrase “Keep Austin Weird” seemed to work. Maybe we should try “Make St. Louis Quirky”?

Could Design Save St. Louis?

“It’s good to feel the wind in our sails again,” says Eric Thoelke, principal and executive creative director of TOKY. “Right before Ferguson, everybody was saying we were poised. Ferguson knocked us back; it punched St. Louis right in the gut.”

Maybe, he adds, that was necessary.

This raises a question: If we do wind up with a branded, vibrant, self-aware design district, will it be a predominantly white one?

“We are intentionally poised at the intersection,” says Thoelke. “Traditional white development runs east-west in St. Louis, and a lot of the African-American development is north-south, up and down Compton, Grand, Jefferson, Tucker. The central corridor is kind of our white folks’ tradition of how things get developed. Midtown Alley is at the center of those axes, and that’s intentional. We need more crossover businesses, and we need more people of color in the creative pipeline.

“We also need a better brand as a city,” he adds. “Detroit is full of optimism. We say, ‘We suck.’ I swear, we breed it into our kids.”

“A brand,” notes Insco, “is a promise—and every intersection with that brand is an opportunity for that promise to be broken or kept. A famous politician here got upset with me because I called us ‘the city of a thousand towns.’ St. Louis is so parochial—and so freaking fragmented! Everybody wants their own little thing rather than looking at a bigger picture.”

The beauty of design as a unifying principle is that it attracts diversity. And it attracts the young people St. Louis wants living, working, and playing downtown. “There’s something cutting-edge and somewhat rebellious about the potential in design that younger people are drawn to,” says Harris, “and beauty is an economic development tool.”

First, though, we have to attract even more designers—which might not be that hard. When Mayfield’s recruiting talent, he points out that “there’s a very flat hierarchy here. They can get immediate exposure to clients at the top level. In Chicago, it was many rungs up the ladder until you got that really great client. Here, if you’re very talented, you get exposure to great work immediately.”

Social trends are also running in the right direction: Several agency directors—after apologizing for the work-play-live cliché—mention how relatively cheap it is to live downtown. “People like to be where the momentum is,” Kelley says simply. Besides, the creative professions need one another. Architects need interior designers; graphic designers need photographers. As that cluster grew, its magnetic force field would increase.

“We’ve seen how this has worked in other cities,” Thoelke says, citing the deliberate mashup of architecture, photography, video, and tech in Miami and Dallas. “There are real synergies when you get startup companies close to graphic design and web design. They need each other. Design helps startups get off the ground, because they’ve got to be able to establish their stories and their brands right away.” Design’s important to St. Louis’ remaining manufacturing firms, too; many credit package and product design for making their products competitive.

Design helps everybody else—but could setting up shop in an acknowledged design cluster help the firms themselves? Proximity to more seasoned, well-known firms helps new design firms, Jassen Johnson notes. Cachet rubs off like pollen from a lily. And a national reputation as a design cluster might give St. Louis firms an edge in winning national work, right?

“People have no idea what business these agencies already have,” Jassen Johnson retorts. “Scorch has Microsoft; TOKY’s done museums all over the world.” More than 3,000 media and marketing companies across the country use Second Street’s software platform for audience engagement. PGAV has projects on four continents. Momentum Worldwide, which operates on six continents and counts American Express and Coca-Cola among its clients, just moved its St. Louis office from Clayton to downtown.

On the other hand, not everybody wants that kind of reach. Some firms would rather keep their portfolios local and their clients close.

“The St. Louis design community can’t survive on St. Louis work,” says Thoelke, “if St. Louis companies are going to go out of town to hire creative.”

“We’re all scrapping with each other, feeding off the same stuff,” sighs Insco. “Someone in a big giant company still downtown that shall remain nameless told me, ‘There’s such great creative talent in St. Louis; I don’t understand why anyone needs to leave’” by hiring from outside. But they do—maybe because there’s a shinier gloss on work seen from a distance, maybe because they’ve gotten used to St. Louis’ not being on the creative edge.

One of Insco’s strategies to become more nationally competitive was to join a collective of seven firms, each with a different specialty. Five of the seven are based in St. Louis. Every one of them is located downtown.

The Missing Link

The Downtown STL list draws hard, clean boundaries that radiate west from the river and stop at Jefferson Avenue. That picks up FUSE Advertising and Think Tank on First Street, Blue Stingray on Second, and Oculus on Memorial Drive. The clusters on Broadway, Spruce, and Tucker. The long corridor of Olive (BAM Marketing, Arcturis, Antidote Studio, Gooya Media, Vidzu Media, Drive Social, Metropolis…). We Are Alexander and at least 20 more firms on Washington Avenue, including the web and fashion design startups in T-REX…

But it cuts off Midtown Alley, home to TOKY and Atomicdust and happyMedium, not to mention Aligned Media, which nearly doubled its office size this summer, plus a few world-class photographers and an artisan furniture maker. So I sneak Midtown Alley onto my private list. Granted, the map’s looking pretty spotty: the emerging Garment District for fashion design, graphic design just west of there on Locust, big architecture and PR firms farther east…

Then I talk to Jassen Johnson.

One of the main forces behind Midtown Alley, he has already redeveloped about 56 buildings for hotshot creative firms, working west from 2900 Locust. But there was very little residential space in that strip, which left a desolate gap between Midtown Alley and downtown. Sure, people could live there—but without any of the coffeehouses, restaurants, retail, and entertainment that would have made it a lively, sociable neighborhood.

So Johnson has set out to balance both stretches, adding residential space to Midtown Alley and creative office space to the gap that’s about to become Midtown Village. The $70 million project is also called the Jefferson Connector because it will rub up against the new Garment District and stitch Midtown Alley to downtown.

“When we’re done, literally everything from the Fox to 21st Street will be fully developed,” he says, “all of it walkable, bikable. You won’t all of a sudden hit these obstacles that keep you from continuing your journey.”

Instead, you’ll be able to hop on a bike at the convention center and find yourself at Grand Center before you know it. Or just go for a walk without that eerie clutch that says you’ve left the safe, cool part of town and you’d better turn around right now.

For the Connector, Johnson needed space that could be carved into small offices to incubate young design firms—but with the exposure to air and light that he can’t offer farther west, where buildings are 130 feet deep.

As he mulled the problem, its solution loomed in front of him: the Beaumont Building, at the corner of Jefferson and Locust. Dejected as a castoff lover, it stood empty, tattooed with old graffiti—but, miracle of miracles, it was shaped like an E. Sunlight streamed through both sides of every crossbar, with views onto two courtyards.

Johnson renamed it the Malone Building, a nod to famous entrepreneur Annie Malone, and tacked up blueprints for a flock of tiny, affordable offices and 60 apartments. Across the street, he began renovating the Martin Building, an old Ford dealership emblazoned with Aston Martin’s big flying wheels. It’s to hold the SCORCH global marketing agency, another anchor agency, 11 smaller offices, and a rooftop restaurant. Visitors will be greeted by Martin himself, a personable robot who can rattle off the restaurant specials or describe the various tenants.

These buildings are playful, with life-size chess pieces in the hall and bright art everywhere. “It’s a different kind of innovation than Cortex, because they’ll be creative office users,” Johnson says. Around the buildings will be a bar, an Airbnb, a coffeehouse, a retail village made of shipping containers, and a boutique hotel “so someone can fly in from Boston for an interview and see that the city has this cool district where they can imagine themselves working, living, and playing.”

One block over, the Garment District’s fast reviving, and “every block you go east, you pick up more agencies,” Johnson notes. He’s trying to create, on a long stretch of Locust, “this Main Street where veteran agency people and the younger startup people can inspire each other.

“Because if they’re not inspired, they’re not going to create the things that will put St. Louis on the map.”