The plaza was quiet early Friday afternoon. Six or seven men, many of them homeless, talked and rested on park benches by the visitors center. One man read in the sunken amphitheater. A woman walked down the steps and sat in the sun.

Karen Zaltsman, 61, said she was hoping to read a little before work at Charlie Gitto’s. She remembered when the plaza was redesigned in the late 1980s. She doesn’t understand why it needs to be rebuilt again.

“So they don’t want a meeting place anymore?” she asked. “I don’t know why they’d spend all the money to redo it.”

She remembers the opening of the St. Louis Center mall downtown. And the Union Station renovation. They were beautiful. And they died. She has a hard time seeing success in this effort. “Children don’t hang around down here,” she said.

Bobbie Carter, 47, didn’t like it either. Many of his friends were homeless, he said. They just want a place to hang out. “They say they’re tired of us sitting around and drinking?” he asked. “We stopped drinking out of cans. We pour it into cups now.”