Saks Left Plaza Frontenac. The Mall Came Out Ahead.
September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Drive past Plaza Frontenac on a Saturday afternoon this summer and the lot on the Neiman Marcus side looks the same as it always has. Walk toward the wing where Saks Fifth Avenue used to be and the picture changes. The signage came down in May. Sixty-five employees cleared out their registers. A store that had anchored that corner of Lindbergh Boulevard since 1974 was gone.
If that were the whole story, it would read like every other mall obituary published this year. It isn't the whole story. While one door closed on Saks, two others opened on retailers that chose Frontenac specifically, and the mall's overall occupancy barely moved. The Saks closure is the easy headline. What actually happened here is more useful to understand if you live nearby and want to know whether your neighborhood's retail center is shrinking or just reshuffling.
The Saks closure had almost nothing to do with how the Frontenac store performed. On March 6, 2026, Saks & Company filed a Missouri WARN notice announcing the store would shut down, with layoffs running between May 6 and May 31. The filing came the same day Saks Global, the retailer's parent company, entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy and announced it would close a dozen Saks Fifth Avenue locations nationwide as part of a broader restructuring.
Frontenac's store was one of them, not because shoppers stopped coming but because a national balance sheet needed fixing. Saks itself framed the closure as a narrowing of focus rather than a retreat from St. Louis, saying the company looked forward to continuing to serve the community at its Neiman Marcus store. That distinction matters locally: Saks and Neiman Marcus have shared a corporate parent since a 2024 merger, so the Neiman Marcus that has anchored the other end of the mall since 1974 isn't a competitor picking up the slack. It's the same company, keeping its stronger location open and closing its weaker one.
The mall's response to losing a fifty-two-year tenant wasn't to sit on the vacancy. Two retailers moved in around the same window, and neither was chasing a leftover lease out of desperation.
| Left | Arrived |
|---|---|
| Saks Fifth Avenue, closed by May 31, 2026, after 52 years at the property | Aritzia, opened June 4, 2026, its first Missouri location, a 10,000-square-foot store on the mall's first floor |
| — | Anthropologie, relocated to Plaza Frontenac from St. Louis Galleria |
Before the Frontenac opening, the nearest Aritzia to St. Louis sat in Leawood, Kansas, on the far side of Kansas City. A retailer skipping the entire St. Louis metro for that long, then landing specifically at Plaza Frontenac when it finally arrived, is a different signal than a mall backfilling space out of necessity. Anthropologie's move tells a similar story from the other direction: it didn't open a second St. Louis-area store. It left one mall for this one.
The more useful comparison isn't Saks versus Aritzia. It's Plaza Frontenac versus the St. Louis Galleria, the other regional mall competing for the same upscale shoppers. The Galleria lost Nordstrom as an anchor in 2025. Its longtime Bread Co. location, open for more than 30 years, closed abruptly in early 2026. Shoppers interviewed there this year described watching a mall that used to feel like a community hub shrink in real time.
Plaza Frontenac's tenant mix, by contrast, sat at roughly 87% occupancy in early 2026, even accounting for the Saks vacancy still being absorbed. That number is the part most coverage of the Saks closure skipped. A mall genuinely in decline doesn't sit at 87% full while still landing a retailer's first Missouri store. What's happening across West County retail this year looks less like a shrinking pie and more like a sorting process, and Frontenac is coming out on the winning side of it.
The mall isn't shedding tenants, but it did add something new for shoppers to think about: paid parking. In early 2026, Plaza Frontenac set aside roughly 120 of its 2,500 parking spaces, about 5% of the total, as paid spots at a base rate of $2 an hour, payable by scanning a QR code and entering vehicle information.
Reaction to the change, gathered by First Alert 4 from shoppers at nearby malls watching the regional retail shakeup unfold, ran skeptical. One shopper, describing what she'd watched happen to mall parking generally, said it felt like public spaces were "dwindling down and becoming so small."
That reaction is worth separating from the facts. Ninety-five percent of the lot remains free. This is a pilot on a sliver of the property, not a wholesale shift to paid parking mall-wide, and it arrived at a mall that just landed two new tenants rather than one that's bleeding them. If you're a regular at Fleming's or catching a film after dinner, the change is worth knowing about before you go. It isn't evidence the mall is struggling to fill its lot.
The retailers drawing headlines aren't what most Frontenac residents actually use Plaza Frontenac for on a typical week. The dining and entertainment lineup that's made the mall a genuine evening-out destination hasn't shifted at all:
That lineup, sitting near the intersection of Highway 64 and South Lindbergh Boulevard, is the version of Plaza Frontenac most residents actually experience most weeks, and none of it moved while the anchor story played out around it.
The headline version of this year at Plaza Frontenac is that a fifty-two-year anchor closed. The version that actually tells you something about the neighborhood is that a bankruptcy-driven closure with no connection to local performance was offset, in the same stretch of months, by a retailer skipping every closer market to land here first and by another brand choosing this mall over its previous one across town. Occupancy held. The dining row didn't blink. The only real change a regular visitor needs to plan around is a parking meter covering one lot in twenty.
If you're the kind of Frontenac resident who tracks what's happening at the corner anchoring your own neighborhood, or you're curious what shifts like this one tend to mean for property values along a corridor like Lindbergh, Sandra Mesker spends as much time reading these local shifts as she does reading listings. Schedule a private consultation if you'd like to talk through what's actually changing in Frontenac, not just what made the news.
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