Why Olive Crossing in Olivette Finally Feels Like a Destination

For most of the last decade, the intersection of Olive Boulevard and Interstate 170 was something Olivette residents drove through on the way to somewhere else. The OfficeMax that used to sit on the southwest corner came down in 2020, and for a long stretch after that the 14.8 acres behind the fence were just graded dirt and a promise. That promise now has a name, tenants, and hours.

Olive Crossing is the reason a resident on Warson or Old Bonhomme can now walk out for a croissant at six in the morning, meet a friend for a beer at seven at night, and never once cross the interstate. That's a small shift in geography and a large one in how the eastern edge of the city actually functions.

The corner that used to be a pass-through

The site was authorized under Olivette's Gateway I-170/Olive Boulevard Mixed-Use District, the first Planned Development District the city ever approved. The plan called for six lots, and the sequencing tells the story of what the corner is becoming. Aldi opened first on Lots 1 and 2, a 20,000-square-foot grocer that gave the west end of the parcel a daily-use anchor. The Clover apartments, a five-story, 184-unit residential building on Lot 4, followed and is now complete. Everything in between is retail.

That "in between" is what changed the corner from a construction site into a place. The 11,000-square-foot multi-tenant retail building along Olive Boulevard closest to the interchange is the piece residents actually interact with, and until this spring it was mostly still under construction.

What's actually open, and what isn't

Here's the current state of the retail building at the interchange, based on the city's own tracking of the Planned Development District:

Two of those names deserve more than a row in a table. Paris Baguette at 9091 Olive Crossing is the first location of the international bakery café in Missouri, part of a chain with roughly 4,000 stores worldwide. It runs a 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. schedule seven days a week, which is longer than almost any independent bakery in West County keeps, and the 3,179-square-foot store was designed around a walk-in resident base rather than a car-trip crowd. The Brass Tap, which opened in March 2026, brings something Olivette genuinely did not have inside its 2.95 square miles: a bar with more than 40 taps and a sports-forward format that still reads closer to gastropub than corner tavern.

An evening you couldn't have had in 2023

Consider what an Olivette resident can now string together on a single Thursday without moving a car more than once.

Start at Paris Baguette in the morning for coffee and something laminated. Later, take the Centennial Greenway west out of Stacy Park, a route the city has been actively expanding as part of the 2024 Comprehensive Plan's outdoor recreation push. Loop back through the neighborhood, grab groceries at Aldi on the way home, and by evening walk back to The Brass Tap for a game. If the game runs late, the walk home is under a mile from most of the streets north of Olive.

None of those individual pieces are extraordinary on their own. What's new is that they're now clustered on the same corner, walkable to each other, and open on compatible hours. The city's older dining anchors, Olivette Diner on Olive at 9644, Sugarfire, Corner 17, Tai Ke Shabu Shabu, Great Heart Brewing, Fallon's, Olivette Station, still hold their spots on the map. The corner didn't replace them. It added a second pole.

The infrastructure is catching up, slowly

The corner works better than it did two years ago. It doesn't yet work as well as it will. MoDOT is currently resurfacing Route 340, which is Olive Boulevard, between I-270 and Dielman Industrial Drive just west of I-170, with additional sidewalk and pedestrian improvements planned for 2026. Part of that scope involves the intersection of Olive and Old Bonhomme, right at the northeast corner of Stacy Park, where the department is acquiring roughly 250 square feet of park land to bring the sidewalk into compliance with current ADA requirements and to relocate a signal control cabinet away from the pedestrian path. It's a small acquisition with an outsized effect: the sidewalk that connects Stacy Park to the Olive corridor is finally getting fixed.

The Centennial Greenway extension is the other piece. The city has explicitly framed the greenway expansion as a way to connect Olivette into the broader regional trail network, and that connection matters most for residents who live between Old Bonhomme and Olive, since the trail effectively becomes the pedestrian link between Stacy Park and the new retail corner.

What's still coming to Olive

The 25,000-square-foot second retail building on the two remaining Olive Crossing parcels is still in planning. The single 1,100-square-foot vacancy in the current multi-tenant building is unleased. And a little further east on the corridor, the City Council held a public hearing on January 27, 2026 concerning a special use permit for 9321 Olive, LLC, part of the Artori Group, to allow a Mercy healthcare use at that address. Whether that becomes a clinic footprint or something larger will shape what the eastern stretch of Olive between the interchange and Price Road feels like a year from now.

For anyone tracking the corridor, the Olivette Economic Development Commission is also currently taking nominations for the 2026 Olivette Business Awards, including Restaurant of the Year. It's a small civic ritual, but it's also a decent proxy for which of the newer places have actually landed with residents versus which are still figuring out their footing.

Stacy Park is still doing the heavy lifting

None of this changes the fact that Stacy Park at 9750 Old Bonhomme remains the community's actual center of gravity. The Party in the Park summer concert series still runs there. STL Holi, the Festival of Colors, drew a serious crowd to Stacy on March 7, 2026. The park hosts Rockin' in the Park, and pavilion reservations still route through the Parks and Rec office in person rather than online, which is either charming or inconvenient depending on your relationship with paper forms.

Music, food, and beautiful Stacy Park. What more could you ask for?

That's the Olivette Parks and Recreation department's own framing of Party in the Park, and it more or less captures the city's operating theory: the park is the venue, everything else is programming around it.

What Olive Crossing has done is give residents a second node that talks to the first. The park has always been where you go on a Saturday. The corner is now where you go on a Tuesday. Between them, the Centennial Greenway extension and the MoDOT sidewalk work will eventually make the connection feel less like two destinations and more like one continuous stretch of walkable city.

Reading the corner if you already live here

For a household that has been in Olivette for ten or twenty years, the change on the eastern edge of the city is easy to underrate because it happened in phases. Aldi in one year, The Clover in another, Paris Baguette this summer, The Brass Tap in the spring. Any one of them is a story about a single tenant. Together, they are a story about what the corner is for. It used to be a place to get on the highway. It's now a place where you can spend an evening, and where the population living within a five-minute walk of that evening has grown by 184 households in the last two years alone.

That's the mechanism worth watching. The city's operating budget of $8.7 million and its 2.95 square miles haven't changed. What's changed is the density of things worth doing inside those boundaries, and specifically the density along the mile of Olive Boulevard between I-170 and Price Road that the Gateway District was written to activate. On this corner, the plan is finally showing up as a place.

If you're thinking about how these corridor shifts affect what your home in Olivette is worth, or how a move within the city fits the changing pattern of daily life here, I'd welcome the conversation. Schedule a private consultation with Sandra Mesker to talk through what's ahead for the corridor and your block.