As St. Louis Public Radio reported on September 8, Straub's at 302 N. Kingshighway is closing, with discount signs marking its final days. Twenty percent off everything but alcohol. Ten percent off the liquor, wine and beer. A store that has opened its doors to Central West End families since 1948 is now working through its last inventory, with the doors expected to shut for good on September 25.
Two blocks east, on the same stretch of streets, the opposite thing has been happening all year. A wine cellar with an annual membership program is set to open this fall below a storefront that sat empty for years. A sports tavern is finishing buildout in a coffee shop's old footprint. A second wine bar is being built into the basement below it. Nobody planned these two things to land in the same season, but they did, and together they say something specific about how this part of the neighborhood is going to feel different by Halloween than it did over the summer.
What Straub's Actually Leaves Behind
Straub's announced the closure on September 8, ending a run at that Kingshighway address that goes back to 1948, nearly eight decades of the same family grocery serving the same blocks. The company is selling the building outright rather than handing the store to a new operator, and it hasn't said what happens to the space once the sale closes. In its report on the closure, St. Louis Public Radio quoted Straub's president and CEO, Jack "Trip" Straub:
"For nearly eight decades, generations of customers have welcomed Straub's into their lives at this location."
Here's what's actually locked in, as of this week:
- Hours are already reduced. The store cut back to 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily starting the day after the announcement.
- The close-out sale runs through September 25, or until the shelves are empty, whichever comes first.
- Straub's isn't leaving St. Louis. The company's Webster Groves, Town and Country, and Clayton locations are staying open. If you've been a Straub's regular for the meat counter or the wine selection, the brand still exists, just not on Kingshighway.
- The building's future is unannounced. Straub's said only that it expects the next owner to be "a positive addition" to the neighborhood.
For a store that's been part of the neighborhood since before the interstate existed, that's a real gap. It's also, notably, not a gap in the only thing changing on that stretch of the CWE this year.
Two Blocks Over, the Same Season Filled Three Storefronts
The intersection of Euclid Avenue and Maryland Plaza has spent years with two conspicuously empty corners. One held the old Culpepper's and an adjacent FroYo shop. The other was Coffee Cartel, a longtime coffeehouse that closed and left a hole regulars still mention. Both are filling in now, on almost the same calendar as Straub's closing.
The Noble Crown opened in May at 300 N. Euclid, right where Culpepper's used to be. It's a partnership between restaurateur Kevin Brennan and the Saint Louis Chess Club, split between a modern American bistro upstairs and a wine cellar downstairs that sells annual memberships with wholesale pricing and tastings included. That basement space, called The Underground Crown, is set to open its own doors this fall, adding an international wine list, Italian antipasto, and a build-your-own burrata bar to what's already there. Restaurant director John Perkins described the project as reinvigorating this historic corner in the West End.
Directly across the intersection, in the old Coffee Cartel space, The Marvel S. Fox is expected to open this month. It's a sports tavern named after the great-grandmother of two of its owners, built around darts, ping-pong, bar dice and an open kitchen, the kind of place designed to stay full on a Tuesday night as much as a Saturday.
Three storefronts. One grocery closing, two restaurants and a bar opening within a few hundred feet of each other, all inside the same six-month window.
The Errand Turns Into an Evening
Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only track these as separate news items. Straub's and Coffee Cartel were both daytime destinations, the kind of stops that shape a morning or an afternoon. A grocery run. A coffee before work. What's replacing them is built for the opposite end of the day: a bistro with dinner service, a members-only wine cellar, a sports bar with an open kitchen that stays busy after dark.
That's not a coincidence of timing so much as a pattern. The corner isn't being repopulated storefront-for-storefront. It's being reoriented toward evening dwell time, toward places where you stay for two hours instead of stopping in for ten minutes. If you've lived in the CWE for a while, you already know the neighborhood has always had that late-day energy along Maryland Plaza and lower Euclid. What's new is how much of it is concentrating on this one specific intersection at the exact moment the daytime anchor two blocks away is packing up its shelves.
That matters for anyone thinking about what a weeknight actually looks like here going forward. The five-minute grocery stop on the way home is about to require either a drive to one of Straub's other locations or a walk to whichever store fills the Kingshighway building next. The two-hour dinner-and-a-glass-of-wine option, on the other hand, just got a lot easier to find without leaving the neighborhood at all.
What Doesn't Change
None of this erases what was already working on Euclid Avenue. Left Bank Books is still the anchor it's always been, still the reason a lot of people walk north past Maryland Plaza in the first place. The Whole Foods already serving the neighborhood isn't going anywhere, and for anyone who needs a full grocery run rather than a dinner reservation, that's the practical answer while the Kingshighway building sits in limbo. Kingside Diner, the chess-themed spot on the opposite corner from The Noble Crown, is part of the corner's dining scene, and the new arrivals add to that established mix rather than trying to replace it.
What's changing is narrower and more specific than "the neighborhood is different now." One 78-year-old grocery store is closing on a firm date. Three storefronts a few blocks away are opening on an equally firm timeline. The net effect isn't a neighborhood in flux, it's a neighborhood whose daily rhythm is visibly shifting from errands to evenings, block by block, this fall.
If you've watched a corner of your own neighborhood do something similar, that's usually not the last change of the season. It's the first one you noticed.
For more on what's opening, closing, and changing in the Central West End and across St. Louis, Adam Briggs keeps a close eye on the neighborhoods he covers, not just the listings in them.
