The Loop has taken another hit. The anchor Middle-Eastern restaurant Saleems has shuttered. No other info available.

JivecitySTL wrote:The Loop has taken another hit. The anchor Middle-Eastern restaurant Saleems has shuttered. No other info available.

This is seriously a shame - they were one of the usually reliable healthy dining choices in the Loop.

we can expect more of these types of closings in these economic times. its just the way it is and will be for some time to come.

The one in West County appeared to be open when I went by it today.

ah! That is horrible! I would expect that place to thrive in the loop. Maybe there was another reason it closed?

i went once with a group. way too overpriced and not that great. sorry. liked the cheap PBR's though.

JivecitySTL wrote:The Loop has taken another hit.

well put.

or maybe the owner wants to tear the building down for one of those fancy smancy parking lots.

Saleem's was one of my go-to places. Sigh.



I don't think I'll be going to the west county location. I haven't been beyond 170 in ages.

unfortunately we all saw this coming.. here come the chains, there goes the Ucity loop... hopefully it can move east. but i dunno.

That's really too bad. I hope the owner does find a new location in the Loop to reopen at. Great food, great atmosphere.

JuiceInDogtown wrote:Yeah, the Loop is getting way too franchised. Once it's a collection of "urban" fast food restaurants and tennis shoe stores, it's pretty safe to say I won't be going there any more.

Heh, why? I love places like St. Louis BreadCo, Qdoba, Noodles and Co, etc. There are still a variety of interesting and unique places in the loop. Particularly if you head in the east loop direction.



For every gentrifying area like the UCity Loop, there are other areas fertile for indie development. I think that Mark guy is doing a pretty bangup job in Midtown alley. And then there's the amazing people that redeveloped the Moolah and other locales... There's always space for indies somewhere and it's nice to see neighborhoods grow together organically over time. Of course, the Chinese have shown some amazing skills with urban planning of the built environment.

I think people forget (or are too young to remember) that the Loop used to be home to a Walgreens and a Dairy Queen. And, like Innovation, I also enjoy some of these chain places from time to time. If I'm going to have a Qdoba burrito I'd rather have it in the atmosphere of the Loop than Chesterfield Valley.



That being said I am concerned when the rents go to a point that independent businesses are priced out in favor of chains. But the East end of the Loop is far from that predicament.

In the late '80s, the Subway, Dairy Queen and Medicare-Glaser drugstore were the only real chain representatives in the Loop. There were also the two St. Louis Bread Company stores, but that was still a local company at the time. However, I remember there being considerable consternation among several of the Loop business owners whom I knew when the Footlocker opened across from the Tivoli c. 1991 - they feared that this was the "camel's nose" that would lead to more mall-type chain stores moving in, with a consequent dilution of the Loop's appeal coupled with increased rents for storefronts, and there were various proposals to block further leasing to out-of-town chains. As far as I know, nothing came of these at the time (though there have been periodic revivals), but as it turned out, there wasn't really much further incursion of chains until c. 2000.



I suspect one of the factors driving the shift to more chains has been Wash. U's conversion of the neighborhoods north and south of the Loop into a de facto student village by buying up virtually all the rental properies, with the result that the resident population living within walking distance of the Loop is nowhere near as diverse as it was in the '80s through mid '90s, which must have a limiting effect on the types of independent businesses that can survive there. In tandem with this population shift and associated gentrification, while the Loop still attracts visitors from a wide range of backgrounds and income levels, the last ten years have definitely seen an increase in the portion of visitors from the suburbs with more money to spend, which has inevitably encouraged more landlords to seek lucrative leasing arrangements with national chains.