The building at 1854 Russell Blvd used to be where toddlers climbed foam blocks and parents traded sleep-deprived small talk over coffee. Urban Fort Play Cafe opened there in late 2017, one more small business trying to make a go of it on a stretch of McKinley Heights that has never had enough foot traffic to keep a storefront full for long. This fall, that same 4,600 square feet becomes something the neighborhood has never had: a production facility large enough to quadruple a citywide bakery's bread output.
Union Loafers, the bakery and cafe known for its naturally leavened sourdough at its original Botanical Heights location on Tower Grove Avenue, is opening Union Bakehouse and Cafe at the Russell Boulevard address in late September or early October. Co-owner Sean Netzer told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch the roughly $500,000 buildout will become the company's main bread-production hub, with about two-thirds of the space devoted to baking and the rest built out as a walk-in cafe serving coffee, pastries and food to neighborhood customers.
That split matters more than it sounds like it should. Most of what has opened and closed on this corridor over the years has been retail first: a resale shop, a barber, a bar that eventually moved to a bigger space on Jefferson. Union Loafers is doing the opposite. The cafe is the smaller, secondary piece. The reason this building exists in its new form is bread that needs to get made somewhere, in volume, for accounts across the region.
What's Actually Moving In
Netzer and co-owner Ted Wilson opened the original Union Loafers Cafe and Bread Bakery in 2015, and the brand has since spun off a handful of satellite concepts around St. Louis: Bagel Union in Webster Groves, which launched in February 2023 with a three-day hand-rolled fermentation process, and The Station at Thurman, a weekend bagel shop that opened in the Shaw neighborhood in April 2024 out of a former gas station. Both of those started small and grew into their current footprints as demand caught up.
McKinley Heights is different. It isn't a satellite testing a new corner of the city. It's the plumbing.
"There's already demand that we can't meet," Netzer said of the decision to expand wholesale capacity.
That's not a sentence about a neighborhood cafe. It's a sentence about supply chains. The bread made on Russell Boulevard will keep the original Tower Grove Avenue location stocked, feed the growing wholesale accounts Netzer wants to expand into, and only incidentally give McKinley Heights residents somewhere new to get a pastry on their way to work.
Why That Distinction Matters Here Specifically
A 2022 walking guide to the neighborhood from local urbanism site NextSTL put it plainly: McKinley Heights could use a few more small businesses to make its self-contained, walkable layout actually function like one. The corridor along Jefferson Avenue has picked up a resale shop and a bar over the past decade, and the animal hospital and Fritanga Nicaraguan Cuisine have held steady as anchors. But small retail concepts in a neighborhood this size live and die on thin margins and foot traffic that isn't always there yet.
Production infrastructure runs on a different logic. A cafe that isn't pulling its weight can be trimmed or closed without touching the rest of the business. A facility responsible for a third of a company's total bread output doesn't get walked away from the same way, because too much else depends on it staying open. That's the version of "new business opens in McKinley Heights" worth paying attention to. It's not a bet that residents will show up. It's a bet on baking capacity that residents happen to benefit from.
What Was Already Walkable
None of this happens in a vacuum. The neighborhood's existing food and gathering spots are still there, and the new bakehouse slots into a short list that hasn't changed much in years:
- Fritanga Nicaraguan Cuisine on Jefferson Avenue, a casual spot with an outdoor patio that's held on through multiple waves of corridor turnover
- Keypers Piano Bar, a Victorian-building bar with live music a few blocks over
- McKinley Meadows, the community garden at Mississippi and Geyer that neighbors describe as an urban edible forest, run by the McKinley Heights Neighborhood Association
- Hammerstone's and Molly's, both a walk east on Russell Boulevard into Soulard proper
McKinley Heights still doesn't have a park of its own, which is part of why McKinley Meadows carries more weight as a gathering spot than a half-acre garden normally would. The new bakehouse doesn't fix that. But it does mean the walk from Russell and Jefferson east toward Soulard now has a reason to start with fresh bread instead of ending with it.
The Fall Calendar Is About to Get Busy Next Door
The timing lines up with a stretch of Soulard programming that's an easy walk from anywhere in McKinley Heights. Soulard Farmers Market Plaza at 8th and Lafayette hosts a Boogie Chyld concert the evening of September 26, and the neighborhood's second annual Ghost Tour runs sometime this fall, guiding visitors through seven historic sites. Then Soulard Oktoberfest returns to Soulard Market Park on October 9 and 10, with the Soulard Restoration Group listing hours of 4 to 11 p.m. Friday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday.
| Event | Date | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Boogie Chyld concert | September 26 | Soulard Farmers Market Plaza |
| Union Bakehouse and Cafe opening | Late September to early October | 1854 Russell Blvd, McKinley Heights |
| Soulard Ghost Tour | This fall | North Soulard, seven historic sites |
| Soulard Oktoberfest | October 9 to 10 | Soulard Market Park |
A resident who picks up coffee on Russell Boulevard on a Friday in early October could plausibly walk the same route toward the Oktoberfest tents that evening. That's not a coincidence the bakery planned, but it does mean the opening lands right as the neighborhood's fall social calendar fills in a few blocks away rather than during a quiet stretch of the year.
What This Actually Changes If You Live Here
The practical version of all this: expect a bakery smell on Russell Boulevard most mornings starting late September or early October, not a seasonal pop-up that might not make it to spring. Expect the cafe side to be smaller than the production side, which means it may feel more like a functional coffee stop than a destination hangout, at least at first. And expect the corridor between Jefferson and Soulard to keep filling in slowly, the way it has for the past decade, one tenant that sticks around a little longer than the last.
McKinley Heights has spent years being the neighborhood between two more famous ones, walkable to Soulard's nightlife and Lafayette Square's restaurants without fully having either inside its own boundaries. A bread factory won't change that positioning. But it's the first business on this stretch in a while whose survival doesn't depend entirely on whether enough neighbors walk through the door, which is a different kind of stability than the corridor has had before.
If you're weighing what it's actually like to live in this pocket of the city day to day, that's the kind of detail worth knowing before you ever look at a listing. The Winckowski Group tracks these shifts across St. Louis City, St. Louis County and St. Charles County neighborhoods because the texture of a place, not just its median price, is what makes it home. Request your free home valuation when you're ready to see what your own McKinley Heights property looks like in this market.
