Drive west on Delmar Boulevard past the Tivoli Theatre this month and you will pass a storefront with the lights off, the old HopCat sign still bolted above the door long after the beer taps went quiet. Keep going a few blocks and you will hit a line out the door of Kishimoto Mendō, the ramen shop chef Steven Pursley opened this spring as a sequel to his South City restaurant Menya Rui. Two restaurants, same street, opposite directions.
Drive south instead, over to Olive Boulevard, and the story looks nothing like Delmar. A 148,000-square-foot Target opened there in May, the largest Target store in the St. Louis region, sitting next to a Costco that has anchored the corner for years and a Dierbergs that opened around the same time.
Both of these are University City. Neither tells the whole story on its own. The neighborhood is not simply "growing." It is splitting into two corridors that are growing in opposite ways, and if you live here, understanding that split changes how you plan your week.
Two Corridors, One Zip Code
The Delmar Loop is getting smaller and more specific. The Olive Boulevard corridor is getting bigger and more standardized. Here is what landed on each street in the past several months.
| Corridor | What Opened or Is Opening | Type of Business |
|---|---|---|
| Delmar Loop | Kishimoto Mendō, 6394 Delmar (April 2026) | Independent, chef-owned |
| Delmar Loop | LOCAL on Delmar, 259 units at Delmar & Leland (completing summer 2026) | Residential, with street-level retail |
| Delmar Loop | HopCat (opened 2018, since closed) | National chain |
| Olive Boulevard | Target, 8645 Olive Blvd, 148,000 sq ft (opened May 2026) | National chain |
| Olive Boulevard | Costco, 8685 Olive Blvd (open) | National chain |
| Olive Boulevard | Dierbergs (open) | Regional chain |
Read the table by type of business, not just by name, and the pattern is obvious. The Loop is losing a national chain and gaining an independent one. Olive Boulevard is stacking national and regional chains on top of each other.
The Loop Is Betting On Chefs, Not Chains
HopCat opened on the Loop in July 2018 with a $2 million buildout, a two-story space directly across from the Tivoli Theatre, and 80 taps of craft beer. It was the kind of investment a national chain makes when it believes a walkable entertainment district can support it. Eight years later, that space is dark.
What replaced the energy, if not the exact address, is Kishimoto Mendō. Pursley did not need to build a brand from nothing. He already had one, built at Menya Rui in South City, and he brought it to the Loop instead of expanding somewhere with more parking. That is a different kind of bet than HopCat made: not on foot traffic alone, but on a chef's existing following willing to make the trip.
At the same time, the Loop is adding the one thing that makes chef-driven concepts sustainable long term: more people who can walk to them. LOCAL on Delmar, the 259-unit apartment project at Delmar and Leland from developer Subtext, is on track to finish this summer. It adds over 7,000 square feet of street-level retail and a patio right on the boulevard, plus several hundred new residents within a short walk of every restaurant on the strip. A neighborhood does not get a Kishimoto Mendō by accident. It gets one because there are enough people nearby to fill it on a Tuesday.
Olive Boulevard Is Becoming University City's Sales Tax Engine
The Market at Olive project tells a completely different story, and the city's own leadership has said so directly. When the new Target opened in May, University City Mayor Terry Crow described the store's expected impact in blunt terms, projecting $60 million in annual revenue and 270 new jobs, and then connected it to the bigger picture: Costco, Dierbergs, and Target together as what he called a large sales tax engine, with set-asides earmarked to help stabilize the Third Ward and the stretch of Olive Boulevard further east.
That is not incidental language. It means the city is treating this corridor as infrastructure, a way to fund improvements elsewhere in University City using tax revenue generated by big-box retail. The Loop was never going to generate that kind of volume. A ramen counter with forty seats cannot produce the sales tax base of a 148,000-square-foot Target. The two corridors are not competing for the same role in the city's economy. They are filling different ones, on purpose.
The Trolley Still Doesn't Connect Them
Here is the part that matters if you actually live in University City rather than just reading about it from outside: the Loop Trolley, which returned for its 2026 season on April 30 and runs Thursdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. through October 25, does not go anywhere near Olive Boulevard. Its 2.2-mile route runs between the University City Library and the Missouri History Museum in Forest Park, ten stops total, free the whole way. On select Thursdays in May it even ran extended hours to shuttle people to the Twilight Thursdays concert series at the museum.
That is a genuinely good amenity for the Loop side of the neighborhood. It does nothing for a resident who wants to walk from a Loop apartment to the new Target for a Sunday grocery run. The two growth stories are happening in the same city limits, but you still need a car to get from one to the other. No public transit project on the books changes that this year.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
You do not have to choose a side of University City to live in anymore, if you ever did. The Loop gives you Kishimoto Mendō, a growing residential base at LOCAL on Delmar, and free trolley access to Forest Park through late October. Olive Boulevard gives you a Costco run and now the biggest Target in the region, both a short drive away. What has changed is that these two halves of the neighborhood are no longer blending into each other. They are becoming more distinct, not less, and the city is investing in that separation rather than trying to smooth it out.
If your daily routine already splits between the two, this summer just made each half more useful on its own terms. If you have been wondering why the Loop feels quieter in some ways and more chef-focused in others, or why Olive Boulevard suddenly has construction cones and a two-level parking garage, this is why. University City is not choosing between its old identity and a new one. It is running both at once, on two different streets.
If you are watching what these changes mean for property values or timing a move in either direction, The Winckowski Group knows this market block by block. Request your free home valuation and we will walk you through what a Loop-adjacent address versus an Olive Boulevard-adjacent one actually means for your next move.
