Four different television crews showed up on Olive Boulevard this spring to film people walking into a Target. Shoppers gave the same three or four quotes to reporters standing in the parking lot. Nobody parked a news van outside the noodle shop that had already opened a few blocks away in the old Royal Chinese BBQ space, and nobody interviewed anyone buying a mochi donut at the bakery that had already been drawing lines since the previous August. That gap in coverage says more about how Olive Boulevard actually works than the ribbon cutting did.
Four News Crews, One Store
The Target that opened on Olive this spring is about 149,000 square feet and created more than 170 new jobs, making it the anchor for the Market at Olive development, which also has a Costco. It's the company's 38th store in Missouri, a state where Target first opened in 1969 and now employs more than 6,400 people. The store runs from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day, and Costco itself has been on that same site since it opened in late October 2022, so this wasn't a new corridor arriving all at once. It was the second and third phase of something already underway.
Local coverage leaned hard into the reaction shots. One shopper told a reporter, "We needed a target here, and we're up and coming, so why not?" Another report noted the excitement among University City shoppers who suddenly had a major retailer within a short drive of home. That's a fair reaction to a very large store. It's also the kind of coverage any big-box opening gets anywhere in the country. Nothing about it is specific to Olive Boulevard.
The Grocery Store Three Blocks From Costco
A week or two before Target opened, Dierbergs opened its own store on the same stretch, a 75,000 square foot building anchoring the broader Market at Olive redevelopment along with two multi-tenant buildings adding roughly 8,500 square feet of retail, restaurant, and service space. The store carries expanded grocery options, fresh and prepared foods, and a wide selection of kosher items, and it includes a Corner 17 restaurant inside. The whole Market at Olive project sits on roughly 50 acres along both sides of Olive Boulevard between I-170 and McKnight/Woodson Road, carries an estimated price tag of $211 million, and leaned on tax increment financing to help pay for land acquisition, site work, and infrastructure improvements. Alongside Costco, Target, and Dierbergs, the development has filled in with Chick-fil-A, First Watch, Chipotle, Chase Bank, AT&T, Raising Cane's, Jersey Mike's, 7 Brew, and Sport Clips.
That's a real amount of money and a real amount of square footage. It's also a formula you could drop onto any commercial corridor in the region. A Costco, a Target, a Dierbergs, and a Chick-fil-A don't tell you anything about University City specifically. They tell you Olive Boulevard has good traffic counts.
What Actually Opened Without a Camera
The businesses that give Olive Boulevard its own character didn't get a shopper-reaction segment. They opened quietly, in smaller spaces, further east toward the Loop side of the street.
- Yummy Rice Noodle, at 8406 Olive, debuted in the space previously occupied by Royal Chinese BBQ. Owner Sean Lin hails from Fuzhou in Fujian Province and worked as a chef in New York for years before opening the shop. The rice noodles are directly imported from Yunnan in southwestern China, and the kitchen makes its broth from scratch daily. As one manager put it, "We make the soup fresh every day selecting only the finest pork bones."
- Olive Bakery, at 8100 Olive, launched in mid-August 2025 with mochi donuts, specialty pastries, cakes, trifles, and boba tea, and has been drawing steady foot traffic since.
- Olive Grill, at 6951 Olive, traces back to a food truck its founder David acquired in 2019. He leased a storefront in Houston, Texas, in 2021, but when that lease fell through he relocated to St. Louis. In 2023, a new partnership with Mutasem Saleh turned the venture from a food truck back into a brick-and-mortar restaurant, this time on Olive Boulevard.
None of these three needed a TIF district or a two-level parking garage. They needed a storefront, a lease, and a menu worth returning for.
Why the Quiet Openings Are the Ones to Remember
Here's the actual claim worth sitting with. A Target opening is a headline because it happens once and it happens loudly. A noodle shop opening is not a headline, but it's the kind of thing that changes what a Tuesday night looks like for the people who live within walking distance of it. You will go to Target maybe once a month. You will decide where to eat maybe fourteen times a week.
The Market at Olive development is significant and worth knowing about if you live nearby. It is also, by design, replicable. Any city with the right acreage and the right TIF structure can attract a Costco, a Target, and a Chick-fil-A. What can't be replicated is a chef from Fuzhou importing his noodles from Yunnan and building a broth recipe from scratch, or a food truck operator who spent four years working toward a permanent address. Those are the businesses that make Olive Boulevard read as a specific place rather than a commercial template, and they're the ones that got a paragraph in a food newsletter instead of a live shot on the five o'clock news.
The Park Runs on a Different Clock
A few blocks off Olive, Heman Park has been running on its own calendar all summer, and that calendar doesn't care what opened at the shopping center. The U City Summer Band, now in its 30th season, performed free family-friendly concerts under the direction of music director and conductor Danny Lewis at the park's outdoor venue at 1028 Midland Blvd. The season ran from early June through July, with themed nights that included a 30th Anniversary Celebration on July 7 and a Broadway Hits program to close out on July 21. It's a tradition several decades older than the store that got all the press this spring.
Now that the concert season has wrapped, the park is already shifting toward the next seasonal marker. Heman Park Pool's back-to-school hours begin Monday, August 17, 2026, which lines up with the University City School District's first day of school on Monday, August 24, 2026. That's the actual rhythm of the neighborhood this month. Not a grand opening, just a schedule change most residents will notice without needing a news alert to tell them about it.
What This Means If You're Watching the Street, Not the Store
If you're trying to get a feel for how Olive Boulevard is actually changing, the retail openings are worth knowing but not worth building your picture around. The bigger signal is that a corridor anchored by a Costco and a 149,000-square-foot Target still has room for a bakery specializing in mochi donuts and a noodle shop importing rice strands from Yunnan. Both things are true at once, and the second one is the part that doesn't show up on the evening news.
If you've got questions about what's changing in University City, or you're curious how a stretch like Olive Boulevard fits into the bigger picture of the neighborhoods around it, The Drew Group is always happy to talk it through. Let's Connect.
