The newly opened Cupples 9 building in downtown St. Louis is officially a hit.
And that’s good news for the building’s developer, The Koman Group.
The retail center recently snagged new leases to such retailers as Yurbuds, Pedal The Cause and Flying Saucer Draught Emporium. With these three, the Cupples 9 building — at 900 Spruce St. in the city’s downtown — is now 99 percent occupied.
This means that The Koman Group’s gamble on the building paid off. The developer led the $30 million transformation of the 119-year-old seven-story building and its 147,000 square feet of office and retail space.
The new tenants are a varied group. Yurbuds is a developer and marketer of earphone sets for athletes. Flying Saucer is a Dallas-based restaurant that offers a large list of hand-crafted beers. This is the company’s first St. Louis location. Pedal The Cause is a charity founded in 2009 by two-time lymphoma survivor and president of The Koman Group, Bill Koman. The group organizes an annual cyclcing fund-raising challenge to raise money for cancer research. In 2012, 1,850 cyclists raised more than $2 million.
The new tenants join anchor Osborn & Barr, the largest agricultural-marketing communications agency in North America. This company occupies 66,000 square feet in the building. Other tenatns are Asynchrony Solutions, an information technology/software developer, and Mackey Mitchell Architects.
The Cupples 9 building was built in 1894 and is listed on the National Park Service Historic Registry. It is part of one of the first urban master-planned manufacturing and warehouse districts in the country.
