There was a routine that used to define an afternoon at Plaza Frontenac. You'd catch a matinee at the six-screen Landmark cinema tucked next to Saks, grab Tex-Mex at Canyon Café afterward, then wander the corridor between Neiman Marcus and Louis Vuitton with nowhere particular to be. That loop closed sometime in the past eighteen months, one link at a time, even as the mall's storefronts filled with names St. Louis has never carried before.
Both things are true at once, and that's the part worth sitting with if you live in Frontenac and treat this mall the way you'd treat a park or a grocery store: a place you pass through on instinct, not intention. Plaza Frontenac isn't shrinking. It's narrowing. The apparel floor is stronger than it's been in years. Everything that used to give you a reason to stay past the checkout line is gone.
The New Arrivals
Aritzia opened its doors on June 4, 2026, a 10,000-square-foot store on the mall's first floor and the Vancouver-based retailer's first location in Missouri. Before Frontenac, the closest Aritzia was in Leawood, Kansas, which means the store isn't just new to the mall, it's new to the entire state.
It joined a fashion floor that's been quietly rebuilding itself since the spring of 2025, when Anthropologie relocated from the St. Louis Galleria and reopened at Plaza Frontenac on March 5, becoming the region's only Anthropologie location under a new roof. Abercrombie & Fitch signed on the same year. Between the three of them, Plaza Frontenac picked up a run of national retailers that had either never touched St. Louis or had planted their flag somewhere else first.
That's a real shift for a mall built in 1974 around two department stores and not much else, then reworked in 1994 with a strategy that leaned on hospitality as much as merchandise. The 2025 and 2026 additions aren't part of that hospitality push. They're straightforward retail bets, and they're landing.
What Arrived, What Left
| Added | When | Left | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropologie (relocated from St. Louis Galleria) | March 2025 | Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema | February 2025 |
| Abercrombie & Fitch | 2025 | Canyon Café | January 2026 |
| Aritzia (first Missouri location) | June 2026 | Saks Fifth Avenue | May 2026 |
Read as a list, the pattern is hard to miss. Everything that arrived sells clothes. Everything that left sold an experience you'd plan around.
The Anchor That Won't Make It to Fall
Saks Fifth Avenue has anchored Plaza Frontenac since the mall opened, which makes its closure the most consequential item on that list even though it was the least surprising by the time it happened. Saks Global filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2026, and by March the company had confirmed it was closing a dozen Saks Fifth Avenue stores nationwide, including Frontenac's, as part of a broader effort to shed underperforming locations. A Missouri WARN notice put a number on it: 65 employees losing their jobs, with the store's operations winding down between May 6 and May 31.
Neiman Marcus, the mall's other original anchor, is staying. That distinction matters more than it might seem. Plaza Frontenac was one of only nine malls in the country built around both luxury department stores as anchors, and losing one without the other leaves a real gap in the wing that Saks occupied, but it doesn't strip the mall of its identity the way a full anchor exit would. What it does mean is that for the first time since 1974, half of the mall's founding architecture is gone.
The Middle That Emptied Out
The Saks closure and the new fashion arrivals get the headlines, but the quieter story is what happened to the reasons you'd spend two hours at Plaza Frontenac instead of twenty minutes.
The Landmark cinema closed for good on February 23, 2025, after nearly three decades as St. Louis's home for arthouse and foreign film. It wasn't a multiplex. It served beer and wine, ran film festival screenings, and gave people in Frontenac and the surrounding suburbs a reason to treat a Tuesday night at the mall as something worth dressing for. Nothing has replaced it.
Canyon Café followed less than a year later, closing on January 25, 2026, after serving Southwest and Tex-Mex food at Plaza Frontenac since November 1995. Employees reportedly found out only days before the doors closed. It was the kind of restaurant you'd default to without thinking hard about it: casual, dependable, the place you ended up at because it was already there.
What's left on the dining side is fine, but it's a different tier entirely. Fleming's Prime Steakhouse, Brio Italian Grille, and Bricktops Restaurant are all still operating in the outparcel lots, and none of them are places you drop into on a whim between stores. The casual, in-between option that used to bridge a shopping trip and an actual meal has disappeared, and nothing has moved into that space.
I've made the Canyon Café loop enough times over the years to notice its absence before I noticed the new storefronts replacing it. That's usually how it goes with a mall's slow reshaping. You register what's missing on your feet before you register what arrived in a press release.
Paying to Park at Your Own Mall
In February 2026, Plaza Frontenac introduced its first paid parking program, setting aside about 120 of its roughly 2,500 spaces at $2 an hour, payable by scanning a QR code. It's a small slice of the total lot, and it's easy to read as a minor operational tweak. It's also consistent with everything else on this list. A mall that's optimizing for high-turnover fashion sales doesn't need every visitor to park for free all afternoon. It needs the spaces closest to the entrance to turn over fast, which is exactly what metered pricing is built to do.
None of this means Plaza Frontenac is struggling. Coverage of the Saks closure noted that the mall's ownership group described the vacancy as an opportunity to reshape that wing of the property, not a crisis to manage around. A mall that can absorb the loss of a fifty-year anchor while opening a state-first retailer in the same season is not a mall in trouble. It's a mall making a choice about what kind of visit it wants you to have.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
If you're in Frontenac, Ladue, or Town & Country and Plaza Frontenac has been part of your rotation for years, the practical shift is this: it's now a much better place to go with a specific purchase in mind and a much weaker place to go with an afternoon to kill. The fashion floor genuinely earns a trip if you're after something Aritzia, Anthropologie, or Abercrombie carries that you can't find elsewhere in the metro. The reasons to wander without a plan, the movie, the casual lunch, the excuse to linger, have quietly been priced or leased out of the building.
That's not a verdict on the mall's health. It's a read on what it's becoming, and it's worth knowing before you plan your next visit around a routine that, in a few key spots, no longer exists.
We spend a lot of time paying attention to how West County's commercial corners shift, because those shifts tell you almost as much about a neighborhood's rhythm as the homes do. If you're curious what else has changed nearby, or you're weighing a move within Frontenac and want a read on the streets, not just the storefronts, The Realty Shop is always glad to talk it through.
