Dick Fleming On Innovation, Collaboration, Technology, and The Globe Building
"St. Louis is really emerging as one of the hot ecosystems of entrepreneurship in the United States. It grows out of a number of things, beginning with the Washington Avenue innovation porter that began a number of years ago, and now anchors such as the Globe building Cortex and T-Rex are really beginning to come together to position St. Louis as one of the go-to places for entrepreneurs and for business, and the assets that we have in places like the Globe building were uniquely here, we have scale, we have infrastructure including some of the best tech infrastructure in terms of connectivity and access to the Internet, and really the entire state of Missouri.
It's very exciting to see spaces like the Globe building coming forward with even bigger scale. 70,000 square feet per floor of adaptive reuse space with high windows, with great technology, with three to 500 parking spaces in the building itself. It's become an attractive, go-to place not only for the data companies that are already here because of the outstanding internet infrastructure, but also because of its physical location and being part of the ecosystem of the Washington Avenue Technology corridor.
85,000 people now working downtown, nearly 20,000 people living downtown, and it's all connected in a walkable set of assets highlighted by recent decisions by the NGA to build their new $1.75 billion headquarters several blocks from here. So it's no accident that an international player such as the Ponce Health Sciences University would choose to locate in St. Louis, in downtown St. Louis here in the Globe building. It's part of the entire renaissance of this ecosystem that's being built in Center City, St. Louis."
- Dick Fleming, Chairman of Community Development Ventures, Inc. and the former President and CEO of the St. Louis Regional Chamber & Growth Association.