Plaza Frontenac in 2026: What's New and What's Changing

For a quarter century, a Tuesday night in this corner of west county had a familiar shape: dinner at Fleming's or BrickTop's, then upstairs to whichever foreign or independent title Landmark Theatres was running on the six screens near the Saks side of Plaza Frontenac. That routine broke in February 2025, and it kept breaking through the following year. The mall that has anchored this stretch of South Lindbergh Boulevard since 1974 did not fade quietly. It swapped identities in real time, and most of the swap happened inside about fifteen months.

The Cinema Went Dark First

As St. Louis Magazine reported, the Landmark Plaza Frontenac Cinema showed its last films on February 23, 2025, and staff cleared the space by February 28. The closure followed a lawsuit Brookfield Properties, the plaza's owner, had filed against Landmark the previous November, claiming the theater owed $274,000 in back rent. A bench trial was set before St. Louis County Circuit Judge Mondonna Ghasedi for the same week the screens went dark.

The theater had opened in 1998 and spent nearly three decades as one of the region's few reliable venues for arthouse and foreign film, including years as a regular stop for the St. Louis International Film Festival before that festival's screenings shifted to the Hi-Pointe Theatre under Cinema St. Louis. In a letter to staff, Landmark's vice president of operations, Chuck Delagrange, wrote that the cinema had created countless memories and played a significant role in the lives of many. By the time it closed, the building was already showing its age: rows periodically roped off for ceiling leaks, a digital ticket kiosk that had not worked in years.

Then the Department Store Announced It Was Leaving

On March 6, 2026, Saks Global announced it would close 12 Saks Fifth Avenue stores and 3 Neiman Marcus locations nationwide as part of a broader cost-cutting push, and the Plaza Frontenac Saks was on that list. The announcement carried more weight here than it would at most malls. Since it opened in 1974, Plaza Frontenac has been one of only nine enclosed shopping centers in the country anchored by both Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus at the same time. Losing one half of that pairing ends a fifty-year format, not just a single store.

What Actually Moved In

While the Saks wind-down played out, the first floor was filling back in. Earlier in 2025, St. Louis' only Anthropologie left the Saint Louis Galleria and reopened at Plaza Frontenac, a move that made the plaza the sole home for that brand in the region. Abercrombie & Fitch opened on the mall's second floor around the same stretch, planting a mainstream name a few doors down from where Saks was closing.

Then came the larger addition. On June 4, 2026, Aritzia opened its first Missouri store on the plaza's first floor, a roughly 10,000-square-foot boutique carrying the Vancouver retailer's in-house labels, including Wilfred, Babaton, Golden, Tna, The Super Puff, and Sunday Best. Until that opening, the nearest Aritzia to St. Louis sat in Leawood, Kansas, about twenty miles south of Kansas City. The St. Louis Business Journal framed the timing directly, noting Aritzia was expanding into the market as it navigated the loss of one of its longtime anchor stores. The company was not testing the water. Aritzia closed its fiscal year with 144 boutiques across North America, up from 130 the year before, on revenue that grew more than 35 percent.

Here is what changed on each floor over that stretch:

One Fewer Department Store Is Not the Same as a Slower Mall

On paper, the math looks like a loss: one department store anchor gone, one movie theater gone. But the tenants that moved into that space bring people back on a different clock. A boutique with a constant restock cycle and a mainstream apparel chain both draw monthly or weekly visits in a way a single per-season department store trip or an occasional film screening never did. Brookfield has not announced a replacement department store for the Saks space, and nothing in this year's leasing pattern points to one arriving soon. What remains around Neiman Marcus, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Tiffany & Co., David Yurman, Tory Burch, Lululemon, Golden Goose, and Tecovas among them, looks like the shift most successful American malls have already made: away from two full department stores and toward a single anchor ringed by specialty retail that shoppers already choose by name.

What a Tuesday Night Looks Like Now

The dining side of the plaza has not moved. Fleming's Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar, BrickTop's, BRIO Tuscan Grille, Canyon Cafe, Flower Child, and the Zodiac Room inside Neiman Marcus still anchor the outparcels for dinner. What changed is what comes before or after the meal. The old sequence, dinner followed by a 9:45 show upstairs, does not exist anymore. In its place is closer to an early-evening shopping loop: Aritzia and Anthropologie on the first floor, Abercrombie on the second, then dinner at one of the restaurants that never left.

For residents who have measured a decade of Tuesday nights by which screen was showing what, that option has been gone since February 2025. What the plaza offers instead is a stretch of denser storefront turnover than it has typically absorbed at once, with several changes over roughly fifteen months inside a building that used to hold the same tenant roster for a decade at a stretch. Whether that settles into a second full department-store anchor or stays a ring of specialty names around Neiman Marcus is a question the plaza has not answered yet.

For homeowners across Ladue, Frontenac, Town and Country, and the west county suburbs that treat this mall as a shared living room, how that question resolves will shape more than a shopping trip. If you are weighing what a changing retail corridor means for your own street or for a move in the area, Christine Neskar brings three decades of local perspective and a design-trained eye to that kind of conversation. Schedule a Consultation to talk through what is actually happening near you.