Webster Groves council fields traffic concerns on Old Webster apartment and condo project | Local Business

The project, called Douglass Hill, would demolish existing businesses and warehouses to make way for about 700 apartments, 100 condominiums and more than 100,000 square feet of retail and commercial space at the southwest corner of North Gore and West Kirkham avenues, an area the city is calling Old Webster North. A historic Black church on West Kirkham would remain.

Douglass Hill represents a new opportunity to attract more residents — and more tax dollars — for an older suburb like Webster Groves, which has long identified the area for redevelopment. It is the most ambitious commercial development to go before the council in recent memory, but its scale and potential to exacerbate traffic near the railroad tracks have been divisive.

A railroad would border the project, but a study, paid for by the development team of SG Collaborative, that estimated how the project would impact traffic did not include the railroad.

“There will be significant traffic impacted,” Mayor Gerry Welch said. “I think, as a city, we should (have) a better traffic study.”

Mara Perry, Webster’s director of planning and development, said the railroad does not have a regular pattern of timing nor number of train cars, making it difficult for the study to create a traffic model based on train traffic.