St. Louis Fills a Downtown Void With Soccer

The new professional soccer stadium that opened last year on the western edge of downtown St. Louis stands apart from most sports venues being built in the US today. The 22,423-seat facility, known as CityPark, was built with relatively modest public subsidies. And instead of looming as a massive megastructure surrounded by parking lots, the home of the Major League Soccer team St. Louis City SC goes out of its way to be a good neighbor to the city around it.

Completed for the team’s inaugural season in 2023 and designed by HOK and Snow Kreilich Architects, CityPark’s 32-acre soccer campus consists of a repurposed manufacturing plant hosting the team’s headquarters, three soccer training pitches and a standalone team store, in addition to the main venue itself. So far, every home match has been filled to capacity. Its lively pregame plaza festivities, abundant public spaces and stylish architectural details have already proven to be an asset to the city’s Downtown West neighborhood. Indeed, the facility was pitched as a means of restoring a patch of downtown fabric that mid-20th-century urban renewal policies had all but destroyed.