Orange cones bedevil patrons at beloved Frontenac eatery
Grassi’s Ristorante and Deli has, for good reason, been called a hidden gem.
“Fortunately enough for us, we have some very very loyal customers, and they figure it out. They’ll figure out where to park. There’s plenty of parking in the back.”
There is however a new quirk in the restaurant’s surroundings, one that is unwelcome to its owner and many patrons. Several dozen skinny orange traffic cones now stand across the street, blocking off parking that Grassi’s customers had long used.
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The cones are the result of two Frontenac commercial real estate owners unable to come to a deal.
Rick Forshaw recently purchased the roughly.75 acres in the middle of German Boulevard. The undeveloped otherwise grassy parcel includes a strip of asphalt that, while it is plagued by cracks, particularly by Frontenac standards, did make for convenient parking. The strip of land is unusual in part because in the days of St. Louis’ trolley system, the spot where the orange pylons now sit was the terminus of the West End line, Grassi’s owner Frank Dyer says. So what looks like part of a normal street has long been privately owned. Forshaw, owner of the namesake furniture store and other properties around Frontenac, bought the strip of land from Vetta Sports, which had purchased it from the racquet club. Dyer says customers had parked on the paved part of the property before Forshaw bought it. Now those cones signal that they should keep off.
Forshaw declined to comment for this story.
Gary Follman owns the building that houses Grassi’s. He says he approached Forshaw about continuing to use the property for parking. The two couldn’t reach an agreement.
Needless to say, Dyer is not crazy about the pylons or the reduced parking for his customers. “It’s inconvenient. It’s an eyesore,” he says. “It’s just unfortunate.”
However, Dyer, who’s owned Grassi’s since 2012, has a perspective about the situation that is uncharacteristic in a town where easy parking is everything—and the lack often leads to discord.
“Fortunately enough for us, we have some very very loyal customers, and they figure it out. They’ll figure out where to park. There’s plenty of parking in the back.” (A few dozen spaces run along the back and the side of the commercial strip housing Grassi’s.)
Of Follman and Forshaw, Dyer says. “We do meatballs, they do commercial real estate.”
However, he does hope they come to an agreement that gets rid of the orange pylons and returns the space to parking. “We’re relying on two businessmen figuring it out…So hopefully they’ll figure it out.”
During the pandemic, when the racquet club owned the land, they did a similar maneuver and blocked off the parking. “We waited them out, and they ended up taking down their barricades,” says Dyer.
Follman says he tried to secure the space for parking “as an accommodation” for his tenants, which also include a dance studio. Forshaw, he adds, is well within his rights to block off the space.
“The fellow who bought the property has a right to do what he wants with it,” Follman says. “It’s his property.”
Follman says that the failure to come to a deal was about more than just the price. “There’s maintenance. There’s responsibilities with it. There’s an insurance issue. Suffice to say we didn’t come to any kind of an agreement.”
Dyer says Frontenac officials are aware of the situation and suggested the city might take action.
But according to Frontenac city administrator Andrea Muskopf, the city considers the matter of the orange pylons one that is between two private property owners, not a place for the city to intervene.