Drive south on Kingshighway from Chippewa on any given Friday night and you'll pass a taxidermy-lined bar with a line for burgers, a pizza counter with red leather booths, and a pancake house that just spent a year under scaffolding. None of them show up on an official map as anything other than Northampton. But ask the people who own three of those buildings what to call this stretch, and they'll tell you it has a name: the Crown District.
That name isn't a city designation. It isn't on a street sign. It comes from two brothers, Ivan and Berto Garcia, who run Garcia Properties out of an office on this same block and who have spent the last five years buying, gutting, and reopening the buildings around them one at a time. If you live in Northampton and have watched a familiar storefront change hands twice in the time you've owned your house, this is why.
A name nobody voted on
The idea started, by Ivan Garcia's own account, with a question he read in a book: if you were guaranteed success and money wasn't a factor, what would you actually do? His answer was this stretch of Kingshighway, the one his office already sat on. When he asked his brother and business partner the same question the next day, Berto gave the identical answer without knowing what Ivan had said.
They started calling their target area, running roughly from Magnolia to Eichelberger along South Kingshighway, the Crown District, a nod to the "king" in Kingshighway and to The Royale Food & Spirits, a longtime neighborhood bar already sitting at 3132 South Kingshighway. It's a branding exercise more than a boundary line. Northampton's real, city-recognized borders run Scanlan and Connecticut on the north, Kingshighway on the east, Chippewa on the south, and Hampton on the west. The Crown District sits inside that eastern edge, a few blocks of commercial frontage the Garcias decided deserved a name of its own.
The bar that tested the theory
The first move was The Golden Hoosier, which opened in 2021 in the long-vacant former Southtown Pub space at 3707 South Kingshighway. The Garcias had no restaurant experience. What they had was a building with a Prohibition-era Art Deco bar so intact that Ivan couldn't bring himself to tear it out once he saw it up close, so the whole concept got built around keeping it. The result is a room full of vintage taxidermy and antique fixtures that reads more like a curiosity shop than a sports bar, with a heated dog-friendly patio out back.
The Golden Hoosier was meant to be proof of concept, the flagship that would show other business owners what the corridor could become. It worked well enough to expand.
Two doors down, the sequel
In 2024, the same team opened Bud's Pizza & Beer at 3805 South Kingshighway, close enough to walk between the two in under a minute. The name has nothing to do with the beer. It's a tribute to Walter "Bud" Winzen, Berto Garcia's father-in-law, whose portrait hangs over the bar. The space seats around 85 guests and was designed in-house by the Garcia brothers and built out by their own construction arm, Garcia Construction, splitting the difference between an old-school South City tavern and a cocktail lounge.
Bud's shares more than a sidewalk with its neighbor. General manager Jimmy Menousek also runs operations at The Golden Hoosier, and the two spots deliberately share a gluten-free program, letting Bud's offer gluten-free crust on every pizza the same way Golden Hoosier built its menu around gluten-friendly options. That kind of cross-staffing and shared systems is easy to miss walking past, but it's the clearest sign that this isn't two unrelated openings. It's one operation running two storefronts.
The rescue on the postcard corner
The highest-stakes move came this year. Uncle Bill's Pancake House, a diner at 3527 South Kingshighway that generations of Northampton residents grew up eating breakfast in, sat closed for a full year of renovation before the Garcias reopened its doors in mid-March 2026. Ivan Garcia told St. Louis Public Radio exactly why they bought it:
"Someone might tear this building down and put a dispensary or something here."
That's not a hypothetical. Buildings along this stretch have turned over fast enough in recent years that a beloved diner sitting vacant for even a few months was a real risk, not a rhetorical one. The Garcias saw the opportunity, in Ivan's words, as one that comes around once, and bought the building specifically to keep that from happening.
For residents, the practical upshot is this: if you've been mourning a closed storefront on this stretch of Kingshighway, check who owns it before assuming it's gone for good. The pattern here isn't demolition. It's acquisition and renovation, on a timeline measured in months, not years.
What hasn't worked yet
None of this has been effortless. Berto Garcia has been candid that the plan hasn't spread the way he expected. He told St. Louis Magazine that changing what kind of business goes into these buildings has been harder than he anticipated, admitting flatly that opening The Golden Hoosier didn't trigger the wave of copycat interest they'd hoped for.
That honesty matters if you live here and have wondered why some storefronts on this block still sit empty while others get full renovations. The Crown District isn't a finished project with momentum of its own. It's still, five years in, mostly one family's buildings, one family's construction crew, and one family's bet that the corridor will eventually pull in outside investment on its own.
What to watch for next
If you walk or drive this stretch regularly, here's what's already in motion beyond the three spots open today:
- A building on the opposite side of South Kingshighway that the Garcias have purchased and plan to convert into another restaurant, with a yoga studio planned for the space behind it.
- A cocktail bar slated for the northwest corner of Kingshighway and Chippewa, a few doors from Bud's. Details on an operator haven't been finalized, but the space has been identified.
Neither project has an opening date attached yet, and both depend on the same buy-first, build-later pace that brought Uncle Bill's back after a full year of work. If the last five years are any indication, the next opening on this corridor won't come with much advance notice. It'll just be there one Friday night, with a line out front and a name most of the city still doesn't know to look for.
If you're curious what a corridor like this means for property values or timing a move in Northampton, that's a longer conversation, and one Team Bravo is glad to have whenever you're ready. For now, next time someone asks where you live, you'll have a name for that stretch of Kingshighway that most of St. Louis hasn't caught up to yet.
