Here is the Loop Trolley Company’s report on the final route. Since the proposed line could be a stimulus to investment in the buildings and parcels facing the route, our readers might be interested. Will the trolley be a catalyst for rehabilitation of remaining vacant buildings like Wabash Station, or (in wilder dreams) restoration of Isadore Shank’s DeBalievere Building (1926)? Will it spur dense infill on vacant lots (an outcome that owners of sites of demolished barbeque restaurants might wish)? Time will tell. For now, we know that there are changes in the trolley route and its terminals.
Paul Brown Building
818 Olive Street
Architect: Preston Bradshaw
Built: 1926
On the west side of Ninth Street between Olive and Pine streets stands one of downtown’s latest early office buildings, the Paul Brown. Named for a banker and vice president of the Mercantile Trust Company, the Paul Brown Building was completed in 1926 from plans by architect Preston J. Bradshaw. The building was a speculative project, and it replaced older buildings on the site including the Odd Fellows Building at the corner of Ninth and Olive (1888). One of the tenants in the Odd Fellows Building, the Christian Science Reading Room, ended up being partly responsible for the Paul Brown’s design when the tenant won a court injunction against relocation. Bradshaw had to redesign the building to utilize the base columns and first floor of the older Odd Fellows Building. Given the inferior older structure of that building, Bradshaw reduced the height of the Paul Brown at the north from sixteen to twelve stories to avoid overloading the older building’s base.
Midwest Terminal Building
Location: 710 N. Tucker Boulevard
Architects: Mauran, Russell & Crowell
Built: 1932
Now simply known as the Globe-Democrat Building, the Midwest Terminal Building was originally intended to house a freight terminal for the Illinois Terminal System underneath a 19-story building. The Illinois Terminal company developed the building. As designed by Mauraun, Russell & Crowell, the Midwest Terminal Building would have had two levels of parking, underground freight loading from the Illinois Terminal’s subterranean lines, a lobby and retail base, 16 floors of warehouse or general commercial space and three floors of offices above. The building would be accompanied by a 32-story tower one block south at the corner of Twelfth Street (now Tucker Boulevard) and Washington. This tower would house the passenger terminal of the Illinois Terminal Railroad, which provided electric interurban rail service to cities across Illinois including Peoria, Decatur and Urbana. Both buildings would be powerfully cubic, streamline Art Deco masses making dramatic use of setbacks. The Midwest Terminal Building was designed with a limestone-clad base and an elaborate carved entrance motif.
Marquette Building
300 N. Broadway
Architects: Eames & Young
Built: 1914
The Monward Realty Company, headed by developer and realtor Lawrence B. Pierce, acquired lots at the northeast corner of Olive and Broadway streets in 1911 and 1912. Located in the heart of the financial district, the site was well-suited for a modern office building. Monward Realty company hired Eames & Young to design the new building, which would later be named the Marquette Building. The firm came up with a plan consisting of a U-shaped 19-story base and a 10-story tower with pyramidal cap influenced by New York skyscrapers of the era. The building blended rugged steel frame construction with Classical Revival exterior detailing in brick, stone and terra cotta. The tower was never built, and the base was completed in 1913. In 1914, fire destroyed the Boatmen’s Bank Building at Fourth and Washington, and the bank elected to lease the first floor bank space already built out.
Hotel Jefferson
415 N. Tucker
Architects: Barnett, Hayes and Barnett
Built: 1904; 1928
Renowned local designers Barnett, Haynes & Barnett designed the original section of the fourteen-story Hotel Jefferson, completed in 1904. The Classical Revival building was completed with stacked bay windows offering wide views of downtown, and an ornate upper section and entablature that included round windows (later reconstructed as rectangular openings). In 1928, a major addition to the west was completed when owners rebranded the hotel as the New Hotel Jefferson. The addition notably did not attempt to replicate the appearance of the original section, but instead offered a more subdued but still classically-oriented facade on Locust Street.
Arcade Building
812 Olive Street
Architect: Tom P. Barnett Co.
Built: 1919
Developed by Edward Mallinckrodt as downtown’s first office building with an enclosed shopping arcade, the Arcade Building (also known as the Arcade-Wright Building) envelops the earlier Wright Building (1906) at the northwest corner of Eighth and Pine streets, designed by Eames & Young. Master of the picturesque and eclectic Tom P. Barnett designed the new building in the Gothic Revival style, a stylistic idiom well-suited to the two-story vaulted arcade inside. Construction began in 1917 while World War I claimed America’s steel supply, so the Arcade was built in reinforced concrete. Briefly, the building was the world’s largest reinforced concrete building. The exterior today retains the building’s characteristic lancet arched retail and entrance openings, with ornate bosses, terra cotta tracery at the top of the northern section, and dramatic bay windows facing Eighth and Olive streets. Gone is the original terra cotta cladding on the piers that terminated in projecting gargoyles above; the piers were reclad in brick during the 1930s after failure on the terra cotta anchoring.
Ambassador Building
Northwest corner of 7th and Locust streets
Architects: C.W. & George L. Rapp
Built: 1926
Demolished: 1996
The Ambassador Building was a seventeen-story building in the heart of Downtown St. Louis that housed one of the city’s most elaborate theaters beneath eleven stories of offices. The building was developed by theater magnate Spyros Skouras’s Skouras Brothers Company. Designed by noted theater architects Rapp & Rapp, who had also designed the St. Louis Theater (1925, now Powell Hall), the building balanced baroque terra cotta ornamentation at the base and griffin-adorned cornice with a powerful, plain brick shaft. Inside, the lavishly detailed 3,000-seat theater employed a French Renaissaince Revival style associated with the “Sun King” Louis XIV. After several years as a music venue, the theater closed down in 1976. The fixtures of the theater went to public auction in 1989; the chandeliers are still found in the Des Peres Cinema in West County. Mercantile Bank demolished the Ambassador in 1996 and 1997 to create space for a driveway to the Mercantile Tower (now the US Bank Tower). The St. Louis Building Arts Foundation recovered the terra cotta ornamental systems.
Preservation Research Office in partnership with Modern STL presents:
A Preservation Ellipsis: The AAA Building and Our Recent Architectural History
Saturday, September 29 at 1:00 p.m.
FORM Contemporary Design Show, 1521 Washington Avenue
Michael R. Allen will give a talk tracing the idea of preserving the AAA Building around to the fire that destroyed the AAA’s previous building on that site in 1975. Theme will run through various episodes in recent architectural history including preservation of the Old Courthouse and the riverfront clearance of the early 1940s, the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in the 1970s and the relocation of the statue of Friedrich Schiller from St. Louis Place Park to across the street from Kiel Opera House in 1975. Weaving through the connections of several moments, the talk shows how we shape and reshape our sense of place through continual reinvention of the built environment.
The Alligator Oil Clothing Company Building at 4171 Bingham Avenue.
I just submitted a National Register of Historic Places nomination for the Alligator Oil Clothing Company Buildings, early reinforced concrete industrial buildings designed by Leonhard Haeger (architect of the possibly-lost Pevely Dairy Plant office building). Some readers may recognize the mighty factory building on the northern edge of the Bevo neighborhood, which stands on Bingham Avenue between Gravois and Morganford. Built in 1918 and 1919, the two contributing buildings use the Turner “mushroom cap” structural system, and the main building is a very unusual early example of a fully-exposed exterior concrete structure. More on the Alligator plant later — now I want to show a neat discovery.
Looking west down Meramec Avenue toward Gravois Road, 1918. Photograph from the St. Louis Building Arts Foundation.
In researching the building, we needed photographs showing that the Alligator buildings retained what the National Register defines as “integrity” — essentially, whether the buildings still convey the attributes that they displayed in their historic period. Tracking down historic photographs was difficult, but we managed to fine one view showing the main Alligator building in 1918, thanks to the St. Louis Building Arts Foundation. The date is clear because the smaller eastern building completed in 1919 is not evident in the photograph.
The view looks west down Meramec Avenue. The diagonal road running across the photograph is Gravois. Chippewa Avenue is seen at right, running diagonally toward the top of the frame. An intersecting diagonal running toward the right top of the frame is the former St. Louis, Oak Hill and Carondelet Railroad line. The Alligator plant is marked with a dark circle. Contrasting with the one-story flat-roofed houses sprouting on subdivisions lots is the dominant feature of the images: the contours of row cropped farm fields. Less that 100 years ago, the area around Chippewa and Gravois was nearly rural.
Wright's dog house photograph courtesy of the Frank Lloyd Wright House in Ebsworth Park.
Date: Sunday, September 9, 2012 — 2:00 p.m.
Location: Missouri History Museum – Lee Auditorium
Tickets: $8 or $6 for members of The Missouri History Museum and/or The Frank Lloyd Wright House in Ebsworth Park.
Tickets now available by calling (314) 361-9017 or at the Missouri History Museum ticket desk.
ROMANZA: THE CALIFORNIA STRUCTURES DESIGNED BY FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT explores Frank Lloyd Wright’s 50-year relationship with the Golden State. Wright designed more than 80 projects for California and saw more than 25 built. The buildings were grand and modest, public and private, and came from each major era of Wright’s seven-decade career.
With unprecedented access to every California building designed by Wright, Romanza journeys all over the state, from the Los Angeles textile block houses, famous for appearances in dozens of Hollywood films, to Wright’s only San Francisco commission which he designed as a “glass of champagneâ€, from the cinder block homes of the San Joaquin valley, to the “Ship’s prow” home on the beach of Carmel bay, from Wright’s contentious relationship with oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, to perhaps the most charming of all Frank Lloyd Wright stories, the design for a doghouse in response to the letter of a 12-year-old boy.
Also included is substantial material on Wright’s unbuilt California work, some of the most fantastically imaginative structures he ever designed.
The documentary is filmmaker Michael Miner’s third about Wright’s architecture. 87 minutes. Q & A with the filmmaker will follow the screening.
A reconstruction of the doghouse will be on display.
Co-sponsored by The Frank Lloyd Wright House in Ebsworth Park
 and Missouri History Museum.
This talk is part of the 
