Designed by Alonzo H. Gentry, the Robert E. Lee Hotel at 18th and Pine streets lies only a few blocks north of Union Station and represented a new type of lodging in St. Louis. Opening in 1928, the Robert E. Lee was a simple, “no frills” style of hotel, and catered to businessmen who probably…
Category: Downtown
Posts about downtown St. Louis
Central Post Office
It dawned on me that after I had posted about the major expansion to the Central Post Office, I have never actually posted about the original building, opened in 1935. I’d even featured the murals on the interior back in 2011. Designed by Klipstein and Rathmann, who also designed the Eighteenth Street Parking Garage from…
Eighteenth Street Parking Garage
I have to admit that I was tricked by this building the first time I saw it. I initially believed it was built as light industry, and was gutted for a parking garage sometime in the mid to late Twentieth Century. I was wrong! This was actually built as the Eighteenth Street Parking Garage, designed…
Plaza Square, New Paint Scheme
The Plaza Square Apartments, a major urban renewal project last century, have gotten a new paint scheme that have really jazzed them up. I’ve written in the past that I wasn’t the biggest fan of these buildings, but I have to admit I do like the new colors.
Ford Apartments
Designed by the famous St. Louis architect Preston J. Bradshaw, someone whom I’ve not looked at extensively, the Ford Apartments is an early example of a Modernist residential building in downtown St. Louis completed in 1950. In a dramatic turn away from the more ornate office buildings nearby, the Ford Apartments eschews decorative elements and…
Schiller Monument
Originally installed in St. Louis Place Park in 1898, the statue commemorating Friedrich Schiller was moved to one of those squares of greenspace in the Gateway Mall in the 1970s. Schiller is one of the most famous poets in the German language, having written what would become the lyrics of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” The…
The Never Built Central Tower
St. Louis had a couple of skyscrapers planned in downtown St. Louis, but thanks to Andrew Raimist, to whom full credit is given for this post, I learned that there was a forty story tower planned on Broadway, that would have slid right in between the two large buildings above where the small building on…
Spires, Skyscrapers and American Skylines
I was thinking recently about how Western Civilization cities are defined by their skylines. In Europe, major cities were dominated by the spires of their churches and in their cathedrals. Take the city of Cologne; if you look above there is sort of a gentle pyramid shape formed if you follow the lines over the…
Post Office Expansion
No one seems to know when this expansion to the Central Post Office downtown was built, or who was the architect. It’s a huge building, and stretches for an entire block; there’s even parking for employees on the roof which you can see from satellite images. Note the soot on the side of the building…
Lightwell, Carnahan Courthouse
I was in the Carnahan Courthouse recently on some unrelated business and I spotted an open window that looked into one of two lightwells for the building. I took these photos blindly, sticking my camera out the window. It’s interesting to see how the HVAC systems have been installed in the lightwell since there was…