Sylvester Lewis opened The Fairgrounds Hotel in 1928 at a cost of one million dollars. This was at least the second hotel he owned, the first one being the Northwestern Hotel. The first manager was Edward T. McFarland, who came from the Hotel Buckingham. A. R. Riley from Chicago took over the management position in 1930 and labeled the hotel “the house of comfort.”
There were 250 rooms, each with a private bathroom, and there was a bowling alley and pharmacy, along with a restaurant located on premises.
The developers hoped to attract visiting baseball players to the nearby Sportsman’s Park located on North Grand, just around the corner (the hotel is on Natural Bridge just west of Grand).
The architect was J.T. Craven, a name I have not seen before (Rob Powers has some information on him here). The general contractor was Boaz-Kiel Construction.
It seems that it’s true that Stan Musial lived here, along with other Cardinals as well as members of the Browns when they were still in St. Louis.
I would describe the style as sort of a Renaissance Revival but relatively simple. Some rooms were combined to create apartments with hotel amenities, which was a common form of habitation in St. Louis in the Twentieth Century but largely forgotten today.
The terracotta cartouches below still show the brackets that helped hold up the now-vanished canopy over the front door.
The building is now senior apartments, but it was the location of many social gatherings and conventions over the years. I looked at it briefly in some terrible photos back in October of 2013.
