For years after the demolition of the old Four Courts the morgue was still used at the corner of Twelfth and Spruce streets (you can see in the 1920 photo below how the old courthouse has vanished).
But finally in 1927, the City of St. Louis turned to its staff architect, L.R. Bowen of the Board of Public Service, to build a new building that would now be known as the Coroner’s Court Building, and which today is the Medical Examiner.
A simple Beaux-Arts building with a $160,000 price tag, the office fit in well with the larger edifices that had risen nearby designed by Mauren, Russell and Garden, which were more complex commissions.
Today, it sits in between an on-ramp and and a more modern expansion of the former police headquarters.
Originally, there was room for 48 bodies, with plans for an expansion to 72. I am not sure if that addition ever happened, as the current dimensions of the building match what was mentioned at its original opening.
Yeah, those fifty-percent figurative/fifty-percent literal “Circa” 1878 toward the 5th of June, 1917 were the Rhineland South American years for “greater” Saint Louis’s quasi-prefectural past within the eyes of a certain late David Mitton fellow 🙁
Like why does that 1912 “completed” Downtown Municipal Courts building with it’s “Beaux Art architectural sensibilities appropriated exterior” look so eerily like East Saint Louis’s 25/10/1909/MCMIX completed Federal Court House?
Which allot of the in post Woodrow Wilson’s “days of terror” metropolitan government activities built buildings constructed between March 4th, 1921 and December 7th, 1941 would be planned to be designed within a Beaux Arts meets Art Deco Modernist fashion over some more “traditional” Continental European Neoclassical like manner?
Nickelodeon, Rugrats and Kool-Aid, how about we some Mad Max, TUGS, and Brian de Palma’s own little Scarface “movie” planned for the “kids?” Just Kidding!
Mikhail/Michael John Kricfalusi/John K. Sean Patrick Bee/Sean B.