This Saint Louis Structure was mainly occupied by Millinery Manufacturers

Silk Exchange Building, St. Louis Missouri

Date added: March 22, 2024 Categories:

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The Silk Exchange Building was designed in 1901 by the firm of St. Louis architect Isaac S. Taylor. Built in a prime location during the height of St. Louis' pre-World's Fair image consciousness, it is a sophisticated example of excellence in the design of a utilitarian building.

Two important developments intersected in turn-of-the-century St. Louis at the site of the Silk Exchange Building. One was the spectacular westward growth of Washington Avenue as a linear district of handsome warehouses and factories along the north edge of the Central Business District. The other was the vision of Twelfth Street, as a major boulevard in a City Beautiful that would greet visitors to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. The intersection of Market and Twelfth Streets, where Eckel & Mann's City Hall was built in the 1890s, had already become a focal point for the annual Fall Festival complete with temporary ornament and statuary such as the Statue of Liberty seen in a circa 1892 view of Twelfth Street looking south from Washington Avenue. In the foreground is the site of the Silk Exchange Building with B. R. Bonner's Ice and Coal Shop one of numerous shabby one-story buildings which narrowed the 150-foot expanse of Twelfth Street north of St. Charles Street.

The land at the southwest corner of Twelfth Street and Washington Avenue was once part of the extensive holdings of Peter Lindell, early St. Louis merchant and real estate investor, whose estate was valued after his death in 1861 at nearly $3,000,000. The Lindell property on Washington Avenue between Seventh and Fourteenth Streets appreciated rapidly in the 1880s and 1890s as St. Louis' traditional economic base of warehousing and distribution expanded to include manufacturing and wholesaling operations. In 1899, The Brickbuilder observed:

Washington Avenue has become a center of the wholesale and light manufacturing interests. When buildings were erected in the vicinity of Ninth Street a few years ago they were considered quite a risk, but almost the entire property to Twelfth Street has been built up with large buildings.

Both the Mercantile Trust Company, which represented the financiers of the Silk Exchange Building, and architect Taylor were among the giants of turn-of-the-century St. Louis. Founded in 1899, the Mercantile Trust Company in less than two years mushroomed in the pre-Exposition building boom to become "the greatest financial company in point of capital and surplus west of the Allegheny mountains." The Twelfth Street Realty Company which financed the Silk Exchange Building was one of several syndicates of major Mercantile Trust stockholders investing in the acclaimed new construction in downtown St. Louis. "These new buildings have taken the place of unsightly, tumble-down properties, and are a striking example of the New St. Louis." Isaac Taylor was at the peak of his career, with numerous commissions for major offices, factories and warehouses. In addition, he had been appointed to the prestigious and demanding job of supervising the preparation of the grounds and construction of building for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.

Before construction of the Silk Exchange Building was finished, ownership was transferred to another Mercantile syndicate; the Corner Realty Company. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch predicted that the building, nearing completion in April of 1902, would "assure the magnificent future always promised for Twelfth Street and give evidence, in addition to its being the widest street in St. Louis, that it will become one of the handsomest streets in the world."

The Silk Exchange Building marked a distinct design departure for Taylor's office. In scale, function, and underlying timber construction, it belongs to the turn-of-the-century Washington Avenue wholesale and light manufacturing district. Beginning in 1888 with the massive Romanesque Revival building for Rice-Stix Drygoods (1000 Washington) the firm designed no less than seven major warehouses and factories for Washington Avenue. Monochromatic and sparing in the use of ornament, the Silk Exchange stands in sharp contrast to the other more colorful and embellished products of Taylor's company. Taylor's chief draftsman, Oscar Enders; considered responsible for the firm's output during the years before the World's Fair; was thoroughly exposed to the aesthetic of the Chicago commercial style before coming to St. Louis to work for Taylor. Enders was also interested in the anti-historicist theories of the Vienna Secession.

The Silk Exchange Building was first leased to the Richard Hanlon Millinery Company in December of 1902 and in 1904, was sold by Corner Realty to hotel owner Leo Moser for $300,000. The building received the name by which it is still known in 1907 when it was leased to Morris Woolf's Silk Exchange Realty Company. Woolf, a merchant of velvet and other silk fabrics, occupied only a ground-floor shop at 505 Twelfth Street. Other street-level spaces housed a restaurant, a saloon, and a corner cigar store. The upper floors of the building were sublet by small-scale clothing and millinery manufacturers, by fabric, button, lace, embroidery, and notions merchants and by manufacturers' agents; a pattern of occupancy that continued for over four decades.

Washington Avenue in its heyday was a major United States garment and shoe district. Hotels, restaurants, and nightspots catered to the buyers who flocked to the area. The Drygoodsman and General Merchant and The Shoe and Leather Gazette, published until 1918 in offices at 1627-29 Washington Avenue, four blocks west of the Silk Exchange, reported news of the trade with emphasis on St. Louis. The August 28^th, 1909, issue of The Drygoodsman featuring St. Louis factories included a photograph of women workers on the fifth floor of the Silk Exchange where "Robin's Rompers" and C & C Overalls were made: "That's all we make but we make them right and we make them big."

Labor-management conflicts surfaced on Washington Avenue and in the Silk Exchange Building during the Depression. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt's short-lived National Recovery Act went into effect with sweeping provisions to regulate industry, production, prices, and wages and to protect labor's right to organize. In St. Louis the N.R.A. program was kicked off in August of that year with a parade of twenty thousand which proceeded east on Washington from 18^th Street. International Ladies Garment Workers Union and Amalgamated Clothing Workers organizers had already been busy in St. Louis: "On nearly every block of Washington west of Twelfth Boulevard a group of striking garment workers picketed the factories where they are on strike." Among the strikers were employees of Classy Jeans Dresses, Inc. from the second floor of the Silk Exchange Building. Though the N.R.A.'s blue eagle symbol disappeared when the Supreme Court in 1935 declared many of the act's powers unconstitutional, the right-to-organize provisions survived and strikes on Washington Avenue continued through the 1930's.

In the 1950's factories began to leave the city for outlying areas accessible by automobile. Federal policies that encouraged suburban residential building and demolition of urban housing stock depleted the labor force; manufacturers, increasingly hard hit by cheap imports, sought rural areas where cheap, non-union labor was available. By 1955, the vast majority of Silk Exchange Building tenants were manufacturer's agents who displayed wares made elsewhere for the buyers in the garment trade. Numerous changes in ownership in the 1960s and 1970s reflected the decline of the district.

The Silk Exchange Building, vacated by the few remaining tenants, awaits conversion to office space. Remarkably little altered since 1902, it commands a key position on the street faces of both Twelfth and Washington.

The building was destroyed be fire in 1995.

While fashionably light-colored brick faces the three exposed elevations of the building, there is not the lavish use of historical detail and profusion of terra cotta ornament which was envisioned for Twelfth Street.

Building Description

Isaac S. Taylor's Silk Exchange Building (1901-02) is located at the southwest corner of Twelfth Street (now Tucker Boulevard) and Washington Avenue. The site, with 150 feet on Tucker and only 40 feet on Washington, was purchased in two parcels by the Twelfth Street Realty Company for $152,000 in 1901. A building permit obtained by the company on August 3^rd, 1901, probably underestimated the construction cost at $80,000; a deception commonly practiced to reduce the percentage-based filing fee. The buff brick and terra cotta building was completed in 1902 by the Westlake Construction Company and a photograph published in The St. Louis Architectural Club Annual Exhibition Catalog of that year.

The eight timber posts supporting the wooden beams of the ceilings are exposed on the Twelfth Street elevation by a range of two-story brick pilasters with stone bases marking seven recessed bays between rusticated corner piers. Above terra cotta pilaster caps, a projecting terra cotta band of small-scale vegetal design separates the base from the six-story shaft. Openings at the third story are embellished by pilasters crowned by terra cotta frontons. Narrow terra cotta panels appear at the top of the spandrels between the seventh and eighth stories. Terra cotta cresting above the dentilled brick cornice has survived in spite of the removal of panels that once decorated the parapet wall.

The five-bay side elevations with punched, double-hung windows read as extensions of the corner piers; enfolding the more open Twelfth Street elevation. At the base on Washington Avenue, two-story, engaged octagonal columns have been partially sheathed; shorter columns at the loading dock on St. Charles are still visible at street level. The new owners of the building plan to remove the disfiguring alterations at the first floor and convert the warehouse space to offices.

Taylor, one of St. Louis' most prolific and versatile architects, was born in Nashville, Tennessee. After graduation from St. Louis University with honors in 1868, he worked in the office of George I. Barnett before establishing an independent practice circa 1880. Oscar Enders, who was to sign many of the firm's eloquent renderings, came to architecture through a circuitous path. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Enders was a prestidigitator with a circus before abandoning the metier for drafting and Chicago. Involvement with the Chicago Architectural Sketch Club brought Enders' talents as a designer and perspective artist to the attention of Taylor who enticed him to St. Louis in the 1890's. Enders was President of the St. Louis Architectural Club in 1895; when Taylor became "Director of Works/Architect-in-Chief/Director General" of the 1904 World's Fair, Enders assumed even more responsibility within the firm. Enders continued the practice after Taylor died in 1917 but returned to Chicago in the early twenties where the last few years of his life were devoted to design work for Graham, Anderson, Probst & White.

The work of Isaac Taylor's office, ranging from straight forward warehouses to artful pomposity in public buildings, cannot be stylistically stereotyped. Masterful design and execution, however, are consistent throughout their portfolio. In addition to the Silk Exchange Building, the Board of Education Building, the Columbia Building and Mercantile Trust, important commissions in St. Louis included: The Mercanitle Club, Planters Hotel, DeMenil Building, National Bank of Commerce, Liggett and Myers Tobacco Factory, Kennard Carpet Co., the Hadley-Dean Building, Municipal Courts and Jail and the Jefferson Memorial Building.