Built St. Louis: Crumbling Landmarks
The Arcade Building

In the very center of downtown stands a group of office towers that is without peer in most cities. The blocks surrounding the 1870s Old Post Office contain over a dozen major buildings dating from the 1920s or earlier, among them the Chemical Building, the Railway Exchange, the Frisco Building, 705 Olive (formerly the Union Trust Building), the American Theater, the Mark Twain Hotel, and the ones you will see in the following pages. All are strikingly handsome; all feature street-level retail space. By rights, this should the center of shopping and business in St. Louis.

Instead, it's often a ghost town. And many of these beautiful office towers, like the Arcade/Wright complex, stand utterly empty, neglected for years by owners who sought no loftier goal than to destroy them to make way for... you guessed it... parking lots. One, the Century Building, has been lost to the wrecking ball. The remainders survive and are facing a brighter future.

Impressive though this group of buildings is, they are in truth only a small fraction of downtown's architectural past. Most of that past has been brutally scraped away in the name of progress: 40 square blocks wiped clean for the Gateway Arch and its grounds; a linear path bulldozed for Highway 40; still more buildings demolished for the Gateway Mall; numerous individual edifices scattered throughout the downtown area. Thus is the importance of this surviving group magnified. The Historic Downtown tour gives a more complete overview of the disintegration of downtown's remaining historic fabric; these pages document the Arcade Building, an office tower occupying \ most of a city block.

The Wright Building || The Arcade Building
- Arcade Building: Ornament
- Arcade Building: Interior
- Arcade Building: Interior Tour
- The Arcade-Wright: Present and Future
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