Built St. Louis > > Vanished Buildings > > Arthur Building
Photographs courtesy of Lynn Apfel.
Image courtesy of Brody Johnson.
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The Arthur Building
Standing diagonally across Skinker and the Forest Park Parkway from Washington University's campus, this little building was a familiar landmark to the Wash. U. community. Long home to the Italian restaurant Talanya's, it had been vacant for several years.
Washington University apparently owned the building for some time, and hadn't put much effort into keeping it up. An architect's report states that renovation would simply be too costly when compared with replacement. The university plans to replace the building with one of similar massing, but about twice the size.
The general consensus seems to be that the neighbors are pleased with the proposed new building. The loss of the Arthur Building is regrettable, but it seems reasonable that a new building could fill the same role that the old one did. The building was demolished in the fall of 2001.
By way of history, the Arthur Building was originally put up as an apartment hotel around 1915 or so. Talanya's, with its famous stained glass window interiors, had been there for many years before moving out in 1996. The windows were removed to the restaurant's new location.
The building was nice enough, but its ground floors were badly mangled in a remodelling that looks like it came from the 1960s. Most of the surviving details are seen in the photograph shown here. The large, boxy addition on the north side of the building was originally a one-story extension of the building; both the panels and the second floor were added in the renovation (though oddly, the first-floor ribbon survived intact when the rest of the facade was replaced.)
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