Battery A Armory

A castellated brick armory built like a medieval fortress. A massive round crenellated tower anchored the rounded corner at Grand and Rutger, pierced with paired oculi and a carved rosette and carried on corbelled machicolations. Battlemented parapets with slit openings ran the length of the walls, broken by a smaller round turret and a stepped bastion. The Grand Avenue front rose from a battered base through pointed-arch windows to a deep arched entrance, and buttressed brick piers with blind corbel-table arcading reinforced the fortress character throughout.

The armory at 1221 South Grand Avenue, at Rutger Street, was built for Battery A of the St. Louis Light Artillery, a unit of the Missouri National Guard. In the 1930s it doubled as a sports venue, hosting boxing matches and serving as the home of the St. Louis Gunners, a National Football League team. It was demolished in the 1960s to make way for the Wohl mental health facility of the city hospital complex.