A four-story brick dry goods store on a corner, trimmed in stone and capped by a steep metal roof. Above the corner bay on the Broadway front, a tall stepped gable rose to a finial, carrying a carved crest and a small balconied window. Round-arched windows lit the fourth floor beneath it. Around the corner, a second gable capped the Franklin front above a balustraded balcony, and a bracketed cornice ran between the third and fourth floors. Large sash windows filled the upper floors, set in panels with roundels between them. The ground floor was a run of shop windows under striped awnings, with THE CENTURY lettered on the band above and a domed canopy over the main entrance.
The Century Dry Goods Company was chartered in St. Louis in 1901 and took over the store of the Boston, a dry goods house on the southwest corner of Broadway and Franklin Avenue. It did not last long. By 1902 banners on the corner announced that the Century was going out of business, and the Globe Shoe and Clothing Company bought its stock, house furnishings included. Schaper Bros., a dry goods and notions firm, already had a store next door at 815 N. Broadway, and it took over the corner. The 1909 Sanborn map shows Schaper Bros. filling a four-story mill-construction building with 78 feet on Franklin and a long front on Broadway, with a restaurant on the third floor and sprinkler tanks in the attic. In 1910 the Schaper Bros. Mercantile Company planned a department store in the Lindell Building at Eighth Street and Washington Avenue, and a 1911 directory lists it there. Franklin Avenue was later renamed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, and the building is long gone.
