City Jail (Municipal Courts)

A six-story block of Bedford limestone behind Isaac Taylor's Municipal Courts, its main entrance on Fourteenth Street. By design it read as a hospital or an office building rather than a jail — the point of its City Beautiful-era dress was to hide its purpose. Kitchen and services filled the basement, offices the first floor, and cells the floors above; the cell walls were steel plates cased in poured concrete, which Taylor argued was more sanitary than bare steel.

Isaac Taylor designed the jail in 1913–14 as the companion to his 1910 Municipal Courts, part of the City Beautiful civic core rising in downtown St. Louis. It cost $300,000 and was clad in Bedford limestone so that, as reformers intended, it would read as a hospital or an office building rather than a place of confinement; the Engineers' Club of St. Louis praised it in a glowing 1920 review. The humane exterior housed a starkly ordered interior. Cells occupied the second through fourth floors, two men to a cell as designed. Women were held on the fifth floor, segregated by race in the east wing, and Black men were crowded three to a cell on the fourth floor, against the building's own plan. It served longer than any other jail in the city's history — until 2002, when the City Justice Center opened on Tucker Boulevard. The building was then demolished, and its site became a parking lot.