A tall corner hotel of dark brick, roughly a dozen stories, rising from a two-story base of pale stone. The base carries round-arched windows and doorways along both street fronts, with carved ornament between them. Above it, plain brick walls are punched with regular rows of sash windows, broken on the long front by a narrow vertical bay of paired windows. A stone cornice sets off the top two floors, where round-arched windows and stone medallions alternate beneath the parapet, centered on a carved cartouche bearing the hotel's monogram. Inside, the lobby was finished in the Italian Renaissance style.
The Claridge Hotel was built in 1920 on the southwest corner of Eighteenth and Locust Streets, 1800 Locust, at the western edge of downtown's wholesale district. George D. Barnett designed it, and the architectural sculptor Victor Berlendis contributed ornament. The hotel had about 350 rooms. Through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s its dining rooms held the banquets, conventions, and installation dinners of trade groups and companies, among them the St. Louis Hardware Club, the Royal Arcanum, the Toledo Scales Company, McCrory Stores, and the National Association of Independent Sewing Machine Dealers, and it kept a cocktail lounge. The hotel was demolished in the 1970s. Before the wrecking ball arrived, the sculptor Bob Cassilly salvaged its marble reception desk, which became the bar of his Park Place restaurant in Lafayette Square, along with the beveled-glass mirrors from its medicine cabinets, which lined the wall behind the bar. Its corner is now a vacant lot.
