Isaac Taylor's seven-story loft building at 1001–1007 Washington Avenue reads as a classical column with a Sullivanesque accent: a two-story rusticated base banded in brick and terra cotta, then a five-story shaft of unbroken brick piers and slender terra cotta mullions rising to round arches at the seventh story. A band of grotesques — the carved fish heads — marks the transition from base to shaft; the original cornice is long gone. The district's NRHP nomination likens the shaft to Louis Sullivan's Bayard Building.
Isaac Taylor designed the building in 1899, during Oscar Enders's first period as the firm's chief designer, at a cost of $175,000. It opened as the Sullivan Building, home to Roberts, Johnson & Rand Shoe Company, founded the year before, which ran manufacturing and wholesale operations here until moving to Fifteenth and Washington in 1909 — years when boots and shoes were St. Louis's largest industry. The Curlee Clothing Company, a men's wear producer that had been growing in a narrower Taylor-designed building at 1128 Washington, acquired all seven floors in 1915. The district's NRHP nomination marks that purchase as a sign of clothing's eclipse of the shoe trade in the avenue's lofts; by 1916 the city's men's clothing sales had reached $24 million a year. The building has carried Curlee's name since, later serving as retail and office space, and it contributes to the Washington Avenue East of Tucker historic district.
