The DeMenil Building was a seven-story Romanesque office tower at 119 North Seventh Street, designed by Isaac Taylor and Oscar Enders and completed in 1894. It stood immediately north of the Wainwright Building, sharing its block on what was then known as Real Estate Row. Taylor assembled a crisp, efficient Romanesque composition in brick and stone — less celebrated than its famous neighbor but finely detailed in its own right.
The building was commissioned and owned by Alexander Nicolas De Menil (1849–1928), a capitalist, lawyer, and writer who was a direct descendant of Auguste Chouteau, one of the founders of St. Louis. De Menil was a Washington University alumnus and prominent civic figure who by the 1890s had largely retired from active business to pursue literary interests, publishing a magazine called *The Hesperian*. His investment in the Seventh Street office building was a natural extension of his real estate holdings in the heart of downtown. When it opened, the DeMenil Building was marketed by the John Maguire Real Estate Company in The Hesperian, which touted its fireproof construction, electric heating, and hot and cold running water. It attracted a varied roster of tenants over its eight decades — real estate firms, architects, civil engineers, and dentists among them — serving as a workaday professional building in the shadow of its architecturally celebrated neighbor. The DeMenil Building's fate was sealed when Missouri state officials decided to renovate the Wainwright as state-owned office space in the mid-1970s. Despite the DeMenil's clear eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places, state officials dismissed it as non-historic on the grounds that it had not been formally nominated — a circular justification that preserved the paperwork while destroying the building. A preservation group called the Friends of the De Menil Building mounted an effort to save it; they were summarily overruled. The building was demolished in 1976 to make way for a bland modern addition to the Wainwright complex. It was part of a broader obliteration of the Wainwright's historical context: between 1964 and 1984, every building that had accreted around Adler and Sullivan's tower in the decades after its construction was removed.
