Emerson Electric Company Building

An eight-story reinforced-concrete daylight factory faced in buff brick, its Washington Avenue front divided into six bays by tall piers worked as slender double pilasters. Narrow paneled-brick spandrels with stone string courses span each story, framing large multi-light metal-sash windows, and elongated brick quoins mark the end piers. Round-arched entrances with keystones and deep brick-and-stone vaults anchor the ends of the ground floor, where stone medallions and guttae ornament the spandrels above. On the east flank the end bays rise to pediments set with disks. A painted "Read The Sporting News" sign projects from the upper wall.

The Emerson Electric Company was founded in St. Louis in 1890, named for Judge John Wesley Emerson, its first president, and began by making electric fans, small motors, lighting, and railway equipment. Outgrowing earlier quarters, the company built this eight-story factory in 1920 to a design by Albert B. Groves, adding it just east of an existing plant at 2020 Washington Avenue. Groves used reinforced-concrete flat-slab construction with wide windows and rooftop skylights to carry daylight deep into the floors. Emerson Electric remained here until 1938, when it moved to a large site in St. Louis County. The building afterward housed a variety of tenants, including The Sporting News for about twenty-five years, whose painted sign survives on the facade. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986 and has since been converted into 102 residential lofts.