A narrow ten-story office building on Olive Street near Eighth, three bays wide, with a front unlike anything else downtown. Rough granite blocks were piled up the piers in jagged, bulging courses, and stacks of projecting glass window boxes filled the bays between them. Above, stepped gables and a steep mansard climbed to a tall central dormer tower crowned with battlements and a flagpole. Panels reading FAGIN and 1888 marked the entrance.
Aaron W. Fagin, a vice president of the Merchants Exchange, commissioned the building after a trip around the world, wanting something original for St. Louis. Charles B. Clarke designed it, and it went up in 1888 as one of the city’s early attempts at a tall office building. The public hated it. People avoided walking under its piled granite front, which looked ready to fall, and its offices and storefronts went unrented. In 1893 the Architectural Record called it “the most discreditable piece of architecture in the United States.” After about seven years of losses the front was stripped and replaced with a conventional facade. The building was torn down in 1918 for the Arcade Building, now part of the Wright-Arcade Building on the same site.
