A narrow six-story commercial building sheathed in gleaming white glazed terra cotta, wrapping the corner of Olive Street and North Seventh with an almost fully glazed elevation. Broad windows fill each bay between slender piers; bands of circular medallions and Greek-key ornament run as spandrel courses, and shallow bowed oriels ripple the upper floors. Foliate lion-head cartouches punctuate the piers, and a scrolled parapet cartouche beneath a projecting hooded cornice crowns the corner, its ends flaring into upswept scrolls. A round-arched entrance with a radiating metal fanlight anchors the Seventh Street front.
The Gill Building was built in 1910 for William A. Gill, a jewelry dealer, and designed by Moritz Eyssell. Its steel frame carries cantilevered floors and an early curtain-wall system, which freed the ground floor for large display windows and an open, unobstructed corner entrance; the design followed the Boley Building in Kansas City. The white glazed terra cotta was valued for shedding the soot of a coal-burning downtown. Ground-floor retail sat below upper-floor offices, and shoe stores held the corner for decades, among them Jarman Shoes in the 1940s and Flagg Brothers in the 1970s. The building anchored a block of white terra-cotta commercial buildings known as Terracotta Row; three of its companions were demolished in 1988 for surface parking, leaving the Gill the last of the group. After a period of vacancy, it was renovated in 2010.
