Hamilton Brown Shoe Factory

The seven-story red brick factory at the northeast corner of Olive and Twenty-First is the Taylor office at its most abstract. Its elevations — three bays on Olive, seven on Twenty-First — follow a base-body-crown organization, with ground-floor cast iron piers whose capitals are geometric rather than classical. Brick piers rise five stories and flow into corbeled courses that only suggest keystones; recessed brick rectangles stand in for ornamental spandrels; courses of rose terra cotta with dentils divide the composition. The NRHP nomination attributes the abstract detailing to Oscar Enders, Taylor's chief designer, and calls the building one of the office's designs least tied to historical precedent.

The Hamilton-Brown Shoe Company, founded in 1872 by J. M. Hamilton and Alanson D. Brown, grew from an East Coast shoe distributor into a manufacturer that claimed by 1903 — the year this factory opened — to be the largest shoe company in the world. The firm hired Isaac Taylor in 1902, shortly after his appointment as chief architect of the World's Fair, and over the next fifteen years his office designed every known Hamilton-Brown facility in St. Louis. Murch Brothers Construction built the factory, which in its later years produced the company's Security School Shoe line. The building's working life tracks the shoe industry's flight from the city. After the newly merged International Shoe Company overtook Hamilton-Brown in 1911, production migrated to small-town factories with cheaper labor. The building was last listed as a shoe factory in 1924, rented briefly to the Excelsior Paper Bag Company and Emerson Electric, and stood vacant by 1929. The failing company moved its headquarters into its own empty factory in 1938 and declared bankruptcy the following year. The Rothschild Brothers Hat Company bought the building in 1942, sharing it with the Stetson Glove Company, and added the one-story eastern annex in 1955. Listed on the National Register in 2000 and since converted to office use, it is one of only two Hamilton-Brown buildings still standing in St. Louis; the other is the 1906 "Sunlight" factory at Ninth and Carroll.