Hamilton-Brown Sunlight Factory

A five- and six-story red brick daylight factory built for maximum window area, its long elevations divided into regular bays by shallow brick piers rising from a rusticated stone base. Windows fill nearly the full width of each bay — round- and segmental-arched with brick voussoirs on the lower floors, square-headed above — beneath a corbeled brick cornice. Faded ghost lettering for the Hamilton-Brown Shoe Company reads across the upper brickwork. The complex wraps interior courts in several connected wings, and a tall freestanding smokestack, now lettered SOULARD MARKET APARTMENTS, rises alongside.

Hamilton-Brown built this factory at Ninth and Carroll streets in 1906, three years after its plant at 2031 Olive, to a design by Isaac Taylor's office, which produced the company's St. Louis factories. The company called it the Sunlight plant, a name that described the design: banks of large windows that lit the workfloors. It is one of only two surviving Hamilton-Brown buildings in the city. Hamilton-Brown operated here until 1941, when the failing company sold the building to the Welsh Baby Carriage Company, whose workforce of about 500 made baby buggies and children's toys. After the carriage company's decline the building passed through warehouse uses, and in 2005–06 it was converted into the 132-unit Soulard Market Loft Apartments, adjacent to the Soulard Farmers Market.