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 the factory at Ninth and Carroll streets in 1906, three years after its plant at 2031 Olive, during the years Isaac Taylor's office designed every known Hamilton-Brown facility in St. Louis. The company called it the Sunlight plant — a Missouri History Museum panorama of the largely female stitching-department workforce is captioned "Hamilton Brown Shoe Co. Sunlight Plant Stitching Department" — and the name described the design: banks of large windows lighting the workfloors, remembered locally as "the sunshine factory." 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. Real-estate listings date the building to 1875 or 1889; the 1906 date, from the National Register nomination for the company's Olive Street factory researched from building records, is more reliable.