Hotel DeSoto

The Hotel DeSoto is a ten-story brown brick building whose upper floors are given over almost entirely to round-arched windows, ranked in tight rows in walls of diaper-patterned brick. Small carved medallions punctuate the brickwork near the top, and a deep bracketed cornice slab projects over the uppermost floor. The two lower stories tell a different story: stripped of their original ornament in a 1950s remodeling, they are faced in plain stone and black granite, with a flat metal entrance canopy — lit from beneath and carrying the number 1014 — over the doors. The result is an ornate arched brick tower rising from a spare mid-century base.

The building opened in 1923 at 1014 Locust Street as the home of the City Club of St. Louis, designed by the architect Tom P. Barnett. The club closed in 1933, and the building spent the following decades as a hotel — first as the Missouri Hotel and then, into the 1950s, as the Hotel DeSoto. In 1956 the Archdiocese of St. Louis bought it and converted it into a home for the elderly, the Hotel Alverne; a 1957 remodeling by the architect Bernard McMahon stripped the lower floors of their ornament and added a new street-level front, tile mosaics, and a chapel. The residential floors were vacated in 1987, and after years of vacancy — with nightclubs coming and going at street level — the building was rehabilitated as the Gallery 1014 apartments, its old ballroom and theatre kept as event spaces.