The Hotel Jefferson is a large brown brick hotel filling a downtown block, built in a Classical Revival manner and trimmed in cast stone and terra cotta. A heavy green copper cornice, dentiled and bracketed, wraps the building partway up; above it the upper floors carry round-arched windows and, at the parapet, a band of small windows set within elaborate terra-cotta garland-and-wreath arches. Canted bay windows run up the corners, and a rusticated stone base carries the arched ground-floor openings. On an upper side wall the tiled words HOTEL JEFFERSON remain. The building rises in two connected sections of slightly different height.
The Hotel Jefferson opened on April 29, 1904 — the day before the Louisiana Purchase Exposition — to house visitors to the World's Fair, and was named for Thomas Jefferson. The original east half, a Classical Revival building at 415 North Tucker Boulevard, was designed by the St. Louis firm Barnett, Haynes & Barnett. In 1928 the Chicago firm Teich & Sullivan added a 400-room wing that roughly doubled the hotel to 800 rooms, with new banquet rooms and a parking garage. The hotel operated into the 1970s and later became a nursing home, which closed in 2006; by then known as the Jefferson Arms, the building stood vacant for nearly two decades. A long-delayed rehabilitation is converting it into an AC Hotel by Marriott with apartments.
