Hotel Majestic

A nine-story Renaissance Revival hotel on the corner of Pine and Eleventh Streets. Its terra cotta and enameled brick are now painted a single soft gray, so the change of material between base, shaft and top shows only in the detail. The two-story base is lined with pilasters, with dark awnings over the shopfronts at street level. Above them the second-story windows are grouped in threes under molded hoods, each crowned by a carved shell of acanthus leaves, and scrolled consoles beneath the third-floor windows carry small balustraded balconies. The shaft rises in plain, evenly spaced windows. At the top, a band of dentils, small hoods over the ninth-floor windows and a deep cornice on paired brackets finish the walls. The side and rear walls are plain, with the hotel's name lettered high on one corner. The entrance now sits under a flat canopy in a drive along the side, beside a second, plainer gray tower joined to the hotel.

The Majestic Hotel was built in 1913–1914 at Pine and Eleventh Streets and opened in late September 1914. Its design is credited inconsistently: newspaper reports in July 1913 named the architect Harry F. Roach, while the building permits issued that September and November named Albert B. Groves, and the two architects never worked as partners. By about 1940 it operated as the Lovejoy Majestic Hotel, with a cocktail bar on the corner. The hotel was later renamed the DeSoto Hotel, a name it still carried in 1979. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, restored in the 1980s, and renovated again by Southwestern Bell in 1987. After further renovation in 2018–2019, it reopened on May 5, 2022, as Le Méridien St. Louis Downtown.