International Life Building

A sixteen-story brick office tower at the southeast corner of Eighth and Pine, rising in a plain gridded shaft above a two-story base of shopfronts and arched entrances. The topmost floors were the ornamented zone: round-arched windows set under heavy terra-cotta hoods and Renaissance panels, carried up to a bracketed cornice. The long side elevations ran in unbroken ranks of windows, and a rooftop sign spelled INTERNATIONAL across the parapet.

The building was completed in 1907 at the southeast corner of Eighth and Pine Streets, designed by the St. Louis firm Eames & Young. It was originally the Liggett Building and later became the International Life Building, taking the name of the insurance company that occupied it. On August 25, 1984, it was demolished by implosion — together with the nearby Buder Building — to clear ground for the Gateway Mall, the same downtown clearance that had taken the Title Guaranty Building the year before. Some of its ornament was salvaged and preserved.