King-Brinsmade Mercantile Company Building

A nine-story corner commercial block faced in white glazed terra cotta and brown brick, in a Renaissance Revival manner. The richly modeled two-story base carries foliate friezes, dentil and egg-and-dart cornices, and grotesque mascaron keystones over its windows; the speckled-granite entrance surround with metal "1709 BLDG" numerals is a later insertion. Above, brown-brick piers frame window bays with ornamented terra-cotta spandrels, rising to an elaborate bracketed cornice with palmette cresting. The long west flank is plain red brick, carrying faded painted advertisements — among them "King Bee Hats — King-Brinsmade Merc. Co." and a period chewing-gum sign.

Built in 1911 to the design of Albert B. Groves for the King-Brinsmade Mercantile Company — a wholesale firm whose "King Bee" hats survive in a painted advertisement on the west wall — the building stood among the loft-and-showroom houses of the Washington Avenue garment district. By the late 1920s it housed Marshall Field & Company and the Chappelow Advertising Company; in the 1940s the International Shoe Company and an American Red Cross office occupied it, and the Superior Typesetting Company held the eighth and ninth floors into the 1970s. Artists took lofts during the 1980s; the building was converted to residential use at the end of the 1990s, and a 2003 renovation produced condominiums, with a 2007 project adding a ground-floor technology tenant and reopening filled-in windows. It is now known as the King Bee Lofts.