Knickerbocker Building

A seven-story loft at the southwest corner of Washington Avenue and 13th Street, about 130 feet on Washington and 150 on 13th. It is really two buildings, 1300-06 and 1308-10, joined behind one front by a party wall. The Washington Avenue front is buff brick, long since darkened by soot to a deep brown, in five wide bays. Brick piers rise from pink granite bases, and string courses trimmed in terra-cotta egg-and-dart molding divide the front into a two-story base, a four-story shaft and a one-story top. Broad round arches span the bays below the top story. Rusticated piers mark the corners and the party wall and end in large terra-cotta lions' heads and cartouches under a green copper cornice. The 13th Street side runs eight bays, its inner six in red brick, and the rear on St. Charles Street is plain red brick, its lower floors oddly painted white, with loading docks at street level. A tall vertical KNICKERBOCKER sign hangs on the Washington front. The storefronts have been altered, with cast-iron mezzanine framing surviving in the eastern bays.

In May 1899 Washington University bought this corner as a long-term investment, part of Robert S. Brookings's effort to rebuild the university's finances, and hired Eames and Young to design a loft. The firm drew it as two separate buildings behind a single front, so the halves could be leased or sold apart. Its completion was hailed as a record breaker that pushed the wholesale district west toward 18th Street, and the design was shown at the St. Louis Architectural Club's 1900 exhibition and published in The Inland Architect in May 1900. The Marx and Haas Jeans Company leased the eastern eighty feet from the start at $15,000 a year. In May 1900 the university sold the western two bays, 1308-10, to Isaac W. Morton for $114,412, while it kept the eastern half. The Knickerbocker Clothing Company had leased 1308 by 1915 and gave the building its lasting name. Marx and Haas moved out in 1929, and the Renard Linoleum and Rug Company held the eastern bays until 1968. Washington University owned its half until 1982, the year the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was later converted to residences as the Knickerbocker Lofts.