Laclede Gas Light Building

The Laclede Gas Light Company Building is a tall early skyscraper of brown brick set between a cream terra-cotta base and crown, its color contrasts carrying most of the ornament. At street level a two-story arcade of round-arched openings runs beneath a carved entablature reading THE LACLEDE GAS LIGHT COMPANY, the arches filled with iron transom grilles. The brick shaft rises as a plain grid of windows to a two-story crowning colonnade of giant fluted Ionic columns in terra cotta, carried on a dentiled cornice edged in copper. The corner is canted, and the whole is a restrained exercise in classical form.

The Laclede Gas Light Company completed this building in 1911 at 1017 Olive Street, at the corner of Eleventh Street, as its downtown headquarters; it was designed by the St. Louis firm Mauran, Russell & Crowell. The company, St. Louis's gas utility, later outgrew the ten-story building and in the late 1960s moved to a new Laclede Gas Building at 720 Olive. The 1017 Olive building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a largely unaltered early-twentieth-century skyscraper, and it remains in office use.