Lennox Hotel

A slender 25-story tower on Washington Avenue, clad in terra cotta with terra-cotta cornices in a restrained Renaissance Revival mode. Its narrow footprint carried it higher than any other hotel in the city at its opening. The largely blank east wall serves as the canvas for a trompe-l'œil mural by Evergreene Painting Studios: illusionistic Beaux-Arts detailing — pilasters, cornices, and window bays — painted across what is otherwise a windowless party wall.

The Lennox Hotel opened on September 2, 1929 as the tallest hotel in St. Louis, one of three built during the 1920s downtown hotel boom alongside the Statler and the Mayfair. It was the last hotel built downtown before the Great Depression — no new one opened until 1963 — and it had been in business barely two months when the stock market crashed that October. The hotel prospered for decades before declining through the 1970s and closing. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on September 6, 1984. A 1986 plan to convert it to apartments collapsed, and the building passed into the city's hands and stood vacant for roughly a decade; the trompe-l'œil mural on its east wall dates from that 1986 work. A renovation reopened it in July 2002 as the Renaissance St. Louis Suites, linked with the former Statler across Washington Avenue. Bondholders foreclosed in 2009 after the hotel failed to cover its interest payments, and it closed in November 2011. Maritz, Wolff & Co. bought it in December 2013 and spent about $15 million on a full renovation, reopening it on September 2, 2015 — 86 years to the day after its debut — as the Courtyard St. Louis Downtown/Convention Center.