Liggett & Myers / Rice-Stix Building

A full-block Romanesque Revival warehouse and showroom building filling the square bounded by Washington Avenue and Tenth, Eleventh, and St. Charles Streets. A rusticated brownstone base carries the red-brick upper floors, pierced by tiers of round-arched windows that gather into broad arcades near the top; the whole is crowned by a deep terra-cotta frieze of foliate scrollwork and a green copper cornice. Heavy corner piers and receding arch orders give the masonry real depth. Among Isaac Taylor's earliest large commissions and often called his masterpiece, it stands as one of the best Romanesque commercial buildings in St. Louis.

Isaac Taylor designed the building in 1888, and it was completed the following year. It was commissioned as the Liggett & Myers Building, for the tobacco firm, but is remembered chiefly for the tenant that soon filled it: the Rice-Stix Dry Goods Company, a St. Louis wholesaler founded in 1879 that moved into the new block around 1889. For decades it anchored Washington Avenue, the center of the city's dry-goods and garment trade, as one of the district's largest wholesale houses. The building later took the name by which it is still known, the Merchandise Mart. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, and in 2003 it was restored and converted to apartments — one of the earliest of the Washington Avenue loft conversions that reworked the district's warehouses for residential use. It ranks among Isaac Taylor's earliest major commissions and his few surviving Romanesque commercial designs, and is the work most often cited as his masterpiece.