Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company Plant

A long red brick factory loft rising from a base of rough limestone, its facades lined with row after row of tall, evenly spaced windows, many now boarded or shuttered in red. Loading docks with metal canopies open onto the street, and an enclosed bridge spans the gap between two of the complex's blocks at the upper floors. The walls are plain brick up to a simple cornice, broken at the corners by large terra cotta cartouches of foliage and a grotesque mask. The complex's tall brick smokestack stands nearby.

Liggett & Myers built its St. Louis tobacco plant along Park Avenue in 1896 to designs by Isaac Taylor. The complex grew to thirteen buildings, with its own power house and smokestacks beside the rail line, and at its completion was called the largest tobacco plant in the world. It closed in 1972, and the surviving buildings now form the Liggett & Myers Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2016 Urban Improvement Co. announced plans to make one of the buildings, the four-story block with a penthouse at 4140 Park Avenue, its headquarters, with shared office space on the other floors; the city approved a ten-year tax abatement in 2017. When a prospective office tenant chose another site, the firm changed the project to 62 loft apartments with ground-floor commercial space, at a cost of $24 million.