A ten-story hotel of red brick over a steel frame, trimmed in white terra cotta and stone. Angular three-sided bays, faced in terra cotta with lion-head panels in the spandrels, rose from the third to the eighth floor on the Washington Avenue, 18th Street and St. Charles Street fronts, and each was crowned near the roofline by a large terra cotta cartouche. A bracketed cornice carried a row of tall leafy cresting ornaments around the top of the building. At street level a band of shopfronts, among them the Marquette Drug Store, wrapped the corner, and an arched doorway on 18th Street, the Woman's Entrance, carried ornament by the sculptor George Julian Zolnay.
The Marquette was conceived by a syndicate of Washington Avenue wholesalers as a hotel for the buyers and merchants who crowded into the wholesale district between 15th and 18th Streets. McNair and Harris Realty assembled the corner lot in 1905 for a group of St. Louis investors, and in March 1906 the Marquette Hotel Investment Company was incorporated with $255,000 in stock. Its directors included Fletcher R. Harris, David D. Walker Jr., George Warren Brown and Jackson Johnson. Barnett, Haynes and Barnett designed the building, and work was under way by April 1906. In January 1907 the Post-Dispatch reported the hotel nearly finished, with 410 rooms and 200 baths, a marble rotunda in the Pompeian style lined with murals and ending in a palm room, a main dining room in the modern French style, a Louis XV ladies' parlor on the mezzanine, and billiard rooms, bowling alleys and a barber shop in the basement. Thomas H. Glancy bought the hotel in 1912 and ran it until the mid-1920s. It then passed to Berberich Hotels and, during the Depression, to the General American Investment Company. In 1940 it joined the Milner chain of economy hotels and was known from then on as the Milner Hotel. As the wholesale district declined, the cornice and roof cresting were removed and the storefronts were covered over with permastone and metal panels. The hotel closed in 1977. The city's Land Reutilization Authority later sold the empty building for $100. Landmarks Association of St. Louis prepared a National Register nomination, and the hotel was listed on September 26, 1985. It was demolished in 1988 for a parking lot.
