Maryland Hotel

An eight-story Classical Revival hotel on the northwest corner of Ninth and Pine, faced in warm apricot brick against lavish cream terra cotta by the Winkle Terra Cotta Company — some of the richest architectural ornament downtown. Cherubim holding shields, urns, garlanded swags, and griffin-like creatures crowd the Ninth and Pine elevations, with guilloche and egg-and-dart moldings framing the windows and a checkerboard of glazed-brick diamonds inset at the eighth story. Four stacks of bay windows rise through the middle floors. Above the first story the plan folds into a U around an interior light court; the original terra-cotta cornice has been removed.

The Maryland Hotel was designed in 1907 by St. Louis architect Albert B. Groves and built by Rajaw Realty on a 99-year land lease that required a fireproof building costing at least $300,000. It opened on October 3, 1908 — a $500,000 house of 250 rooms — during a week of Veiled Prophet festivities and a campaign visit by presidential nominee William Howard Taft. Its steel frame and masonry were marketed as nearly fireproof, with "not enough wood in it to make a fire," and it served the merchants and buyers filling a downtown then pushing west. Over the following decades the hotel was renamed the Baltimore Hotel and later the Mark Twain Hotel, and it slid from a luxury house to a residential hotel renting rooms by the week. It was renovated between 1995 and 2000 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, its terra-cotta ornament largely intact though the original cornice was gone. Anchor Point Hotel LLC bought the building in 2023. In July 2026 the Missouri Attorney General moved against it as a public nuisance, citing drug activity and roughly a thousand police calls over five years, and ordered its operations to cease by September 1, 2026 so the building could be secured and rehabilitated.