Melbourne Hotel
A tall brick apartment-hotel tower on a two-story white glazed-terra-cotta base at the corner of Grand and Lindell. The base carries oval cartouche panels, egg-and-dart and dentil courses, and round-arched shop windows with fanlights and wrought-iron balconettes. The brick shaft rises largely plain to an elaborate crown: a corbelled arcade of pointed Venetian Gothic arches in glazed terra cotta, diaper-patterned brick spandrels, and a latticed parapet frieze beneath a deep bracketed cornice and a recessed rooftop loggia. The plan bends with the street grid, giving the tower an irregular footprint.
The Melbourne was built in 1921 as an apartment hotel, designed by Preston J. Bradshaw, with an annex added in 1929 that follows the bend in the street grid and gives the building its irregular shape. It later served as a women's dormitory and then as Saint Louis University's Jesuit Hall, housing the university's Jesuit and Dominican communities. It is being renovated into apartments as The Melbourne, a Neighborhood Properties project pairing 169 units in the original building with a new fourteen-story tower designed by Gray Design Group.
