Mercantile Library Hall

A three-story Italianate block of brick on the southwest corner of Fifth Street and Locust. Shops filled the ground floor, their names painted on signboards over the windows. The second story had tall rectangular windows under molded hoods, with MERCANTILE LIBRARY spelled out in large letters on the band above them. The third story, which held the Grand Hall, was lit by a row of tall round-arched windows. Rusticated pilasters marked the corners, and a deep bracketed cornice ran around the top.

The Mercantile Library Association, founded in 1846, moved into its own building at Fifth and Locust in 1854. Shops rented the ground floor, the library filled the second, and the third held the Grand Hall, which seated 2,000 and was the largest auditorium in the city. The hall was the civic stage of mid-century St. Louis. The first session of the Missouri State Convention met there in 1861 and voted to keep the state in the Union, and the convention that abolished slavery in Missouri met there in 1865. The St. Louis Symphony gave its first concerts in the hall, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Schurz, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde lectured from its platform. In 1884 Robert S. Brookings began a campaign for a fireproof building. The old hall was torn down in 1887, and a six-story Romanesque library building by Henry G. Isaacs, with no lecture hall, was dedicated on the same site in 1889.