Missouri State Life Insurance Company Building

A twelve-story office tower sheathed entirely in cream-white glazed terra cotta, its walls a grid of paired windows in slender vertical piers between a heavily ornamented base and crown. The upper floors carry round-arched windows beneath a deep frieze of rosettes and egg-and-dart, and the cornice line bristles with winged griffins — feline bodies with wings and snarling heads thrust out over the street — with crouching human grotesques perched at the corners. The two-story base is worked in the same white terra cotta with carved surrounds. On the roof stands the open steel skeleton of the building's former "Weather Ball" beacon.

The Missouri State Life Insurance Company built this office at 1501 Locust Street in 1915 as a seven-story building designed by the architect Albert B. Groves, and enlarged it to twelve stories in 1923 to designs by Wedemeyer & Hecker. When Missouri State Life was declared insolvent in 1933, the newly organized General American Life Insurance Company took over its policies and its building and made it the General American headquarters. In 1956 General American raised a "Weather Ball" on the roof — a beacon visible for miles that glowed red for warmer weather, blue for cooler, and green for no change, and flashed when rain or snow was coming. General American left in 1979, and the building was converted to apartments in 2002. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.