Missouri Theatre Building

A twelve-story building of tan brick over a light stone base, in an ornate classical manner. The lower stories are faced in stone with a frieze of terra-cotta panels — scrolled foliage around central rosettes — set between the windows, framed by egg-and-dart, dentil, and anthemion moldings on a bracketed cornice. Oval cartouche medallions run in a band higher up, and a heavy modillioned cornice with foliate brackets crowns the walls. The windows are trimmed in green. A tall blank brick wall on one flank marks where the theater auditorium once stood behind the offices.

The Missouri Theatre opened on November 8, 1920, one of the largest and most lavish movie palaces in the country, seating about 3,600. It was designed by the New York firm DeRosa & Pereira for the Famous Players Missouri circuit, with the auditorium set behind a twelve-story office building on Grand Boulevard — the theater faced in light stone, the offices in brick. It was among the first St. Louis theaters with air conditioning, advertised as the "Pike's Peak Breeze," and its precision dance troupe, the Missouri Rocket Girls, went on to New York's Roxy Theatre in 1927 as the Roxyettes, forerunners of the Rockettes. Elvis Presley played the house on a 1955 Grand Ole Opry bill. The theater closed on December 15, 1957, and its auditorium was demolished for a parking lot on June 26, 1959, while the office building survived. After years as the University Plaza apartments, the building reopened in 2018 as the Angad Arts Hotel, with restaurants at street level.