A seven-story loft of mill construction, built tight against the east wall of the Ely and Walker building. The few photographs that catch it show a plain, dark brick face with none of its neighbor’s terra cotta, and a slatted enclosure on the roof that held the tanks for its sprinkler system.
The Misval Realty Company, with offices at 210 North 4th Street, bought the lot running through to St. Charles Street in 1907 and took out a $92,000 permit for a seven-story mercantile building, 60 by 150 feet, designed by Mauran, Russell and Garden and built by the Murch Brothers Construction Company. It was planned for loft tenants in the new wholesale district, and by the end of 1907 its Mesker windows were in. The 1909 Sanborn map shows it as seven stories of mill construction with “various occupancies,” heated by steam and lit by electricity. It was fully sprinklered: a Niagara wet system of 937 heads fed by a six-inch city main and two 3,000-gallon pressure tanks in a slat-clad structure on the roof. W. C. Persons caught it at the edge of his ca. 1924 view of Ely and Walker, and again in January 1938 looking west from 15th Street, when a For Lease sign hung at street level. Aerial photographs show it still standing in 1958 and gone by 1968, and by 1971 its site was a parking lot, as it remains. Who or what “Misval” referred to is unknown.
