A massive brick-and-tile hall in the Moorish Revival manner, its Lindell Boulevard front built around a giant horseshoe arch that springs from clustered columns of golden-glazed terra cotta and is flanked by two lower arched recesses. The arches are filled with geometric brickwork tympana inlaid with green, amber, and white glazed tile and screened by star-patterned metal grilles. Bands of gold, cobalt, and white arabesque tile run across the facade, and a glazed medallion at the crown of the arch shows a pharaoh's head over a crescent and scimitar — the emblem of the Shriners. Above rises a plain brick wall to a stepped, scalloped parapet set with foliate roundels, over a yellow-glazed base.
The Moolah Temple was built in 1912–14 as the home of the Moolah Shriners, the twenty-eighth Shrine temple chartered in the country. The order, which had met since the 1880s in other Masonic halls, chose Ernest Helfensteller Jr. of the St. Louis firm Helfensteller, Hirsch & Watson to design its temple in the Moorish Revival style favored by early Shrine buildings. The Shriners used it until 1988, when they moved to a former junior high school on Fee Fee Road in the county. After a $17.2 million renovation in 2004 the building was converted to housing — it now holds forty apartments — and it operated as the Moolah movie theater and lounge until 2020. It also houses Moolah Lanes, the oldest operating bowling alley in the city of St. Louis.
