New Bank of Commerce Building

The New Bank of Commerce Building was a sixteen-story Second Empire tower at 200 North Broadway, designed by Mauran, Russell & Garden and completed in 1908. Its facade of "Meadow Gray" Tennessee marble rose on a tripartite Chicago School frame, topped by a heavy two-story mansard roof with dormer windows and wrought-iron balconies — a striking hybrid of French classicism and American commercial architecture that distinguished it on the Broadway financial corridor.

The building was erected by the National Bank of Commerce as an expansion of its existing headquarters in Isaac Taylor's 1902 tower at the opposite end of the same block. Mauran, Russell & Garden — the firm John Lawrence Mauran had spun off from Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge in 1900 — designed a sixteen-story tower faced entirely in Tennessee marble. Construction began in January 1908, with James Stewart & Co. as the general contractor. The main banking room was described at the time as "one of the most beautiful rooms in the city." Early tenants beyond the bank itself included the Southern Surety Company, the St. Louis American League Baseball Company (the Browns), and Wilson & Trueblood, Attorneys at Law. In 1913, only five years after completion, the Broadway ground floor was remodeled with a new entrance for the Mortgage Trust Company, a job carried out by the firm now styled Mauran, Russell & Crowell. In 1915 the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis occupied the entire second floor. The building was renamed the Federal Commerce Trust Building. The Fed remained for roughly a decade before relocating to its new quarters two blocks north. The federal government purchased the building outright in 1936, and it became the Veterans Administration Building — City Landmark #90. The VA's regional offices vacated in 1961 for the new Federal Building on Market Street, though a VA outpatient clinic continued operating from the Pine Street storefront through the late 1960s. The building was vacated entirely in 1970 and sold to Frates Equities of Tulsa. In the spring of 1977, demolition permits were issued for the building and its two neighbors — the Chamber of Commerce Building (Isaac Taylor's 1902 tower) and the Lutheran Building — to clear the site for a parking lot. Local preservation groups received almost no warning; by the time the city's Landmarks Commission hastily designated the structure Landmark #90 in March 1977, demolition was already weeks underway and "practically everything of value" — ornament, wrought-iron balconies, copper roof trim — had been stripped. Spirtas Wrecking Co. continued over the objections of the Board of Aldermen. The St. Louis Place office tower was built on the site in 1983.