Old Southern Hotel

A six-story hotel occupying a full downtown block at Walnut and Fourth Streets, built of light stone in an Italianate manner. A rusticated ground floor of arched shopfronts — sheltered by awnings and a columned cast-iron sidewalk canopy — carried five upper stories of round- and flat-headed windows in even rows, the whole finished with quoined corners and a bracketed cornice. Horsecars and wagons passed on the cobbled streets below.

This was the first Southern Hotel, opened in December 1865 to the design of George I. Barnett, one of St. Louis's foremost architects. Built in the Italianate style on the block bounded by Walnut, Fourth, Broadway, and Elm Streets, it ranked among the largest and most fashionable hotels of the postwar city; Robert Benecke photographed it, as here, within a few years of its opening. On the night of April 11, 1877, fire broke out in the hotel and spread through its upper floors, killing roughly twenty guests and staff and injuring many more. It was the deadliest hotel fire in St. Louis history and one of the worst American hotel disasters of its time. The ruined building was cleared, and a larger "fireproof" Southern Hotel rose on the same block, opening in 1881; that second hotel stood until its demolition in the 1930s.