A pink-granite office tower on the corner of Fourth and Locust, its lower floors carved with unusual richness. Smooth and rock-faced granite frames the ground-floor shopfronts, set between piers with diamond-panel rustication and capitals cut with fleur-de-lis. A raised frieze spelling SECURITY BUILDING runs above the second story beneath a running wave-scroll and egg-and-dart course. Over the Fourth Street entrance a balustraded stone balcony rests on scrolled brackets, flanked by carved spheres, above a doorway screened with a star-patterned grille. Bronze tablets read "THE SECURITY BUILDING · A.D. 1890" and "319 NORTH FOURTH STREET." Brick and pink stone rise above to a bracketed cornice.
The Security Building went up at Fourth and Locust in the early 1890s, when this corner of downtown was the center of St. Louis banking. The Boston firm of Peabody, Stearns & Furber designed it; the cornerstone is dated 1890, and the eleven-story building was finished about 1892. It belonged to the first generation of tall office buildings in the city — of roughly thirty such towers raised in St. Louis in the late nineteenth century, it is one of only about eight that survive. Its lower two floors are faced in pink granite, with pink limestone and brick above; a prefabricated cast-iron dome rises over the lobby and art glass tops the entrance. Beyond its bank and offices, the building housed the Noonday Club, an organization of St. Louis businessmen, for many years. As downtown's financial district thinned through the twentieth century, the Security Building shared in the long decline and slow recovery of the surrounding blocks. It was rehabilitated in 2004 and remains in office use; the former banking hall was later rebuilt as workspace for the Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis. It is a St. Louis City Landmark and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.
