A five-story Italianate commercial block of brick, painted white, six bays wide. Continuous sill courses band the front, and rows of arched windows climb its height: tall round-headed openings at the second story, segmental arches with molded hoods above. A broad pressed-metal cornice with a paneled frieze and closely set brackets crowned the top. A glassy projecting bay spanned the middle windows of the second story. At street level, a storefront faced in dark and yellow opaque glass carried the sign of Herkert & Meisel, trunks and leather goods.
The Semple-Birge Company, dealers in hardware and agricultural implements, built this five-story Italianate warehouse in 1875. Its move to the 900 block of Washington Avenue marked a new westward push of the wholesale district. Pictorial St. Louis drew it that year as Semple, Birge & Co.'s Agricultural Warehouse, the name painted high on its side wall, a five-story block rising over the houses and small shops of a declining residential neighborhood. Within little more than a decade the mercantile district had grown up around it. A projecting bay was added to the second story around 1910. By the 1980s the building belonged to the Herkert & Meisel Trunk Company, whose luggage and leather goods store filled the ground floor. In 1987 it was listed as the earliest building in the Washington Avenue: East of Tucker Historic District. It was one of only three surviving buildings from the avenue's first period of commercial development, and one of a small number of large multi-story Italianate commercial buildings left in the city. It was demolished in the years before 2002, when the Renaissance Grand hotel's conference center, with its ballrooms and parking garage, opened on the south side of the block.
