Singer Building (Broadway and Locust)

As built for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, a five-story Second Empire commercial block on the corner of Broadway and Locust. Rows of windows under arched hoods rose to a heavy bracketed cornice, and above it a steep mansard roof was broken by tall gabled dormers. By the early 1900s the corner held a nine-story building in its place. Its two-story base carried round-arched windows with striped awnings, and above it paired round-arched windows between pilasters rose in tiers to a top story of small arches under a flat roofline. A tall pier on the corner carried the painted sign of the Mechanics-American National Bank.

The Singer Sewing Machine Company built its St. Louis office building at the northeast corner of Fifth Street, now Broadway, and Locust in the early 1870s. An 1877 letterhead gives its address as 417 Locust, and a 1966 Globe-Democrat caption remembered it as "downtown's pride" in the 1870s. In 1889 it housed the American Central Insurance Company. The Mechanics' Bank, which had begun at Second and Pine, kept its vaults on this corner. In 1905 it merged with the American Exchange National Bank as the Mechanics-American National Bank, and Emil Boehl photographed the corner, by then a nine-story building, with the new bank's name on it. About 1909 the bank moved across the intersection to the Mercantile Library Building on the southwest corner. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis announced its new building for this site in 1923, and the old corner building came down for it.