Southern Hotel

A six-story hotel of light stone filling an entire downtown block, its long principal front — about 270 feet — facing Walnut Street between Fourth Street and Broadway. The engraved advertisement shows a restrained Italianate design: a rusticated ground floor of shopfronts under awnings, five upper stories of regularly spaced windows, slightly projecting end and center pavilions, and a bracketed cornice, with a flag flying above. Street-railway cars and carriages crowd the streets around it.

The Southern Hotel was among the grandest hotels of nineteenth-century St. Louis. The first Southern, an Italianate building designed by George I. Barnett, opened in December 1865 on the block bounded by Walnut, Fourth, Broadway (Fifth), and Elm Streets. On April 11, 1877, it was destroyed in a catastrophic fire that killed some twenty guests and staff — the deadliest hotel fire in the city's history — as flames spread upward and trapped people on the higher floors. The hotel was rebuilt on the same block and reopened on May 11, 1881, rebuilt to the designs of George I. Barnett — architect of the original hotel — and his partner Isaac Taylor; it is the building shown in this advertisement. Larger and more richly finished than its predecessor — white marble, frescoed public rooms, a rotunda, and more than 350 guest rooms — it was promoted, pointedly, as "thoroughly fire-proof." Six stories tall with a 270-foot front on Walnut Street, it remained one of downtown's leading hotels for a generation. Declining patronage closed the Southern on August 1, 1912. The building stood largely vacant for two decades and was demolished in 1933–1934, a gas station taking its place on the downtown corner.