Stix, Baer & Fuller

The former Grand-Leader store fills its downtown block in brown and red brick over a two-story base faced in green and black marble. Colossal brick piers climb the upper floors between ranks of windows, capped by a deep terra-cotta cornice of acanthus, egg-and-dart, and dentil courses; carved cartouches, shields, and scrolled brackets mark the corners and parapet. The Washington Avenue front is the most ornate, its ground floor set with scrolled monogram panels in polished marble, while the Sixth Street and rear elevations are plainer — a red-brick warehouse wall of paired industrial windows under a corbelled cornice. The block reads as several joined structures of differing weight.

Stix, Baer & Fuller opened its Grand-Leader department store on the north side of Washington Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets, in a building designed by Mauran, Russell & Garden and built in stages beginning in 1906, with a major addition in 1921; by the 1920s the store had grown to fill the entire block north to Locust Street. It served as the company's flagship for decades. The chain was sold to Dillard's in 1984, which reopened the store as an anchor of the St. Louis Centre mall in 1985; it closed in 2001 and stood vacant. In the 2010s the block was rehabilitated as the Mercantile Exchange (MX) district, its spaces divided among an Embassy Suites hotel, the National Blues Museum, and The Laurel apartments.