The Coronado Hotel

The Coronado is a large red-brick building — roughly eleven stories, with a taller tower section behind — rising from a richly worked two-story limestone base. Along the base, round-arched windows with fanlight transoms alternate with carved roundels bearing portrait heads, beneath an arcaded corbel-table frieze and bands of egg-and-dart and foliate ornament. Three round arches on barley-twist columns mark the main entrance beneath a black metal canopy. The brick upper stories are trimmed in stone — quoined corners, sill courses, and a deep terra-cotta frieze of scrollwork, urns, and cartouches below the cornice. The detailing is Renaissance Revival, densest at the base and the crown.

Preston J. Bradshaw designed the Coronado and built it as a residential hotel between 1923 and 1925, the first of the row of buildings he raised along this stretch of Lindell Boulevard. Bradshaw owned the hotel and lived in it with his family for the rest of his life. It drew prominent guests through the middle decades of the century — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles Lindbergh, and Harry S. Truman among them — and in 1934 Bradshaw opened a basement bar, the Coal Hole, fitted out like an old English tavern with an arched ceiling and a fireplace. Operating for a time as the Sheraton-Coronado, the hotel closed when St. Louis University bought it in July 1964 and converted it to a student residence. The university later vacated the building, and it stood empty for roughly fifteen years. A rehabilitation in the early 2000s, costing about $40 million, returned it to use as apartments and event space — rebuilding the roof, refinishing the original terrazzo floors, and restoring the ballroom with its ring of up-lights set into the floor.