The Mayfair Hotel

An eighteen-story hotel of red brick over a three-story base clad in cream terra cotta, the concrete frame faced almost entirely in the two materials. The base is rusticated terra cotta with round-arched, leaded-glass shopfronts and a canopied entrance edged in gilded lights; above it a band of terra-cotta panels sets urns flanked by griffins between the windows, framed by egg-and-dart and dentil moldings. The brick shaft rises in a plain grid of windows to a terra-cotta crown of round-arched openings beneath a bracketed cornice. Bronze lantern sconces and green-painted frames mark the street level.

The Mayfair Hotel was built in 1924–25 for the hotelier Charles Heiss, a Bavarian who had managed Statler's St. Louis hotel before a falling-out with Statler sent him to build his own. Designed by Preston J. Bradshaw and opened on August 29, 1925, the eighteen-story hotel offered three high-speed elevators, a nine-chair barbershop, a beauty parlor, and mezzanine dining rooms and a lounge. The radio station KMOX went on the air from a mezzanine studio in 1925, broadcasting daily recitals on an $18,000 Kilgen organ. Its guests over the years included Irving Berlin, John Barrymore, Douglas Fairbanks, Cary Grant, Harry Truman, and Lyndon Johnson. The hotel was renovated in 1977 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. In 2003 the businessmen Michael and Steven Roberts bought it and renamed it the Roberts Mayfair Hotel; after their adjoining condominium tower failed they sold it in 2012, and in 2013 it passed to Magnolia Hotels, which renovated it and reopened it in 2014 as the Magnolia Hotel St. Louis.