A five-story commercial block of dark brick set on a rusticated light-stone base, standing flush to the northwest corner of Market Street and Jefferson Avenue. Vertical strips of contrasting light stone run the full height at the corners and the center of each front, dividing the brick walls into a regular grid of rectangular windows. The stone-faced ground floor holds storefronts and an arched corner entrance, and a projecting cornice caps the top beneath a raised central parapet. The two street elevations are treated alike, giving the building the same face on Market as on Jefferson.
The People's Finance Corporation was founded in 1923 by seven Black St. Louis businessmen to make mortgage and small-business loans to Black residents who were refused credit by white-owned banks; the National Urban League's journal called it the largest Black-owned finance company in the country by 1925. The corporation opened this five-story building at the northwest corner of Jefferson Avenue and Market Street in 1926, built by Black tradesmen at a cost of about $150,000, with a crowd of several thousand at the opening. It held eighty-one offices, an assembly hall, seven ground-floor stores, and a rooftop ballroom, and became the professional and political center of Black St. Louis. Tenants included the People's Bank, one of the few lenders that extended credit to Black St. Louisans; the St. Louis Argus and St. Louis American newspapers; chapters of the NAACP and the March on Washington Movement; the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; and many Black doctors and lawyers. The rooftop ballroom hosted community galas through the 1920s and 1930s. The City of St. Louis targeted Mill Creek Valley for urban-renewal clearance and began acquiring its buildings in 1958; demolition of the neighborhood started in February 1959, and the People's Finance Building was razed with it.
