The Truman Office Building

A narrow four-story front of four bays, faced above the ground floor in pale glazed terra cotta whose white paint is flaking away to red beneath. Slender colonnettes with foliate capitals divide the bays, each holding a pair of large windows; the top-floor windows are round-arched, set under a molded arcade, and an ornamented band runs beneath them and again below the third floor. A dentilled frieze studded with small diamond panels finishes the parapet. The ground floor is a modern storefront sheathed in dark polished granite.

The four-story commercial building at 916 Olive Street held ground-floor retail on one of downtown St. Louis's main shopping streets. Browning, King & Company, a men's clothier, occupied it in the early 1930s, its Olive Street windows dressed with elaborate displays. By 1936 the storefront was the Downtown Norge Appliance Store, run by W. J. Lane Jr., selling refrigerators, stoves, and washing machines behind neon-lit NORGE windows. In 1985 the owner, Jack Randall, commissioned a neon portrait of President Harry S. Truman for the building — the source of its name, the Truman Building. Downtown Urgent Care occupied the ground floor from 2008, followed by LabCorp after 2011, when the neon Truman portrait was removed.