Title Guaranty Building

A thirteen-story Chicago School office building on the southwest corner of Seventh and Chestnut Streets, laid out on an H-plan of two office wings joined only by a corridor and elevator core. Its light terra-cotta and brick shaft rose in a regular grid of windows set off by Renaissance ornamental panels at the spandrels and street level. The crowning story was the set piece: an arcade of arched windows lined by a frieze of terra-cotta angels below a deep bracketed cornice, with a row of crests along the parapet above. A rusticated base carried the ground-floor shopfronts and entrances.

The building opened in 1898 at the southwest corner of Seventh and Chestnut Streets as the Lincoln Trust Building, developed by the Lincoln Trust Company on the former site of the Polytechnic Institute and designed by the St. Louis firm Eames & Young. It stood on Chestnut's "Real Estate Row," and its early tenants included the Wabash Railroad and Eames & Young's own offices. After the Lincoln Trust Company was merged away in 1909, new owners gave the building its longer-lasting name, the Title Guaranty Building. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, and Landmarks Association of St. Louis moved its offices in as a show of support in 1981. Even so, it was demolished — by conventional means, unlike the neighboring Buder and International buildings, which were imploded — in 1983 to clear ground for the Gateway Mall. Some of its terra-cotta angels were salvaged and survive at the Art Institute of Chicago, the City Museum, and elsewhere; the site now holds the Gateway One / Peabody Plaza office building.