A 25½-foot-tall replica of a Vess soda bottle, built of sheet metal over a steel frame and standing upright on a low base. It is finished as a Lemon-Lime bottle — a pale green neck and shoulder in a foil-like diaper pattern above a white body carrying the red "VESS" label and the words "Billion Bubble Beverage" and "Lemon Lime." The bottle originally turned on a rotating steel pole and was outlined at night in roughly 600 linear feet of neon tubing.
The Vess Bottling Company erected the bottle about 1952 as an advertising device at Hampton and Gravois Avenues in south St. Louis. It weighed more than 2,000 pounds and turned three revolutions per minute on a steel pole, lit after dark by roughly 600 linear feet of neon tubing. The bottle was later removed and put in storage, where workers rediscovered it in the late 1980s. In 1990 it was designated a St. Louis City Landmark, number 120. It was afterward relocated to Sixth and O'Fallon Streets at the northern edge of downtown — an area later promoted as the Bottle District — where it now stands. Its designer and fabricator have not been identified.
