Wright-Arcade Building

Two buildings that read as one. The earlier Wright is an eighteen-story, steel-framed tower faced in brick, its elevations pulled into tall unbroken vertical piers with ornament held to the street level and the crowning cornice — the spare, upward manner of the nearby Wainwright Building. Wrapped around it on the Olive and Pine fronts is the later Arcade, a Gothic Revival skyscraper of fourteen stories on the Pine side and sixteen on Olive: brick piers carrying lancet-arched openings, carved bosses, projecting bay windows toward Eighth and Olive, and a band of terra cotta tracery across the upper northern front. Between the two streets runs the building's namesake — a two-story interior shopping arcade under ribbed groin vaulting.

The Wright Building went up in 1906 at the northwest corner of Eighth and Pine, on the site of the Louis Benoist mansion, and was designed by the St. Louis firm Eames & Young. At eighteen stories it was the tallest building in the city when it opened, and was nicknamed the "giant of downtown." In 1917 the developer Edward Mallinckrodt commissioned Tom P. Barnett for a new building on the rest of the block. The plans first called for a separate ten-story structure; after site problems, they were revised to wrap the new building around the Wright and fuse the two together floor by floor. Because the First World War had claimed the nation's steel supply, the addition was built in reinforced concrete — briefly the largest reinforced-concrete building in the world. It opened in 1919 as the Arcade Building, downtown's first office building with an enclosed shopping arcade, managed from the start by Isaac T. Cook & Company. Jewelers and diamond dealers filled the arcade and its retail floors, doctors and dentists floors nine and ten. In the 1930s the terra cotta cladding on the piers, which ended in projecting gargoyles, was stripped and the piers reclad in brick after its anchoring failed. The interior arcade closed in 1979. The building was named a City Landmark in 1980 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. The Pyramid Companies bought it in 2001 and began a rehabilitation in 2007, but the firm folded in 2008, leaving the upper floors open to the weather. In 2014 the Minneapolis developer Dominium bought the building and completed a $118 million rehabilitation, reopening it in 2016 as the Arcade Apartments — 282 units, split between market-rate apartments and affordable artist lofts.