Arcade Building

Going to the mall in ye olden days was a completely different experience than going to the mall today. Around the turn of the 20th century, “shopping arcades” were starting to catch on in America. People would dress up in their Sunday best and stroll down ornately decorated isles while perusing selections of fine jewels and hand-crafted watches, and buy pocket-squares in haberdasheries. Nowadays, people mostly only go to the mall if they absolutely have to because there’s a wedding that weekend and their suit jacket doesn’t fit, or you pop in on a whim to see if Orange Julius is still a thing. (It is!)

One of the earliest forms of the indoor shopping mall was Trajan’s Market in Ancient Rome, built circa 100-110 AD, but the American shopping mall didn’t come around until 1890 when the Cleveland Arcade opened in Ohio. Early shopping malls favored Victorian and Gothic architecture and catered mostly to the wealthy. The suburban hell holes we shop in today didn’t begin until 1950.

The Arcade Building lies smack in the middle of downtown St. Louis, Missouri. Comprised of two buildings -the Wright in 1906 and the Arcade in 1919- it’s more accurately (but less commonly) known as the Arcade-Wright buildings. The two buildings were conjoined, beginning with the Wright and followed by the Arcade, which wrapped around the Wright on two sides.

The Wright building stands 18 stories high and the Arcade at 16. When operative, the bottom levels were the mall stores and the top levels were various offices ranging from jewelry appraisers to a radio station, and a court document printing company. The building was abandoned around 1978 and made a city landmark in 1980. It sat vacant for decades before Dominium Development converted the building into apartments, commercial space, and a parking garage in 2015.

I kept the history of the Arcade Building brief because there isn’t all that much to it without getting into the history of malls, and that’s a topic I’m saving for a post about an ill-fated trip to the (active) Mall of America. While reading about malls, I lost three hours down the research rabbit hole just so I could type that one sentence about the first mall in Ancient Rome and now I know a lot of useless facts about malls and no one even likes them!

Jewelry appraising offices on the upper floors.

The best room in the building housed the Missouri Court printing office, where multiple, giant linotype machines still reside. This method of printing was replaced in the 60′s and 70′s by offset printing and computers.

The court printing room is still scattered with newspapers and court documents, but we were pressed for time and couldn’t spend all afternoon sorting through old papers, which is one of my favorite things to do while pretending I can’t hear my exploring pals telling me to hurry up already.

Elevator shaft. But not the one connected to these old elevator doors. 

To see more photos, go to the Arcade Building Flickr set 

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