Photographs by Karen Elshout & Ashley Heifner
For seven decades, the words “Old Post Office” evoked images of a grand but shabby, pigeon-infested downtown building that had definitely seen better days. Then came a $47 million facelift, revealing one of the two largest examples of French Second Empire architecture in the United States. (The style was borrowed from Napoleon III; the best example in Paris is the Louvre.)
Now, with this National Historic Landmark restored to its pre-pigeon glory, it’s easy to see why the U.S. General Services Administration once ranked St. Louis’ Old Post Office the sixth most historically significant building in its inventory and the seventh most significant architecturally.
“I don’t know how many hundreds of times I’ve been in this building, and every time I walk in I just feel this sense of history,” says Gwen Knight, vice president of DESCO Group, which partnered with DFC Group Inc. to lead the restoration. “Being in the very courtroom where Gen. [William Tecumseh] Sherman dedicated the building in 1884 ...” At that ceremony, Sherman called the building “a symbol of the business sense of the Republic [and] an emblem of the power, kindness, goodness and greatness” of the federal government.
Webster University unofficially launched the Old Post Office project several years ago by commissioning a study on the feasibility of relocating part of its campus to the building.
“They quickly realized they weren’t developers and needed help,” says Knight.
The Webster officials went to the Danforth Foundation and Al Kerth, late public-relations executive and civic leader, who put them in touch with Steven Stogel of DFC. Separately, DESCO president Mark Schnuck was asking Tom Reeves, president of Downtown NOW!, how DESCO could help revitalize downtown St. Louis, and Reeves was telling Schnuck to look at the Old Post Office.
Reeves and Kerth introduced Schnuck and Stogel, and so began a partnership to renovate the building, with Trivers Associates as the architect.
“Webster agreed to be the first tenant, taking the lower section of the building,” Knight says. “That was great, because we knew the lower level would be hardest to lease and it lays out beautifully for classrooms.”
The Missouri Court of Appeals Eastern District later indicated interest in the two massive courtrooms on the third and fourth floors, where, seven decades earlier, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and trial court had met. The Teapot Dome case was heard in those rooms, and it was there that the historic decision was made to break up Standard Oil’s monopoly.
“They’re Level One preservation zones, which means you have to get all sorts of approval and historic-preservation approvals to do anything in that space,” Knight explains. “When the [Missouri] Court of Appeals came along, it was perfect, because you could take the large historic courtroom and make it a courtroom again and use the other courtroom for a library.”
With the courts and other government agencies moving in, Missouri officials began to wonder why the state didn’t own the building, so the federal government obligingly transferred title to the Missouri Development Finance Board.
Other tenants—a mix of private and public companies, nonprofit organizations and agencies—started lining up and have since moved in: Teach for America, the St. Louis Business Journal, The Pasta House Co., the St. Louis Public Library, the Missouri Arts Council, Focus St. Louis, a division of the Missouri secretary of state’s office and the state attorney general’s office.
More than $300 million has gone into the area surrounding the Old Post Office since the project began.
As part of the post–Civil War revitalization effort, the federal government built St. Louis a combined post office, federal courthouse and customs house. Similar buildings (no longer standing) were built at the same time in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Cincinnati. The goal? To restore the people’s confidence in the government—and the government’s confidence in itself—after the divisiveness of the war. Consequently, little expense was spared. Designed by architect Alfred Mullet, St. Louis’ building took 12 years and $6 million (a steep price tag for the time) to construct.
A 30-foot moat surrounds the fortresslike building, presumably to help guard against theft of the gold bullion once stored there. Most of the westward expansion was funded from the building.
Iron shutters slide like pocket doors into walls in the two-story courtrooms. Legend has it that during the 1920s the shutters were pulled over the windows to protect those gathered for the trial of a famous gangster from retaliatory gunshots.
There are 14 fireplaces, each with its own Venetian marble mantel.
Floors on several levels and a stairwell are covered with the original encaustic tiles, with their distinctive geometric design of contrasting clay colors in brilliant earth tones. Some have chipped at the edges, but they’re in amazingly good condition for their age. The restoration team thought about replacing them, but the company in Indiana that manufactured them is long gone.
“Trivers found a company in Sheffield, England, that would make them—for $750 a square foot,” Knight recalls, “so we said, ‘We really like the character of the tiles the way they are.’”
The pink granite on the lower part of the building came from Iron Mountain, Mo., and the gray granite on the top came from Hurricane Island, Maine. “That’s part of the reason it took so long,” Knight says. “They had to ship the gray granite down the East Coast to New Orleans and then up the Mississippi to St. Louis.”
An atrium was added in the late 1970s, and today its centerpiece is “Peace and Vigilance,” a massive sculpture by artist Daniel Chester French, who also sculpted the famous statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. The sculpture, which once sat atop the Old Post Office’s dome, was brought inside several years ago to save it from further deterioration. A mold was made to create the replica that now sits at the base of the dome.
Turning a building built for customs, court and postal affairs into one that can meet 21st-century demands—without compromising its history—was the job that fell to Andy Trivers.
“One of the greatest challenges was to take a building pretty much built as a fortress, a historic building designed to be imposing, and make it inviting and welcoming,” he says. Take the 11-foot doors, weighing close to 1,000 pounds: “They’re so imposing that you really don’t even want to open them,” Trivers says wryly. “We opened the doors and added a glass façade that’s a door behind them. Especially at night when the lights are on, you can see right into the building, which invites the public in.” Which was the point.
