Photography from the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division, Historic American Building Survey, HABS MO, 96-SALU, 104-2
It opened a few days before Christmas 1875, at Third and Pine streets. It was designed to be one enormous room; it was a trading floor. At that moment, it was also the biggest indoor space in America, built for $2 million, and it showed. Every hinge and doorknob was brass. It had winding walnut staircases, white marble fountains, an enormous hand-carved walnut rostrum. The great vaulted ceiling was covered in flower medallions and murals of figures in cloudscapes, reclining ladies and men on horseback, bearing flags. A huge chalkboard ran down the length of one wall, where clerks wrote, erased, and rewrote prices for corn, bran, soybeans, hogs, and wheat. Buyers inspected grain at marble-topped tables, samples poured into metal bowls, and they’d sniff, squint at, or test kernels between their teeth.
Grain flowed into bowls, and money and power flowed in and out of the Merchants’ Exchange. The Veiled Prophet Ball took place there. So did the 1876 Democratic National Convention. And in 1909, when 412 mayors—from as far away as Canada—visited St. Louis for “Centennial Week,” they were brought to watch the traders on the floor and were greeted in grand style. The rostrum was decorated with “sheaves of corn, wheat, oats, and barley,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch breathlessly reported. “At each corner was a pyramid of golden pumpkins, and, most wonderful of all, the leader of the band which played in front of the rostrum stood on a giant pumpkin.”
By Christmas 1957, the exchange had moved to a new building on Oakland Avenue with all the charisma of a shoebox. Snow swirled into the old building on Pine Street, through skeletal beams where the roof used to be; it fell straight into the basement, because the floors were gone, too. Men with money always want the most modern thing. There’d been an earlier exchange building, erected in the 1836, making ours the oldest commodity trading exchange in the U.S. By the early ’90s, the building on Oakland Avenue was blighted, taken by eminent domain to expand the Saint Louis Science Center. The Exchange was dissolved in 1998. And the only trace of all that money, all that power, all that grandness, is the endless back and forth of railcars crossing the Merchants Bridge.
