As soon as next spring, Downtown West visitors and residents could see new life at the Jefferson Arms building, a once grand hotel that for nearly the past two decades has sat empty save for the squatters and urban explorers who haunted its halls.
Onur Ozkan, a project engineer with the building’s owner and developer, Alterra Worldwide, says that work on the 13-story building’s HVAC, plumbing, and electrical is mostly done. By next year, the 120-year-old building should house restaurants and retail on its ground floor, with apartments and an AC Hotel by Marriott above.
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In addition to being a place where people will soon live or stay or just buy a cup of coffee, the Jefferson Arms represents an important piece in the revitalization of downtown St. Louis. It sits on Tucker, four blocks from City Hall. Downtown watchers have cited it alongside the AT&T Tower, Railway Exchange Building, Millennium Hotel and others as a key vacancy that needs to be imbued with new life if the city’s urban core is to thrive again.
Originally constructed as a high-end hotel for the World’s Fair, the Hotel Jefferson opened in 1904 to a great fanfare of society balls and receptions. “It is generally conceded that the Waldorf-Astoria of New York has a rival in the Jefferson Hotel of St. Louis,” read the first sentence of a story in the Post-Dispatch at the time, calling it the “great show hotel of St. Louis.” It played host to the Democratic National Convention the same year it opened and again in 1916. A new addition in 1928 brought the Gold Room, a hall featuring a mezzanine and a stage backed by a floating swan sculpture. Sergei Rachmaninoff performed there in 1930.
The latter half of the twentieth century was not so kind. Hilton Hotels purchased the property in 1950, but by the 1970s it had been converted into a senior citizens home. The apartments began advertising themselves to renters of all ages in the early aughts. “There may not be a plainer bar in the entire city,” Thomas Crone wrote of the in-house watering, the Jefferson Arms Lounge, in 2003. Three years later, a failed effort to convert the apartments into condominiums left the Jefferson Arms vacant.
The building sits on the National Register of Historic Places, which construction supervisor Irv Ryba says has been a great influence on the process. They have cleaned sculptures and railings with dry ice in the hopes they can be restored. If an original fixture can’t be saved, the crew tries to replace it with something that looks as close to the original as possible. “There has to be a balance,” Ryba says. The swan sculpture will remain, as will the grand hall, Ozkan says.
A presentation created by Alterra shows the ground floor housing three restaurants, a bakery, and a coffee shop as well as two retail spaces, though Ryba says that the exact mix of ground floor tenants is yet to be determined. The hotel and apartment space will share floors two through twelve, with the 13th floor being all residential. Current plans call for 225 hotel rooms and 235 apartments.
Alterra has completed projects ranging from a Prada store in Kazakhstan to a dairy plant in Iraq, as well as a business center and a hotel in Dallas. The company lists the Jefferson Arms development as a $145 million project. It is aided by $17 million in tax increment financing as well as historic tax credits.
