The Union Trust building in downtown St. Louis is more than Sullivanesque. It’s genuine Sullivan.
Sullivan as in Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect who transformed tall-building design by showing that even brick can be made to appear to soar. “Form follows function,” Sullivan’s motto, applies to his demonstration of how steel frames freed architects to design office buildings to be tall and more pleasant for their occupants. He included large windows that improved ventilation and provided more interior daylight in a time of primitive electric lighting.
Sullivan’s Wainwright Building, completed in 1891 in St. Louis, is considered the father of all skyscrapers because its slender brick piers indicate the thin steel skeleton beneath and allow it to seem taller than its modest 10 stories. Two years later, Sullivan’s Union Trust building opened at 705 Olive Street, two blocks north of the Wainwright, now a state office building. Like the Wainwright, the 14-story Union Trust’s vertical design accentuates its height.
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Largely vacant since 2013, the Union Trust is undergoing a $55 million renovation by Restoration St. Louis. Two shifts of workers from BSI Constructors and subcontractors are on the job to get the building finished by late 2018 as the 140-room Hotel Saint Louis under the Marriott Autograph flag. The top two floors are being turned into 14 apartments. In addition, a rooftop penthouse apartment will have a skylight, three bedrooms and three bathrooms.
Amy Gill, Restoration St. Louis’ chief executive, said this week that Hotel Saint Louis will be, in part, an homage to Sullivan. The hotel’s rooftop bar, similar to the building’s original beer garden, will be named Form as a reference to the architect’s motto. The street-level restaurant will be named Union30 as a reference to the building’s original name and order of listing, in 1971, as a City Landmark. The building has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1982. It includes a 1905 addition that Eames & Young, a respected St. Louis architecture firm, designed to duplicate Sullivan’s original.
Hotel Saint Louis is among several hotels planned or underway downtown.
Like the other projects, Hotel Saint Louis will fit into the boutique category with a spa, a small rooftop pool and a ballroom that will be built on part of a parking lot to be turned into a valet drop-off area. Hotel guests and apartment residents will use the city-owned garage across Olive Street, where Restoration St. Louis has a deal to lease parking.
Heading Hotel Saint Louis’ design work is Nathan Zierer, a project manager with Restoration St. Louis’ sister firm, Checkmate Design. He said he feels privileged to work on a Sullivan-designed building.
“This is my end-all and be-all building,” said Zierer, who earned his architecture degree in 2012. “You’re still in shock because there are only a few in the world you can work on.”
Over the decades, many of Sullivan’s dozens of buildings have been demolished, including the St. Nicholas Hotel, which opened in 1894 a block from the Union Trust. Renamed and drastically remodeled in 1905, the St. Nicholas was razed in 1974. The Old Post Office Plaza occupies the site now.
Except for some alterations in 1924, the Union Trust’s exterior is original. Still in place are Sullivan’s elaborate terra cotta trim and cornice, arched windows, upper-floor columns and terra cotta lion heads. Removed during the remodeling were 15-foot gargoyles and large round windows on the second floor. The square windows that replaced the round ones will remain but the building’s current arched entrance will be reworked to resemble the rectangular entrance of 1924.
The National Park Service, which decides what may be done to National Register buildings and still qualify for federal historic preservation tax credits, rejected Gill’s request to reproduce the gargoyles. None exists as a model and old photos fail to show enough details to allow installation of reproductions, Gill said the park service ruled.
But enough remains behind walls and above the ceiling of the Union Trust’s remodeled lobby to restore the area to its original configuration. Gill said the walls and ceiling will be removed to produce Hotel Saint Louis’ atrium lobby with a skylight and mezzanine.
Painted on the back of the building is a mural of ancient Greek architecture that Gill said will stay. That decision pleases Cindy Tettaton, who took cellphone photos of the mural after lunch Tuesday downtown with friends. Tettaton, 42, of Florissant, is a daughter of Lonnie Tettaton, whose sign company painted the mural. She said she helped with the project in the late 1980s when she was about 13.
Tettaton pointed to a painting of a Greek statue she said is partly her handiwork. She said her task was similar to working on a paint-by-number kit.
“It was pretty easy,” she said.