St. Louis's oldest surviving telephone building

In 1889, the Bell Telephone Company established a dedicated headquarters, spending $154,225 on a design from the Boston-based firm Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge. The result was a six-story hub of brick and red sandstone on Olive Street. The building may have been the first building built for the telephone industry in St. Louis; regardless, it served as the city's main telephone exchange until 1926 and remains the city's oldest extant telephone building.

The main switchboard room was originally located at the top of the then-six-story building. To meet rising demands for space, a seventh story was added in 1919. By 1920, the local St. Louis Bell Company merged with other Bell companies to form Southwestern Bell. In 1923, Southwestern Bell absorbed the local competitor Kinloch Telephone. The company eventually moved out of the building in 1926 to a nearby new facility.

This structure survived the demolition of many of the city's Romanesque Revival buildings. After the phone company vacated, the building was used as a retail and warehouse facility for S.G. Adams Stationery. From the 1960s to the 1980s, it housed S.G. Adams' flagship store. In the late 1990s, the building was renovated into residential loft apartments and commercial retail.

Now, the upper floors serve as residential lofts while the ground level handles commercial retail. You can still survey the three-story arcades and the massive, blank brick of the eastern wall. The building is one of only a handful of structures in St. Louis designed by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons