One Hundred Site Not Always a Parking Lot

Date Posted: December 11, 2016

Posted In: Projects,

From St. Louis Post-Dispatch:  Before the plan for an apartment tower on a Kingshighway parking lot, there was the Buckingham, a fancy St. Louis hotel built in time for the 1904 World’s Fair.

A story in the Jan. 8, 1903, main edition of the Post-Dispatch reported that “St. Louis capitalists” would erect a 10-story “modern hotel, to be the most elaborate in the West.”

Then as now, the site is across North Kingshighway from Forest Park. Triumvirate Investment Co., the Buckingham’s developer, planned 500 guest rooms and a “mammoth” first-floor ballroom, the Post-Dispatch reported. Features were to include a “gentleman’s cafe” to accommodate 300 people and two “ladies’ restaurants,” the 1903 story added.

“A unique departure will be a ladies’ hairdressing and shampooing establishment,” the story concluded.

So up the hotel went. Seventy years later, it was gone.

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