USA > Missouri > St Louis County > St Louis City > The story of a great city in a nutshell : 500 facts about St. Louis > Part 5
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The St. Nicholas Hotel, a recently-erected structure of splendid design and the highest class of interior arrangements, at Eighth and Locust Streets, is in the front rank of modern hostelries. Its fame is national.
The Lindell Hotel, in the heart of the wholesale dis- trict, on Washington Avenue, between Sixth and Sev- enth Streets, is probably one of the best known institu- tions of its kind in America. It contains 240 rooms and frequently registers 1000 guests.
No less noted is the Laclede Hotel, at Chestnut and Sixth Streets, with 150 rooms and accommodations for 700 guests. The Laclede and the Lindell, bearing
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names that find frequent occurrence in St. Louis' his- tory, are landmarks of the Mound City.
The Imperial Hotel, adjoining the Laclede on Chest- nut Street, with modern equipments and facilities, boasts a capacity for 600 guests. The St. James Hotel, on Broadway, in the Olympic Theater block, has accom- modations for nearly 800 guests ; and with the Moser, on Pine, between Eighth and Ninth Streets, and the Rozier, at Thirteenth and Olive Streets, opposite the Exposition, completes the list of the more important down-town hotels.
But a distinctive feature of the hostelry adjuncts of St. Louis is furnished by the large number of excellent hotels in the residence sections of the city beside those which have been established in the vicinity of the great Union Station. Among this last class is the Terminal, in the Union Station building itself, with 100 rooms. Dotting all sections of the city, like oases for transients, are more than 125 comfortable hotels ; and out in the West End are several caravansaries with an elegance and convenience of arrangement peculiarly St. Louisan in their spirit and adaptability. Among these are the Hotel Beers, the Grand Avenue Hotel, the West End Hotel, the Hotel Berlin, the Westmoreland, the West- minster and several others, all elegantly appointed and thoroughly up to date, and most of them new.
Besides these, six large new hotels are already pro- jected, and work has been commenced on three of them.
Hundreds of spacious apartment and lodging houses
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add to the city's capacities for the entertainment of guests during conventions or fetes.
Incidental to St. Louis' hotels, interest, especially for visitors and strangers in the city, attaches to the subject of handling travelers and their baggage. The St. Louis Transfer Company maintains an office at the Union Station, and a supply of carriages, coaches and baggage wagons to transport passengers and baggage to and from Union Station and any part of the city. This company checks baggage through from residences to destination, to any part of the United States and Canada to which a traveler can purchase a ticket; it has its agents on all incoming trains to take up travel- ers, railroad checks and arrange for delivery of baggage to hotels and residences. In addition to the handling of passengers, it operates half a dozen large warehouses for the storage of freight, and receiving depots in St. Louis for the railroads that terminate at East St. Louis, and transports by wagons from the railroads at East St. Louis to the merchant's door in Louis, and vice versa when the merchant is the shipper, the greater bulk of the merchandise hauled by the fourteen railroads ter- minating on the east bank of the Mississippi River.
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1 N any one of the scores of industrial and trade institutions that give to St. Louis its commercial pre-eminence can be found the evidence of dis- tinctive greatness. Here there is no faltering effort. No better proof of this is possible than is found in the fact that St. Louis has already taken rank as the fourth manufacturing city of America, and that its factories continue to increase in number and capacities with a rapidity which far outstrips those of any other city in the world. It is estimated that in 1900 nearly 7,000 manufacturing concerns are giving occupation to 200,000 St. Louisans, while the total value of the prod- uct which shows the impress of their handiwork will, in the course of one year, aggregate $350,000,000.
Speeding forward in all branches of manufacturing industry, the Mound City has taken an unapproachable lead in a number of them. Such, for instance, is its supremacy in the manufacture of woodenware, crackers, stoves and ranges, tin-plate and street cars. In these
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and other lines it either has the largest factory or is credited with a larger output of product than any other one city on earth. On this basis of supremacy St. Louis also leads the world in the manufacture of to- bacco, beer, boots and shoes, chairs, saddlery and harness, terra cotta, white lead, sewer pipe, fire brick, pressed brick, chemicals and proprietary medicines.
Street cars made in St. Louis carry the peoples of every latitude. They are being sent to the furthermost part of the world ; and wherever the march of progress has brought the modern conveniences of public transit, the trade marks of St. Louis manufacturers herald the industrial supremacy of the Mound City.
The only extensive rubber manufacturing establish- ment in the West is among the many new industrial enterprises that have recently added themselves to the community's host of producing agencies. The making of structural iron and steel, the milling of flour and meal, the manufacture of farming and agricultural im- plements, the construction of road vehicles and ma- chinery of every description, and in fact the productive genius as applied to every phase of utility gives em- ployment to workmen and gains profit for investors in St. Louis.
The marvelous expansion of the city's manufacturing energies is indicated by the fact that the decade which ended with the century just closed witnessed an average increase of 100 per cent in the number of factories, the number of hands employed and the wages paid to them, while the capital invested in these manufacturing
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establishments was during the same period fully trebled.
Hand in hand with its manufactures, the wholesale and jobbing interests and activities of St. Louis are striding toward the goal of trade mastery. Perhaps no other inland city in the world presents such a diver- sified array of gigantic commercial institutions. Scarcely a staple handled by trade-carriers on any sec- tion of the globe that does not find a leading dealer in St. Louis. The Mound City's shoes mark the soil from the icelands of Hudson Bay to the mysterious wilds of Patagonia, from the Klondike's new golconda to the distant Philippines, from the tesselated coasts of Europe to the dreary steppes of Siberia. Its dry goods, in the handling of the high grades of which St. Louis proba- bly outrivals any city in America, are shipped wherever the trade of the nation has penetrated. With the largest hardware establishment on earth, St. Louis fur- nishes domestic utensils and field implements to the pioneer in Australia, the explorer in Africa, the traveler and his host in Asia and even to the patrons of out- rivaled European competitors.
The tremendous advance that the city has made in these lines of commerce can be readily instanced with the growth of its boot and shoe trade. In two decades, St. Louis' commerce in this line has sprung from less than $1,000,000 to more than $32,000,000. St. Louis is the second largest distributing center of footwear in America.
With a colossal trade in clothing, the city is the largest soft hat market in the United States.
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Its hardware sales for 1901 are estimated at $18,- 000,000.
The greatest distributing point in the Western hem- isphere for chemicals of every description, St. Louis boasts the largest drug house in the world, with half-a- dozen competitors ranking among the foremost estab- lishments of their kind.
An index to the magnitude of the city's tobacco trade is given by the fact that in one year the sales of smoking and chewing material approximate $30,000,- 000.
St. Louis' yearly business in leather, furniture, bread- stuffs, electrical supplies, live stock, paper, glassware and notions, plumbing material, railway and transit supplies, oranges, bananas, lumber, coffee, flour and groceries, grain, provisions and coal gives it leading rank in each of those lines of trade; and in some of them it has distanced all other cities. In the saddlery and harness business the city leads the United States, while its annual trade in leather is approaching the ten million dollar mark. Its furniture business is estimated to yearly exceed $25,000,000, and in many branches of this commerce it has unquestioned supremacy.
Always one of the world's leading trade centers for horses, mules, cattle and other live stock, the extra- ordinary demand occasioned toward the close of the century for international military operations accent- uated St. Louis' superlative importance in this direc- tion. Immense values were involved in the city's ship- ments of horses and mules to foreign countries in 1899 and 1900.
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The rapidly developing lumber trade of the South- land gives impetus to St. Louis' jobbing and wholesale business in this line of commerce.
The great extent of the city's coal trade becomes clear when the phenomenal growth of its manufacturing industries is recalled, together with the accompanying necessity for increased fuel. Coal is delivered to man- ufacturers in St. Louis by annual contract at a price practically equivalent to $1 per ton.
As no single treasury could store the values repre- sented in the wholesale and jobbing pursuits of St. Louis, so, too, can no one volume adequately describe their details. But their titanic proportions are in part reflected in one representative institution, Cupples Station. That gigantic establishment takes added im- portance from the fact that it is in the center of the coffee district of the greatest inland coffee market of the world. Cupples Station embraces thirteen of the most extensive firms in St. Louis engaged in the handling of groceries and kindred wares. These con- cerns were assembled into one vast establishment for the purpose of expediting receipts and shipments and of reducing transportation charges. The station occu- pies a site on the Terminal Association railroad tracks at Seventh and Spruce Streets, and the ground floors have been bridged over in order to secure the largest possible measure of area. Thus, all the great railroad lines that operate through St. Louis are enabled to de- liver and receive freight at the doors of this gigantic emporium. An idea of the enhanced facilities afforded
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by this aggregation of industry is given by the state- ment that in one month 46,000,000 pounds of freight has been handled at Cupples Station.
The greatest " wholesale row " in the West and cer- tainly, on a business basis, one of the world's import- ant thoroughfares, is Washington Avenue, from Third Street westward to Thirteenth. The architecture of this stretch of commercial structures tells more than thousands of words of description could-tall, broad and solid buildings, with a depth that indicates a search for room and the need of space in which to transact the enormous business that is annually done there. It is in these ten blocks of commercial houses that the larger share of St. Louis' wholesale trade in hats, caps, dry goods, boots and shoes, and clothing is regularly transacted.
To the utilitarian and materialist, no painted per- spective in artist's tints and conceits could be more im- pressive than a glance out this vista of industry and trade on a sunny forenoon or a bright, early evening. During those seasons when the country merchants and the milliners from neighboring cities flock to St. Louis to make their regular stock purchases, the scene pre- sented along this stretch of Washington Avenue becomes peculiarly imposing.
With the breadth of a fashionable boulevard, but in- closed by great buildings of the most compact con- struction, Washington Avenue along those ten blocks is transformed on these occasions into a great human kaleidoscope. Endless lines of street cars ply back and forth through countless mazes of alert, quick-stepping
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commercial people, the very density of whose throngs puzzles the spectators. To an observer above in a balloon, the picture would seem altogether like the set- tlement of some queer species of ant, whose variegated teguments only set off their marvelous application and industry.
Certainly no wholesale district in any city is more advantageously located. In the inner heart of St. Louis' downtown section, it is threaded by street car lines that run to every corner of the community. One big hotel is right in the center of this section, and all the leading downtown hostelries are practically within a stone's throw. The merchant, who is eager to waste no time while selecting his stock, finds himself in the midst of sample-cases and show counters almost before he has quit his breakfast table. And in the evening, fatigued by the day's work, his hotel is "just across the street," or "right around the corner."
Second only to Cupples Station and the Washington Avenue " Row," there are distributed throughout the city other wholesale, jobbing and manufacturing cen- ters, each one of which embraces more industry and capital than are necessary to make up the activities of an ordinary town. These concentrations of business energy are much like the sprouting and growth of the acorn into the oak forest. They nestle in favorable spots, thrive lustily on the auspices and advantages of of the vicinage, and then, rearing aloft their domiciles of diligence-like foliage of progress-drop the seeds of encouragement, from which like institutions spring up about them.
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Out along the broad sweep of Twelfth Street, where some of the greatest crockery and glassware firms of the West are located ; down on the sloping reaches of the Levee, along Commercial, Main, Second and Third Streets, where for more than half a century have been quartered wholesalers of leather, cotton, hides and a host of other staples, and in a hundred different locali- ties where advantages of traffic and convenience have encouraged them, are gathered groups of wholesale and jobbing establishments.
But even more extensive is the distribution of manu- facturing centers. From North St. Louis, where the smoke of many monster chimneys shows the factories of furniture, chairs, graniteware and chemicals; down through the throbbing business sections to the valley that holds the Terminal Railroad tracks, and along that valley, following its curve westward and northward beyond the first of the city's terraced elevations until it loses itself among the undulations of Northwest St. Louis, the smoke stacks of scores of manufacturing institutions tell of the spread of industry. And the broad expanses of South St. Louis are dotted with other factories whose hum is echoed and re-echoed westward along the meanderings of the River Des Peres to Cheltenham, where the long strings of factory build- ings are knotted into groups of brick, tile, sewer pipe, and other manufactories.
Just across the Mississippi River, and giving occupa- tion to many workingmen of St. Louis, in Madison, Granite City, East St. Louis and other suburban towns,
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are mammoth industrial institutions, such as the National Stockyards and pork and beef packing houses, employ- ing together 2,000 men; Frog and Switch Works in East St. Louis, employing 600 men; Iron and Steel Works in East St. Louis, employing 1,000 men ; Malle- able Iron Works, East St. Louis, 600 employes ; Glass Works, 400 workmen; Enameling Works at Granite City, 2,000 employes ; Steel Foundry at Granite City, 1,200 workmen; and Car and Foundry Company at Madison, employing 1,200 men.
Perhaps busier in appearance and certainly more pleasing to the eye are the scores of great retail empo- riums that lend color and vivacity to the down-town district. Palaces of trade they are, the superb modern marts where the cloths and conceits, flannels and fineries, and dresses and dainties of a whole world are gathered for sale. The wonderful elaborateness of these monster establishments becomes apparent when it is found that days of rambling through their innumera- ble departments and along their interminable counters will constantly bring forth new attractions-like a great exposition in which the gatherings of a universe are presented.
Along Broadway, Sixth, Fourth, Olive and Locust Streets, and Washington and Franklin Avenues, these palaces of trade daily witness the shopping of thousands of women. The innovations of modern times and the conveniences that Progress brings are instanced in these commodious institutions. They are no longer the stores of the provincial town. They are caravansaries
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and emporiums combined. There is no want that can- not be supplied in some one of their departments. The woman with a day's shopping to do assumes the task among these great establishments with the conscious- ness that every ingenuity has been employed to facili- tate and make convenient the details of her errand.
When she is tired there are places for her to rest, and when she is hungry there are places for her to eat. Each one of these emporiums counts among its features all the comforts of a well-managed community. Per- haps one of the most unique adjuncts of many of these great department stores is the attractive café, as com- plete in all its appointments as a well-ordered restaurant run for exclusively restaurant purposes.
And outside the down town district, along South Broadway, on Chouteau Avenue, on Jefferson, Grand and Vandeventer Avenues ; and indeed wherever shop- pers find it convenient to go, are hundreds of these bright establishments, though on a somewhat more modest scale than the larger palaces of trade in the heart of the business section.
IMPELLING FORCES.
B USINESS men of other cities, struck by the tremen- dous commercial energy of St. Louis, have often sought to discover the sources of its impelling power. Their search has invariably led them to the symbolic maxim in which the spirit of the nation found its genesis-" In union there is strength." In the lexicon of community life, St. Louis should stand for organization.
No progressive enterprise undertaken by the Mound City fails. The reason is plain. Behind each venture to which the name of the city is linked are gathered a host of organized influences that will permit no halt and no turning back. This irresistible, impelling power is embodied in the trade guilds of St. Louis. To them are due most of the city's brilliant commercial achieve- ments and business triumphs. On their numbers and earnestness is founded the larger share of St. Louis' strength as a commercial community.
Foremost, of course, among these powerful trade
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guilds is the Merchants' Exchange, whose massive building is a monument to St. Louis' business solidity. Organized in 1862, the Exchange now has a member- ship of 2,000 representative business men, whose private fortunes and firm assets aggregate scores of millions of dollars. Perhaps no business organization in the world has set its impress in more indelible characters on the pro- gress of a parent city than has the St. Louis Merchants' Exchange. From it radiate countless influences and energies each of which lends impelling force to the on- ward march of the city's business interests. The Mer- chants' Exchange is the back-bone of various auxiliary organizations, whose united purposes find concrete form in St. Louis' commercial advancement. Member- ship in the Exchange is a badge of business integrity and prominence. It is also an obligation to strive for the city's welfare. Wm. T. Haarstick is president of the Merchants' Exchange. The vice-presidents are Geo. J. Tansey and T. R. Ballard. Geo. H. Morgan is secretary and treasurer.
Younger but no less energetic in its efforts is the St. Louis Business Men's League ; composed of 200 of the leading business and professional men of the city. It was incorporated under its present name in April, 1895, but has really been in active operation since May, 1891, in which month both the Autumnal Festivities Associa- tion and the St. Louis Traffic Association were organized. These two bodies, after completing the work for which they were especially formed, consolidated and incor- porated on a permanent basis the Business Men's
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League. The objects of this association, as stated in its charter, are : to promote the interests of St. Louis in every avenue of trade and commerce ; to oppose discrimination against the city; to secure increased transportation facilities ; to encourage the holding of conventions in the Mound City ; and "to secure, by all legitimate means, the greatest good for the greatest number of our people."
In conjunction with the Merchants' Exchange, the Business Men's League maintains the St. Louis Traffic Bureau, under the management of a traffic commis- sioner. It has also a legal department with a regular council. The successful efforts of the League in behalf of St. Louis are recorded in counting rooms of every commercial institution in the city and are recalled by numbers of decisions of the Joint Traffic Association, by national conventions held in the city, by the construction of new railroad branches, and in scores of other ways. Mr. Sam M. Kennard was president of the League for the first three years. He was succeeded in turn by Mr. John C. Wilkinson and former Mayor C. P. Walbridge. Mr. James Cox is secretary and Mr. Walker Hill treasurer.
A trade guild to which St. Louis owes some of its most substantial success is the Interstate Merchants' Association. Composed of many of the foremost mercan- tile men of the section, it devotes itself to the expansion of St. Louis' trade, particularly in the Mississippi Val- ley and the further West. Inducements are secured for and conveniences furnished visiting buyers. Mer-
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chants in other states are shown the wisdom of buying in St. Louis rather than going further for their purchases ; and, altogether, the Association is yearly welding into imperishable strength the bonds that hook the Mound City to the great Southwest as its natural and logical metropolis.
No less influential is the St. Louis Manufacturers' Association, organized in 1895, and incorporated in May of that year. The work of this guild consists chiefly in securing for St. Louis all possible material ad- vantages in competition with the most favored cities. The matters of transportation, taxation, legislation, in- surance and trade expansion receive the closest atten- tion from this association. But much of its work is largely of a private nature, and there is therefore no means of accurately computing the immense benefits that have accrued to the city from the operations of the St. Louis Manufacturers' Association. L. D. Kingsland is the president and T. L. Cannon secretary of the as- sociation.
There is no wasteful diffusion of business energies in the Mound City. Each line of trade concentrates its efforts through the agency of some guild for the advance- ment of that particular branch of the city's business. Of course, some of these guilds, by reason of the larger capital invested and the more extensive demands to be met, have domiciles of their own. Others, operating as auxiliary bodies, make their headquarters in the buildings of sister guilds. Among the foremost of these organizations are the Cotton, Lumber, Wool and Drug
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Exchanges. Each of these represents one of the city's most extensive trades, and their members, belonging for the most part to other St. Louis business organizations, are among the leading commercial men of the com- munity.
The wholesale and retail grocers and the wholesale and retail druggists of the city have separate organiza- tions, which have accomplished brilliant triumphs in extending St. Louis' trade.
One of the most powerful guilds of the Mound City, representing as it does one of St. Louis' leading lines of business, is the Furniture Board of Trade.
Perhaps none of the trade guilds in the Mound City gives it wider advertisement or more effective exploita- tion than the fact that it is the national headquarters of the Traveler's Protective Association of America, or, as it is better known, the T. P. A. It is an organization of commercial travelers and their employers, formed and equipped for the prompt promotion of commercial in- terests. In September, 1900, ten years after its or- ganization, the association had a membership of 16,590, distributed among twenty-nine states. Missouri is the leading state division, with a membership of,2,850. Mr. E. C. Burrows of Peoria, Ill., and Mr. Louis T. La Beaume of St. Louis, are respectively president and secretary of the national organization. Post A of St. Louis, the "Banner Post," has for its president and secretary Messrs. Louis Rosen and Will B. Webber respectively.
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