The Wanamaker Building

The Wanamaker Building dominates the block with its heavy, granite exterior and the massive eagles perched above its entrances. This structure began as the Grand Depot, a former freight station converted by John Wanamaker into one of the country's first department stores. In nineteen eleven, Wanamaker installed a custom pipe organ built for the Saint Louis World's Fair. It remains the largest playable pipe organ in the world, with twenty-eight thousand pipes that still vibrate through the cavernous central atrium every day.