ST. LOUIS — The developer hoping to build apartments at the site of the Engineers’ Club in the Central West End is no longer seeking to demolish the historic building.
St. Louis-based Lux Living, a developer of apartment buildings in the Central West End, has submitted plans to the city that would keep the Engineers’ Club next to its proposed apartment building at 4339 and 4359 Lindell Blvd.
The Engineers’ Club is the third largest professional engineering society in the country and is one of the two nonprofit organizations that hope to sell property along Lindell to Lux so it can build apartments. Optimist International is headquartered nearby at 4494 Lindell, and the St. Louis Preservation Board has twice rejected Lux’s proposals to build apartments there.
The same city board in December denied Lux’s bid to convert the Engineers’ Club site by partially demolishing the building, using the facade and walls to house the complex’s pool.
But the developer’s latest plans for the site do not involve demolition of the building and would build the apartments next to the Engineers' Club, a company spokesperson said.
Lux Living did not provide any other details of the new plans. The company originally proposed 200 units over seven stories, built on 4339 Lindell, the current site of a parking lot next to the club.
Like the Optimist headquarters, the Engineers' building was identified in a 2013 city survey as one of the most historic midcentury modern buildings in the city. The building was designed in 1965 in the Modern Expressionist style by St. Louis firm Russell, Mullgardt, Schwarz & Van Hoefen, and the city’s Cultural Resources Office recommended against preliminary approval of the project in December because the “loss of half the building would be a significant loss to the city’s architectural history.”
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