× Expand Photo by W.C. Persons, courtesy of the Missouri History Museum The top of the Civil Courts Building

The Civil Courts Building in downtown St. Louis is one of those buildings everyone knows—and many of us know it so well, it's become almost invisible. Yet there it looms, right at the intersection of Market and Tucker. When I moved to St. Louis in 1986, it was one of the first buildings I noticed, and as I grew older, I discovered its nebulous relationship to one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But as I waited in the mezzanine of the jury waiting room a couple of weeks ago, it dawned on me that maybe the time had finally come to write about this masterpiece of St. Louis architecture.

The Civil Courts Building was inspired by the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. It might be one of the lesser known of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but its place in that septet has never been disputed. (One or two wonders change over the course of the ancient era.) And what did it look like? Much of what we know about the Mausoleum’s appearance comes from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, a careful description of the Roman world that fast encompassed the conquered Greek civilization he’d seen as a naval commander. (His tragic death, as he fought to save friends during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, is recounted by his nephew Pliny the Younger.)

Who, you may be wondering, is buried in this mausoleum? King Mausolus of Caria (a vassal state of the Persian Empire that then ruled the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea, part of the larger Greek cultural region known as Ionia). His tomb was so imposing that our modern word “mausoleum”—literally, “Building of Mausolus”—is used to designate any grand and elaborate tomb. Commissioned by his wife Artemisia, the towering brick building, sheathed in white marble, brought together the leading sculptors of the Greek world of the time. Vitruvius tells us it was designed by two architects, Satyros and Pytheus, and a quartet of sculptors—Leochares, Bryaxis, Scopas, and Timotheus—supervised the sculpting of high relief and other free-standing sculptures on the four side of the slightly rectangular building. In this way, the mausoleum became a museum of the best artists of the Greek world.

Likewise, the design of the mausoleum exhibited a taste of the internationalism of the time, as the Persian Empire joined disparate cultures into a centralized government. The base of the mausoleum looked to Middle Eastern forms in tomb architecture, with three stepped platforms, each decorated with sculpture. Above the sturdy base rose 36 Ionic columns, recognizing the influence of Greek culture on the region (and exhibiting the awkwardness of Ionic column capitals on the corners of buildings). Finally, alluding to the influence of Egypt, a stepped pyramid guarded by lions rose up to a quadriga: a chariot with four horses holding Mausolus and Artemisia, finishing the massive composition.

× Expand Photo by Chris Naffziger Detail of an Amazonomachy frieze from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, now at the British Museum

In addition to the writings of ancient authors such as Pliny the Elder and Vitruvius, we also have the excavations of Charles Newton, whose work is documented in a massive tome that visitors to the Central Library can view right here in St. Louis. A later, far more scientific excavation by Kristian Jeppeson in the 1960s shed further light on the famous mausoleum. Simply put, the august tomb had been destroyed by neglect and by knights defending Bodrum from the advancing Ottoman Empire. The knights lost, nonetheless, and the remains found by Newton are now in the British Museum.

Photo by Chris Naffziger Detail of a horse from the Mausoleum's quadriga

One of the horse heads from the quadriga survived a fall of 100 feet to the ground and landed with its bit still in its mouth. Newton also found a few pieces of sculpture frieze being used as a drain cover; he successfully convinced the owner to give them up for a price. (Personally, I’ve enjoyed the Halicarnassus sculptures more than the criminally scrubbed Parthenon Marbles nearby when I’ve visited the British Museum.)

Photo by W.C. Persons, courtesy of the Missouri History Museum The Civil Courts under construction, February 1, 1928

Fast forward two millennia from the mausoleum and shift to the Midwest, where you find Klipstein and Rathmann busy trying to keep the Beaux Arts Style alive in St. Louis. You see their mark on buildings such as the Bevo Bottling Facility at Anheuser-Busch. I sometimes refer to this phase as “Terminal Beaux Arts,” as it clearly shows the influence of Modernism and Art Deco. The design for the Civil Courts Building, also a Klipstein and Rathamn commission, is no different. Much as Louis Sullivan had done decades before and only a couple of blocks away with his Wainwright Building, the duo took a traditional architectural archetype and adapted it to the modern era. While Sullivan and his partner Dankmar Adler began with a Renaissance palazzo and stretched the middle piano nobile to create the revolutionary design for the Wainwright, Klipstein and Rathmann instead stretched the base of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus to towering heights, keeping the Ionic colonnade and Egyptian Revival stepped pyramid in correct proportions.

The result is a stunning, monumental spina for the nascent mall that city planners had long envisioned for the center of the city. The surrounding low-rise buildings near the intersection of Market and 12th Street (the future Tucker Boulevard) were now aging and “obsolete,” and city leaders wanted to both eliminate those buildings and create a monumental core befitting the “City Beautiful” movement.

× Expand Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum Fred Graf, Bond Issue, 1924

An illustration created to encourage voters to approve the bond issue shows the grand plans, only some of which were approved, that would have transformed the courthouses, city hall and opera house into an ensemble, a Roman Forum for St. Louis.

× Expand Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum An Army Air Corps photo of the Civil Courts building, looking east

An aerial photograph from an army airplane shows how the plans for wider streets, now rendered redundant by the interstates, had marked the small houses around the newly finished courthouse for destruction.

Photo by W.C. Persons, courtesy of the Missouri History Museum The first day of court

Turning from the grand to the small scale, the new Civil Courts spared no expense in the details. The original revolving doors, now in the collection of the St. Louis Building Arts Foundation, give us a clue to what such entrances would have looked like, had the Ancient Greeks invented them. The lions from the mausoleum, free-standing sculptures at the top, become a low-relief frieze on the side of the building. The interior features stern marble and stained wood, all carefully preserved. The law library at the top of the building is easily one of the most beautiful spaces in the entire city, with a view stunning enough to do it justice. And the two chrome sphinxes at the top, bearing fleur-de-lis on their chests, round out the towering courthouse.

Three phrases above the doors on the western entrance are worth explaining: The first on the left is “Let Justice Be Done Though the Heavens Fall,” which dates to the ancient world—and even had a slightly pejorative meaning at the time. Today, it represents a commitment to justice that endures any backlash. In the center, moving right, is the phrase “Judge Righteously Every Man and His Brother,” which is the King James translation of Deuteronomy 1:16. Finally, on the right, Isaiah 9:7 is reworked: “May Truth, Honor and Justice Forever Reign.”

Photo by Chris Naffziger The Civil Courts Building today

The reason I am drawn to the Civil Courts Building and works of its kind is not because they evince some sort of simplistic optimism. The leaders who commissioned these edifices were dead serious about their constituents' concern for the way their tax dollars were spent. When I see much of what is being built today at public expense, I wonder where that sense of gravitas has gone.

Perhaps it will return someday.