Broadway Boulevard and Clark Street (formerly Fifth and Myrtle Streets)

The 1858 St. Louis directory listed two slave dealers, Corbin Thompson and Bernard M. Lynch. In his advertising, Thompson claimed that his slave pen had "a high and healthy location with ample room."

Lynch, a well-known character in his day, engaged in the slave trade in St. Louis for many years. First he ran a slave market on Locust Street, midway between Fourth and Fifth Streets. When his business outgrew those quarters, he purchased the Fifth and Myrtle site in 1859, installing barred windows, bolts, and locks to convert it to a secure prison. The Reverend Galusha Anderson (1832-1918), a distinguished
Baptist minister who was pastor of Second Baptist Church in St. Louis from 1858 to 1866, described the desolate quarters:

The room was in the shape of a parallelo- gram. It was plastered and had one small window high up near the ceiling. There was no floor but the bare earth. Three backless wooden benches stood next to the walls. There were seven slaves there, both men and women, herded together, without any arrangement for privacy.

Soon after the start of the Civil War, the federal authorities took possession of the building and used it as a military prison. Long concealed in the substructure of the Meyer Brothers Drugstore, the actual slave pens were not dismantled until 1963, when construction of Busch Stadium began on the site.