Featuring one of the most elaborate brick facades in St. Louis, The Hoffman Brother’s building originally served as a produce market. Actress Betty Grable—the #1 pin-up girl of the 1940s and Hugh Hefner’s inspiration for Playboy magazine—developed her “million-dollar legs” working summers here at her grandparents’ produce market. In the mid-1930s it was taken over by the Ferman Tent Company. In late 2019 Advantes Group still found the building, located at the corner of Lucas Ave and 2nd street, to still have some legs left in her and has since pinned 21 luxury apartments and 15,000sf of retail and office space under its roof.
