Mailed on a September evening in 1916 — the machine cancel reads "11:00 PM" — this richly colored pre-linen card carries the grand Flemish Renaissance bulk of St. Louis City Hall into the hands of Mrs. Kathryn in Peoria, Illinois, with a faint penciled note that speaks of someone heading home after a visit. The building itself is one of the Midwest's most architecturally extravagant civic landmarks: designed by Harvey Ellis and completed in 1904 (the year of the World's Fair), its red brick and terra-cotta façade bristles with stepped gables, pinnacled turrets, and a soaring clock tower, all rendered here in the warm chromolithographic palette of the V.O. Hammon Publishing Company of Chicago. The cobblestone street in the foreground and the neatly trimmed iron fence remind viewers of the era's civic pride at its most theatrical.