As the twenty-first century began, Main Street had been transformed from a declining mill town's retail zone to a remarkable consumption site with national stores, local restaurants, and loft-style apartments built on the foundation of industrial production from the early nineteenth century. Between the Schuylkill River and the rear of the large mills that lined Main Street is the early-nineteenth-century Manayunk Canal that provided motive power to run the looms and spindles of the region's cloth industry. Most of the buildings were the work of industrial specialists such as Peuckert and Wunder, who designed several industrial plants including the Missouri Mills at Gay Street (1914), Robert Krook's mill at Walnut Lane (1915), the offices of the Manayunk Trust at 4336 Main Street, and a saloon at 4300 Main Street. For a quarter of a century, the architectural offices of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates have made the three-story brick mill at 4236 Main Street an international center of architectural innovation.