The Merrick Building is one of the few surviving structures from El Paso’s railroad boom era. Its exuberant design still reflects that expansive period, when property owners were urged to modernize the city by demolishing existing adobe buildings and replacing them with brick construction. South El Paso Street is the city’s main downtown shopping street, attracting walkover customers from Ciudad Juárez (Mexican cross-over shoppers saved the downtown retail infrastructure of almost all Texan border cities after middle-class locals fled to the suburbs in the 1970s). Each side of the corner building has two two-story angular bay windows with pilasters and cornices of pressed metal, inset terra-cotta panels, stone stringcourses, a cornice of pressed metal that rises to form small pediments over each bay window, and wrought-iron cresting. Between the bay windows are tall narrow windows and horizontal bands of diamond-ended brick and flower-and-leaf-patterned tiles. A corbeled brick gable concludes the center of each facade. From 1890 to 1996 the St. Charles Hotel occupied the second and third floors. During the Mexican Revolution (1913–1917), the Shelton-Payne Arms Company operated out of the building, selling weapons to all factions. The ground-floor space later operated as the Hollywood Café. A restoration in 2000 provided apartments on the upper floors.