Cattleman C. A. O’Keefe hired Mauran, Russell and Crowell of St. Louis based on their reputation for hotel design, including the Rice Hotel in Houston and the Galvez in Galveston, and for their association with Sanguinet and Staats on the Hotel Texas (1921) at 815 Main. Retail spaces occupy the street-level facades with the primary entrance from the north on E. 5th Street. The hotel contained 284 guestrooms, including 8 suites at the fifteenth and eighteenth floors that had loggias overlooking a rooftop pool. The resultant upper-level setbacks are the Blackstone’s architectural signature. Noted country radio station WBAP’s recording and broadcasting studios were in the penthouse, and country-western singer Bob Wills and the Light Crust Doughboys performed here frequently in the 1930s, including recording their hit song San Antonio Rose.
The buff brick building is Moderne in its stepped-back massing but embellished with cut stone panels of Italian Renaissance detail. Closed from 1982 to 1997, the Blackstone was rehabilitated and reopened as the Marriott Courtyard in 1997.