I looked at the former Christian Hospital back in October of 2021 when it had turned into the Prince Hall Senior Services building, and it looked perfectly fine. But now it’s abandoned and totally trashed! What the heck happened?
Clyde C. Miller Career Academy
Opening in 2004, the Clyde C. Miller Career Academy was designed by KAI and Kwame Building Group. It is the newest building proposed for closure, but the building will not be abandoned, but used for a different purpose, just the end of high school classes. Sitting at 1000 N. Grand, it is just north of…
Carver Elementary School
Washington Carver Elementary School is a bit of a mystery to me. The name of the school is obvious, of course, and commemorates the famous scientist and inventor, but the details of the building are not well documented. City records state that it was built in 1926, but there are clearly later additions in the…
Bryan Hill Elementary School
Opened in 1911, Bryan Hill Elementary School serves the College Park neighborhood. Designed by William Ittner, it is squeezed into a narrow parcel of land, making photographs of the building difficult. Named after Dr. John Gano Bryan, a famous educator in the late Nineteenth Century, that appellation still does not explain the “Hill” portion. Perhaps…
Meramec Elementary School
Meramec Elementary School is another example of an earlier building, built when Dutchtown was well out in the exurbs of St. Louis, was replaced by a later commission. In this case it was William Ittner in 1911, having adopted his famous mature style of a central portal and two matching wings with some asymmetry. And…
Adams Elementary School
Adams Elementary has a history that stretches back to 1878, when the school above was constructed in what at the time was a relatively isolated but not unpopulated part of the city. The current building was designed by William Ittner in 1899, which is fascinating because the school is not in any way a “traditional”…
Peabody Elementary School
Peabody Elementary School is another institution with a long history in the neighborhood just south of downtown that can be traced back to at least the 1870s if not earlier. At one point it became known as Clinton-Peabody, and as some readers might remember, it shared the name of the housing projects nearby. A new…
Ames Elementary School
The original Ames School was built in 1873, at the northeast corner of Hebert and 14th streets. It received an addition in the later Nineteenth Century to the east which has now been torn down. The new Ames Elementary School moved over to Hadley Street, just north of St. Louis Avenue and east of Interstate…
Jefferson Elementary School
We’ll start looking at the schools slated for potential closure in order of age and working out from downtown, more or less. That means we’ll begin with Jefferson Elementary School, which as evidenced from these historic photos, has a long and rich pedigree in St. Louis. Judging from the two photographs above, I suspect the…
St. Louis Public Schools Announce Major Closures
The news from St. Louis Public Schools is bleak: the proposal announced in late June calls for the closure of seventeen elementary schools and two high schools. The schools marked for closure come from many different eras in the district’s history: the late Nineteenth Century and the designs of August Kirchner, the early Twentieth and…