Three stories of brick over a raised basement, symmetrical and plainly finished, under a low hipped roof crowned by a central rooftop monitor. Two round-arched doorways sit side by side at the center of the front, reached from the street, with shuttered windows ranked evenly across all three floors. A picket fence runs along the sidewalk above a cut bank. The building's restraint marks it as the work of the small city of Carondelet rather than the later St. Louis school system.
The City of Carondelet built Blow School in 1858 at Virginia and Loughborough avenues — then Fifth and Pine streets — on land donated by Henry Taylor Blow, whose name the school took. Henry Doering, a contractor living in the district, oversaw its construction. The building was enlarged repeatedly over the following decades; a surviving photograph, copied by the Missouri History Museum, is captioned "1st Blow School 1866," a date that most likely marks one of those additions. By the time the St. Louis Board of Public Schools recorded the building in its 1883 dimensions table it stood three stories, held twelve rooms and 720 seats, and was heated by steam, its original 1858 construction noted in the "when built" column. Carondelet was annexed to St. Louis in 1870, and the board counted Blow among its new accommodations that year at 540 seats. A second, larger Blow School was raised beside it in 1883, and both were cleared around 1903 when William B. Ittner's Blow School replaced them on the site.
