A three-story Romanesque Revival school of brick on a raised basement, set back from Shenandoah Avenue behind a stone retaining wall topped with an iron fence. Steep hipped roofs rise to tall front-facing gables at the corners, and a louvered, hip-roofed ventilator stands on the ridge. Round-arched openings line the ground floor at the entrance end, while stone belt courses divide the upper floors into bays of grouped rectangular windows set close together to light the classrooms. A tall brick chimney climbs the side wall.
Charless School was built in 1895 at 2226 Shenandoah Avenue, replacing the first Charless School of 1859, on ground Joseph Charless Jr. had given the city for a school. August H. Kirchner designed the three-story building, which held 13 classrooms. The tornado of May 1896 damaged it within a year of opening, and the Board of Education spent more than $2,000 on repairs. The bell tower it was built with was later removed. The school closed in 1981. In February 1988 a three-alarm fire, believed to be arson, started in the attic of the vacant building and damaged the roof, and a second fire broke out the next day. The school was razed in 1993. The Board of Education sold the empty lot in 2007, and construction of new houses on the site began in 2016 and was complete by 2020.
