Clifton Heights School

A two-story school of red brick on a rusticated brick-and-stone raised basement, its original block Italianate in character: tall segmental-arched windows grouped in threes between brick piers, a deep bracketed cornice carried on scrolled terra-cotta consoles, and clay-tile coping. A buff-brick Moderne frontispiece was later inserted at the center entrance, carrying a stylized sunburst clock motif above a flat-canopied doorway. The building steps down a sloping corner site, its raised basement fully exposed at the rear above a limestone retaining wall along the street.

Clifton Heights School was built in 1897 for the St. Louis Public Schools, serving the Clifton Heights neighborhood, a streetcar suburb that had grown up along Old Manchester Road, now Clifton Avenue. It is attributed to August H. Kirchner, the St. Louis Board of Education's architect through 1897. The public school later closed, and by 1950 the building housed the H.F. Epstein Hebrew Academy, a Jewish day school that occupied 2725 and the adjoining 2729 Clifton Avenue. It afterward became the headquarters of Service Employees International Union Local 1 and is held by the Service Employees Center Building Corporation.