A one-story Art Deco station house of tawny, variegated brick, laid in horizontal bands with darker purple-brown brick picked out in stepped piers and courses. The central entrance bay projects slightly and rises above the parapet as a flat-topped pier of dark brick, with a lamp set into a copper-lined channel running down its face above the door. A zigzag frieze of pale and dark tile runs beneath the coping on either side. The door sits in a dark frame under a lettered transom, reached by a flight of steps between low stepped brick cheek walls that continue as a raised dark-brick base across the front. A lower wing extends to one side.
The Fifth District Police Station is one of a series of five (possibly six) nearly identical Art Deco / Moderne district police stations designed by City Architect Albert A. Osburg for St. Louis in the mid-to-late 1930s. The stations are single-story structures in blonde/buff brick with intricate brickwork, stylized Art Deco detailing concentrated above the entrance — particularly a geometric vertical fin over the main door — and stylized lettering and signage. The series was part of a broader New Deal–era wave of PWA/WPA-funded civic building in St. Louis. The district stations were consolidated and closed around 1990 when the city reorganized into larger patrol divisions. The Penrose Street building has been city-owned and intermittently used for municipal purposes since closure.
