Grant School rises from a raised corner lot behind a rock-faced limestone retaining wall at Pennsylvania Avenue and Crittenden Street, its two building campaigns reading side by side. The original 1893 block is Romanesque Revival: red brick with a round-arched entrance, corbeled brick arches over the windows, carved stone spandrels, and a gabled centerpiece where paired brick colonettes with foliate capitals flank a stone panel lettered GRANT SCHOOL. The adjoining wing is plainer and more classical — three stories under a hipped roof with a copper cornice and segmental dormers, its tall windows set in flat brick walls between stone belt courses.
Grant School was built in 1893 to the design of August H. Kirchner, a three-story, twelve-room Romanesque Revival schoolhouse named for President Ulysses S. Grant. As the surrounding south-side neighborhood grew, the school was enlarged by William B. Ittner, who had become the Board of Education's Commissioner of School Buildings in 1897: Ittner added a six-room, three-story wing on the south side in 1901 and made further alterations — enclosed stairways and pressed-metal ceilings — in 1913. A one-story multipurpose room followed in 1968, when the building became a middle school. Grant served as a public school for a century, from 1893 until its closure in 1993. It stands in the Tower Grove East neighborhood and was later listed on the National Register of Historic Places. After years of vacancy the building was rehabilitated and converted into apartments, the use it holds today.
