An open octagonal picnic pavilion carried on eight slender iron columns painted teal with red collars, their tops linked by scroll-cut spandrel brackets over a frieze of circular medallions. A broad hipped roof of gold-painted metal rises to a smaller octagonal lantern with green diagonal-lattice sides, capped by a finial and a running-horse weathervane. Inside, painted rafters radiate from a central boarded octagon left open to the cupola for light and air. The whole is finished in a gold and dark-green color scheme that sets it apart from its matching southern twin.
Henry Shaw placed roughly a dozen fanciful pavilions through Tower Grove Park as ornaments and as shelter from sun and rain. The Humboldt North Pavilion is one of a pair of octagonal shelters built in 1870–71 to designs by the architect Eugene L. Greenleaf, among the earliest of the group. It and its matching southern twin were later called the Humboldt pavilions for their nearness to the bronze statue of Alexander von Humboldt, erected in the park in 1878. The park's collection of Victorian shelters is part of its designation as a National Historic Landmark.
