A large brick public school of 1908 on a corner site in Soulard, designed by William B. Ittner in his Jacobethan Collegiate Gothic manner and rising three and four stories. Two square brick bell towers, pierced by tall paired pointed-arch openings and capped with tile roofs, break the long roofline. The variegated tapestry brick is enlivened by glazed polychrome ceramic roundels — among them a boy seated with a book — set within circular brick surrounds, and a carved stone panel reads "HUMBOLDT." A monumental pointed-arch window with wood tracery lights the assembly hall, and banks of tall mullioned classroom windows run the elevations beneath corbeled brick cornices and red clay tile coping. The building stands on a raised corner behind a low brick wall and an iron fence.
Humboldt School was built in 1908 to serve Soulard, the densely settled, heavily German neighborhood just west of the Anheuser-Busch brewery. It replaced an older Italianate school of the same name and belongs to the wave of school construction overseen by William B. Ittner, who had become the St. Louis Board of Education's Commissioner of School Buildings in 1897 and reshaped the city's schools around daylight, ventilation, and generous assembly space. The school takes its name from Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian naturalist and explorer widely honored in nineteenth-century German-American communities. Its twin towers, tapestry brickwork, and glazed ceramic roundels — several depicting children at study — mark it as one of Ittner's more richly ornamented neighborhood buildings. Unlike many St. Louis schools of its era, Humboldt never closed; it remains in use by the St. Louis Public Schools, today as the Humboldt Academy of Higher Learning, a magnet elementary school.
