The first Humboldt School opened in September 1870 at Jackson and Picotte streets in Kosciusko, a densely built immigrant neighborhood on the near-south riverfront. A three-story building of twelve rooms seating about 700, erected for roughly $33,000, it was one of a cluster of substantial ward schools the St. Louis Board of Education completed that autumn alongside Pestalozzi, Madison, and Laclede. It served the neighborhood into the early twentieth century, until William B. Ittner's larger Humboldt School replaced it in 1908 a few blocks west, at 2516 South 9th Street in Soulard. The old building's end came not from the new school but from the city itself: Kosciusko, wedged between Seventh Street and the river below the MacArthur Bridge, was marked for clearance in the 1947 comprehensive plan and taken by the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority beginning in 1959. Over the following decade the nineteenth-century district was almost entirely erased and rebuilt as fenced riverfront industrial ground — a smaller cousin of the Mill Creek Valley clearance. Jackson and Picotte streets are themselves gone; nearby Lesperance Street survives to mark the old grid.
