A three-story elementary school of red brick over a random red-brown brick basement and a reddish granite foundation, trimmed in Carthage limestone and capped by a terra-cotta cornice. The symmetrical H-plan front centers on a limestone entrance portico — round Doric columns and engaged piers under a triglyph frieze and an elliptical fanlight arch — above which a carved stone cartouche reads JACKSON SCHOOL, crowned by a stone sphere between paired rosettes. Tall double-hung wood windows run in regular bays beneath splayed limestone lintels. A cast-iron lamp standard still lettered "Jackson School" stands at the walk; the building is fenced and vacant, much of its glass broken.
Jackson School was among the first buildings William B. Ittner designed after his 1897 appointment as Commissioner of School Buildings for the St. Louis Board of Education. The permit was issued in October 1898, and the Lenz-Helm Building Company put the school up for $89,132. It was named for President Andrew Jackson and served the dense residential blocks around 16th and Hogan Streets. The design caught Ittner at a turning point. Its H-shaped plan — an eleven-bay center block between two three-bay wings, with a one-story kindergarten off the rear — was the state of the art when he adopted it for his first school commissions, and Jackson was the last he built to it. The plan maximized window area, but rooms on both sides of each corridor still left the halls dim; his later E-shaped plan opened one side of every hallway to the outdoors and solved the problem. Inside, the school was finished to a high standard: granitic mosaic floors, marble baseboards, oak trim, iron stairways, and a stained-glass transom over the kindergarten door bearing the silhouette of Friedrich Froebel, who invented the kindergarten. A one-story multipurpose room was added at the south in the 1960s. Jackson operated as an elementary school until 2003, when St. Louis Public Schools closed it in a district-wide consolidation. It has stood vacant under SLPS ownership since.
