A three-story brick public school of the late 1870s, photographed about the 1890s at the corner of Adelaide Avenue and Belleview Street on the developing north side. Italianate in character, it joined a taller three-story block to a lower two-story wing, both of brick over a rock-faced stone foundation, with segmental-arched windows in regular tiers beneath a bracketed, corbeled-brick cornice. A small cupola rose from the roof. A board fence enclosed the yard along the unpaved streets, with scattered houses beyond.
The first Lowell School was built in 1878, in the years after St. Louis annexed the near-north side in 1876, and stood at Adelaide Avenue and Belleview Street in the Hyde Park–College Hill area. ("Belleview Street" was an early, builder-given name; the city renamed this stretch North Eleventh Street by 1883 — one of many such consolidations of old subdivision street names.) A three-story brick building with a lower wing, it served the neighborhood for roughly half a century. About 1926 the Board of Education replaced it with a far larger building a few blocks away — Rockwell Milligan's Collegiate Gothic Lowell School at 1409 Linton Avenue, which carried the name forward and stands today as KIPP Triumph Academy. The old building, recorded here in an Emil Boehl photograph of the 1890s, was taken down after the move. (The Board also kept a small, separate "Colored School No. 9," likewise called Lowell, in these years; the colored schools were renumbered often, so the two Lowells should be kept distinct.)
