A three-story red-brick public school of 1910 filling its block on South 7th Street, designed by William B. Ittner in a Renaissance-inflected turn on his Jacobethan school manner. Light stone quoins frame the projecting end pavilions, and the upper walls carry patterned tapestry brick in diamond-diaper bands beneath a corbeled frieze and stone coping. Along 7th Street a single-story wing opens in a row of tall round-arched windows below a stone balustrade. The central entrance is a round arch flanked by paired columns and crowned by a segmental pediment and carved cartouche, with a stone panel reading "MADISON SCHOOL 1910"; the corner pavilions repeat the arched, columned doorways. A low iron fence encloses the raised, balustraded terrace.
Madison School was built in 1910 to serve LaSalle Park, a crowded working-class immigrant neighborhood on the near-south side, close to the riverfront industry below downtown. It was designed by William B. Ittner, the St. Louis Board of Education's Commissioner of School Buildings, and named — like the earlier Madison Schools that had stood on this near-south ground since the 1850s — for President James Madison. The community it taught was unusually mixed: just to the north lay "Hop Alley," the city's small Chinatown, and among the Missouri History Museum's photographs of the school is a 1930s Chinese class alongside the more familiar graduation and kindergarten groups. Madison served the neighborhood for nearly a century before the St. Louis Public Schools closed it in 2007. The building still stands on South 7th Street, its Ittner brickwork and stone ornament intact behind an iron fence.
