A three-story red-brick school of the 1870s, recorded here looking toward its corner at Seventh and LaSalle Streets. Italianate in character, it was organized around a central pavilion crowned by a triangular pediment and carried on a bracketed cornice, with round-arched and segmental windows rising in tiers above a raised basement. An iron picket fence on a low stone wall enclosed the corner lot along the cobblestone street, and beyond it to the east stood the domed, cross-topped tower of a neighborhood Catholic church.
The older Madison School stood at Seventh and Labadie Streets on the near-south side — the second Board school of that name on the ground. It opened in 1870, replacing an "Old Madison" of 1855, and served the crowded immigrant neighborhood with about twelve rooms in the Board of Education's standard three-story plan. Because it predated the creation of the Board's architect office (about 1871–72), no architect is recorded for it. Compton and Dry's 1875 Pictorial St. Louis shows the school at Seventh and Labadie — Plate 3, keyed as building 5, a block west of the Annunciation church and school — confirming the 1870 building still stood mid-decade. (Labadie Street here was later renamed LaSalle, which is why the site now reads "7th & LaSalle.") Its later history is tangled: Board tables also list a "Madison (New)" of 1878, so the original may have been rebuilt before the century turned. Either way, the site was cleared for William B. Ittner's much larger Madison School, which opened in 1910 and still serves the block. The Missouri History Museum holds a view of this "old school building"; catalogued in April 1930, it is almost certainly a copy of an earlier photograph taken before the building came down.
