Marshall School

A four-story Classical Revival schoolhouse of red brick trimmed in limestone and terra cotta, laid out on a modified E plan. The thirteen-bay front on Aldine rises from a rusticated brick ground floor to a top story of closely ranked windows under a terra cotta cornice, with wide overhanging eaves and shaped rafter tails; an octagonal copper-roofed cupola crowns the hipped roof. The main entrance sits between rusticated brick pilasters under a heavy terra cotta entablature lettered "John Marshall School," with a garlanded door frame and a wreathed cartouche in a broken pediment above. At the rear, a tall central tower rises between the wings. A one-story brick all-purpose room joins the west side.

Marshall School began in 1863 in a rented building at 16th and Walnut Streets in western downtown and took its name from Chief Justice John Marshall. William B. Ittner designed its replacement on Aldine Avenue in June 1900, on a residential site at the edge of the Ville, then a white neighborhood; it was the ninth of the more than fifty schools he would design in the St. Louis area, and it was built in 1900–1901. Its rear wing gave each floor an extra classroom lit from three sides, five months before Ittner began the Wyman School and the open, E-shaped plans that followed. Marshall served white children until 1918, when it became an intermediate school for Black students. It returned to elementary grades in 1927. By the 1930s it had outgrown the building, and three steel portable classrooms stood on the grounds until they were sold in 1940. A 1951 bond issue paid for Marshall Branch, a one-story overflow building on the southeast part of the grounds, opened in 1952 — the same year a new cupola replaced the original, which had burned. A one-story all-purpose room was added to the west side in 1965. Marshall was listed individually on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999, and in 2011 lent its name to the Marshall School Neighborhood in The Ville Historic District. St. Louis Public Schools closed it in 2003. In 2026 the St. Louis Development Corporation and the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority acquired the vacant building from the school district and sought bids to stabilize it with federal American Rescue Plan Act funds.