Scruggs School is a handsome two-story red brick building designed in the Collegiate Gothic style, featuring symmetrical massing, decorative limestone trim, and characteristic pointed-arch window details that lend it an air of academic dignity. The building's formal composition, with its prominent central entrance and regular fenestration pattern, reflects the institutional architecture favored for early 20th-century St. Louis public schools.
Let for construction in 1917 as the Neosho School — for its corner at Grand and Neosho — the building opened in 1919 and was soon renamed for Richard M. Scruggs (d. 1904), a partner in the Scruggs, Vandervoort & Barney department store and one of the city's noted philanthropists. Rockwell Milligan, Commissioner of School Buildings, designed it for phased growth: the central core came first, with wings added as Dutchtown's enrollment swelled — the Board let contracts for additions in September 1926. The school served the neighborhood for nine decades before Saint Louis Public Schools closed it in 2010. Unlike many of its shuttered contemporaries, it found a second life: in 2012 a Vietnamese Buddhist congregation purchased the building for $700,000, and it remains in active use.
