Shaw School

Henry Shaw School is a long two-story building of variegated red-brown tapestry brick on a raised stone base, banded at mid-height in buff brick and roofed in red tile with deep bracketed eaves and copper trim. Stepped end pavilions rise to gables edged with an interlaced arcade of polychrome brick, each centered on a round, brick-ringed oculus and set with triangular Arts and Crafts tile emblems. A square tower breaks the long roofline, its belfry an open loggia of slender columns beneath a tiled cap, and smaller arched-and-gabled dormers punctuate the ridge. Tall multi-light classroom windows run in bands between brick piers. A carved stone panel reads "Henry Shaw School — W. B. Ittner, Architect."

Henry Shaw School takes its name from an 1870 St. Louis public school; the present building, at 5329 Columbia Avenue in the Hill, was designed by William B. Ittner, the district's Commissioner of School Buildings, and opened in 1907. A carved stone panel at the entrance records his authorship. The school was named for Henry Shaw, the businessman who founded the Missouri Botanical Garden and gave the city Tower Grove Park. In the Hill, the city's historically Italian-American neighborhood, Shaw served a largely Italian-descended student body — more than 900 pupils in its early years. In 1976 it joined the district's magnet program as a visual and performing arts school, and it continues today as Shaw Visual and Performing Arts Elementary.