Simmons School (1898)

A three-story red-brick school built in stages in a restrained Classical Revival manner, reading as two similar cruciform blocks set side by side with a lower addition to the west. Red-brick walls rise from a Missouri-granite foundation beneath red clay-tile hipped roofs with dormers and small roof ventilators. The main doorway sits in a carved limestone frontispiece — a fanlit arched opening framed by pilasters and scrolled brackets, under an incised panel reading "SIMMONS · MARSHALL SCHOOL." Tall multi-pane double-hung windows, grouped under stone lintels, line the elevations, and brick chimneys rise from the roof. The building stands vacant behind chain-link fencing, its lower windows boarded, upper glass broken, and a rear section stripped to bare brick.

The school began in 1873 as the Elleardsville School for Colored Children No. 8, one of the segregated city's schools for African American children, and was renamed for Dr. William J. Simmons (1849–1890), a Baptist clergyman, educator, and author who had been born enslaved. William B. Ittner designed the present building on St. Louis Avenue in the Ville, and it went up in stages: the original east section opened in 1898, built two stories with a removable wood roof for later expansion; Ittner added a third story in 1901 and a second, larger west section in 1911. A further west addition followed in 1930, its plans attributed to Rockwell Milligan, the Board of Education's architect. In 1930 the school also became home to Stowe Teachers College, the city's normal school for training Black teachers, which had outgrown its quarters at Sumner High; renamed for Harriet Beecher Stowe, it was one of only two accredited institutions in St. Louis — with the Homer G. Phillips School of Nursing — that admitted African Americans, and from 1933 hosted a Lincoln University junior-college division before moving to its own building in 1940. Simmons continued as a public school, latterly the combined Simmons–Marshall School whose name is carved above the door, until the St. Louis Public Schools closed it in 2009. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places; the vacant building has since lost a rear section.