A picturesque folly on the bank of a rectangular reflecting pool in Tower Grove Park, built from cream-colored limestone salvaged from the burned Lindell Hotel. Broken ashlar walls, short fluted columns, and fragmentary entablatures are arranged in clusters to suggest an ancient ruin, the stones carrying Venetian Italianate carving — interlaced arabesque panels, Vitruvian-scroll and egg-and-dart moldings, and semicircular fan-carved lunettes. A cast-iron tiered fountain rises from a mound of piled fragments at the center of the pool, which is edged by a turned-baluster balustrade and an ornamental urn; turtles bask on the rockwork.
The Ruins were assembled by Henry Shaw from the wreckage of the Lindell Hotel, a Venetian Italianate hotel on Washington Avenue at Sixth Street that was among the largest in the country when fire destroyed it on March 30, 1867. Shaw, who deeded the land for Tower Grove Park to the city in 1868, acquired the hotel's fire-damaged limestone and, to a plan he drew up with the park's horticulturist James Gurney, had the blocks restacked beside a pool as a romantic ruin — one of the ornamental follies of the gardenesque park.
