Turner Open Air School

The Charles Henry Turner School is a two-story red brick building in a restrained Classical Revival manner, laid out on a shallow H-shaped plan. Its entrance pavilion rises to a pedimented gable with a dentiled cornice and a stone frieze incised CHARLES HENRY TURNER SCHOOL, set above brick pilasters and a round-arched doorway with a fanlight. Steep tile-covered roofs cap the wings, and a tall tapering brick chimney stands over a rear ell. Ranks of large multi-pane classroom windows line the elevations. The building is now abandoned, its windows boarded or broken and the yard littered with debris behind a temporary fence.

The Charles Henry Turner Open Air School opened in 1925 as the first school in St. Louis built specifically for African American children with physical disabilities and chronic illness. It was designed in 1924 by Rockwell M. Milligan, architect to the Board of Education, on the open-air-school model — the belief that abundant fresh air and light benefited children with tuberculosis and similar conditions — and was fitted with ramps rather than stairs for students with limited mobility. A companion school on the south side, the Michael School (also Milligan, 1924), served the same purpose for white children; it was demolished in 1997, leaving Turner as the earliest surviving example of a St. Louis public school for students with special needs. The school was named for Charles Henry Turner (1867–1923), the African American zoologist and educator known for his research on the behavior of insects, who taught at Sumner High School. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.