This vacant Elementary School in Saint Louis was closed and abandoned in 1981

Frank P. Blair School, St. Louis Missouri

Date added: November 04, 2023 Categories:

West (rear) elevation of main school building; kindergarten in left hand middle ground (1982)

The architecture of the three-story Frank P. Blair School, built in three stages from 1882 through 1894, is a vigorous and well-preserved embodiment of the distinctive characteristics of the High Victorian aesthetic applied to school design. The most elaborate public school remaining in St. Louis of those built in the 1880s, its twin stair and entrance towers were a departure from the traditional St. Louis central entrance plan. The octagonal, one-story, free-standing kindergarten built at the rear of the grade school in 1891 (with an 1894 addition) represents a genre which evolved after the establishment of the first successful public school kindergarten program in 1873. No other surviving example could be located in St. Louis. The early history of Blair School also exemplified the success of post-Civil War educational policies designed to attract the city's large German population to the public school system and the degree of influence enjoyed by first and second-generation German St. Louisans.

Blair School fronts 170 feet on Rauschenbach Avenue, a street which borders the north edge of St. Louis Place Park. Part of the Union Addition of 1850, a multi-block plat filed by the major landowners John O'Fallon and Louis LaBeaume plus six others, the tract (about two miles northwest of the city's riverfront center) was incorporated into the city with the boundary extension of 1855. By 1875, the blocks to the east, north and south of the site were substantially developed but only scattered housing bordered the park which was not improved by the city until the 1870s with an artificial lake and cast iron fountain.

Purchase of the school site was authorized by the School Board on March 28^th, 1882, after several months of attempts to find a site large enough to accommodate future expansion. Excavation was begun before the end of the month. In June the Board accepted the Teachers' Committee recommendation that the school be named "The Frank P. Blair School" for Francis Preston Blair, Jr. (1821-1875), an outstanding and popular political figure in Missouri during the years preceding the Civil War and a Brigadier General in the Union Army.

The school, finished by the end of August 1882, was the grand finale of the School Board Building Committee's annual Field Day of inspection of new school construction. The event was reported by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in detail. Six carriage loads of Building Committee members, Board officials, architect H. William Kirchner, building contractors and school principals visited south side buildings in the morning, had an "elegant repast" at the restaurant in Forest Park and "enjoyed a liberal outlay of cigars and wine" before proceeding to Blair School on the north side where neighborhood residents had gathered. The Globe called the new school "the pride of the ward" and "in the best style of Architect Kirchner who has had full swing in its construction. . . altogether the building is one of the finest, if not the finest school building in the city." The day ended with a banquet at the house of Albert Bornmueller, the School Board's representative from the 14^th Ward and a member of the Building Committee.

Architect Kirchner's "best style" was an amalgam of High Victorian interpretations of historical style, a non-archaeological eclecticism that evoked the sense of "pastness" which has been called the High Victorian "symbolic ideal". The 1882 building, with six central, three-story bays flanked by recessed towers with corner turrets rising a story above the central block, more than met the School Board's preference for architecture "sufficiently imposing to produce the desired influence upon the pupils and the community."

The U. S. Census of 1880 for the 14^th Ward showed a population of 20,536 with 5,223 German-born, the largest number of any of the twenty-eight wards. the educational program at Blair when it opened in 1882 with a student body of fifty percent German or German-American included German language instruction. Initiated after the Civil War, German classes had achieved the desired effect of attracting much of the large German population to the public schools and away from the private German schools which began to proliferate in the 1840s and 1850s. Unlike Cincinnati, where German children attended public schools where subject matter was taught half a day in German and half in English, in St. Louis a daily hour of German language instruction was offered in any school where enough parents requested it. By the 1880s, the results for St. Louis were residential and cultural patterns far less segregated than in Cincinnati.' In 1880, half of the city's twenty-eight Wards were represented on the St. Louis Board of Education by first and second-generation Germans.

Architect H. William Kirchner (1853-1937) was also a resident of the 14^th Ward. The son of a German-born doctor, he was born in Baltimore and came to Missouri in the late 1850s. His architectural training was in the office of George I, Barnett where he worked as a draughtsman before opening his own office in 1887. He was appointed School Board Architect in 1881 and 1882 (in a period when the Board Architect was appointed for one-year terms) and for a three-year term in 1886. His younger brother August H. Kirchner joined him as partner in 1884 and served as School Board Architect from 1893 to 1897. Elections for Board Architect mirrored the lively and acrimonious contests for the Board itself. In 1883, when neither Kirchner was a candidate, Otto J. Wilhelmi was finally elected on the eleventh ballot. The salary for the Architect was three thousand dollars with the stipulation that the architect take no outside work. The Superintendent received only thirty-six hundred dollars.

William T. Harris, School Superintendent from 1868 to 1880, considered Germans the most "cultured and civilized immigrant that flocks to our shores" and encouraged St. Louis Germans to maintain ethnic ties. His life-long interest in German philosophy and culture led him to defend the twenty-three year "experiment" of gradual assimilation through German curriculum in public schools and to advocate the importance of kindergartens based on the teachings of German educator Friedrick Froebel. After Harris' departure from St. Louis in 1880, neo-Know Nothing challenges to German instruction increased as did "exposes" alleging misuse of funds by the School Board and complaints about better salaries and recruiting of German teachers. A "Reform Board" elected in 1887 was not a reform but rather a successful anti-German coup. The first year the new Board could tinker with the building program was at the conclusion of William Kirchner's three-year term as Architect in 1889. The Board, pleading lack of funds, then abolished the office of Architect but appointed a losing candidate from earlier years as Superintendent of Construction and Repairs. For new schools, jobs would be farmed out to an assortment of other architects who would receive three percent for design and specifications and two percent for supervising construction. Architects for new schools designed in 1890 include Ramsey, Brown, Baker, Taylor and Furlong. The only non-Anglo name was that of Austrian-born Louis. Kledus, defeated by William Kirchner in the 1882 election for Architect. Kledus' commissions from the Board were not the most lucrative; in addition to the Blair kindergarten, he designed the Rock Springs kindergarten and "colored" schools #8 and #11.

The Blair kindergarten, an octagon with a faceted, peaked roof, evokes the "play" with geometrical blocks which was part of Froebel's curriculum. The single open space of the interior was designed to allow a head teacher and assistants to work with all the children in an informal setting. In spite of (or perhaps because of) the rigorous attention to rigid discipline and attendance in the grade schools, the average pupil remained in the public schools for only three years. The school building itself had become a symbol of Ward success at the School Board, and Superintendent Edward Long wrote: "It is hoped that, in the future, the Board will look more to the size and comfort of the rooms than to the external appearance of the building." Only the little kindergarten buildings, however, offered designers an opportunity to heed Long's admonition. An Examining Board report for School Board expenses ending June 1892, revealed that fees paid for one year to architects totaled almost twenty-one thousand dollars. The School Board promptly revived the position of School Architect. August Kirchner was the only candidate in 1898; his salary was set at five thousand dollars. Superintendent Long received forty-five hundred.

Although Blair was filled to overflowing the day it opened (over one thousand students), the School Board elected to open a branch in rented rooms at the other side of the Park until the "Reform Board" finally responded to Long's request by authorizing the addition of 1888. Without his three-year contract in hand, William Kirchner's skillful expansion of his own building would have been highly unlikely. Together, the Kirchner brothers served as School Architect for eleven of the years between 1881 and 1897 when a new charter established a non-partisan School Board election and a new office of Commissioner of School Buildings. A fortuitous choice of site, an original design with possible plans for expansion and the actual expansion undertaken by the Kirchners combined to produce Blair School, a building which can be said to lead most clearly to the work of the first and best Commissioner of School Buildings, William B. Ittner. Although the setting at the edge of a park may not have been a primary consideration when the School Board purchased the lot, the imposing elevation of Blair School foretells Ittner's renowned twentieth-century schools set back on generous, park-like lawns.

A monument to Friedrich Schiller was erected in the park in 1898 and until the late 1930s, residents in houses surrounding the park were almost exclusively of German extraction. Gradually, the Germans were replaced first by Eastern Europeans and then blacks and poor whites. By the early 1970s, City Directories list an alarming number of houses as vacant. Located only a few blocks north of the country's most infamous housing project, Pruit-Igoe, St. Louis Park Place experienced dramatic and devastating demolition at its borders. The Schiller statue was removed by the city and relocated to a civic plaza downtown in the mid-1970s and the School Board closed Blair School due to a reduction in enrollment in 1981. Meanwhile, a handful of determined "urban pioneers" have moved into the immediate neighborhood and dubbed their organization "La Place St. Louis". McCormack, Baron & Associates, developers with several successful adaptive reuse projects to their credit, have acquired the school with plans to convert it to housing. This project could be a model for the city and a milestone in the efforts to save what is left of the near north side.

Building Description

The Frank P. Blair School has been a highly visible symbol of public education for nearly one hundred years. An impressive manifestation of High Victorian architectural style, its twin stair and entrance towers represent a notable 1880s design solution to the dual public school problems of safety and building expansion.

The school was built in three stages beginning with the 1882 central twelve-classroom block of three stories with flanking four-story stair towers designed by the School Board Architect. H. William Kirchner and built at a cost of $37,856. Kirchner was also the architect of the two-story north and south wings which added eight more classrooms in 1888 and cost $20,494. The $8,253 third-story additions to the wings were built in 1894 from plans still in the Board of Education files drawn by the School Board Architect August H. Kirchner, bringing the total number of rooms to twenty-four. A photograph taken to record the completion of the 1894 addition shows an iron fence with geometric, humanoid stone posts guarding the school. In the foreground is the fence which once extended around the park.

The recessed stair towers allowed for two exposures for every classroom in the original building and would serve the phased additions. Architect Kirchner took full advantage of the dramatic design possibilities of this functional concern blending a number of historical styles in a typical High Victorian fashion. Particularly imposing are the recessed entrances, each entered under a broad segmental arch of stone and alternating brown and black glazed bricks that spring from massive stone impost blocks. These rest on capitals of simplified, knobby leaf and frond forms above square columns on high stepped pedestals. The columns are repeated at the entrance wall where the double doors below arched transoms are reached by a flight of ten steps. Above a curiously menacing, massive stone slab (reminiscent of Frank Furness) below the second-story sill, the windows are paired below a segmental arch. The light buff, brown, and black glazed brick voussoirs and stringcourses contrast with the stone skewbacks which echo the stone impost blocks below and are a use of "constructive coloration". Further enrichment is provided by the layered and corbelled brickwork of the window openings, a treatment accorded to virtually all the windows of the school. The third-story paired windows of the towers, between stone courses, are topped by a stone lintel.

A photograph of the second and third stories of the central, 1882 building gives a clearer view of the Italianate elements of the stylistic mix: stilted segmental and flat arched openings, stone brackets (which extend to form keystones of the third-story windows) and trim below the stone cornice and truncated, hipped roof. The polychromy of the third-story flat arches and stringcourses is a surprisingly vivid combination of pale blue and black glazed brick. The 1888 and 1894 additions, like the original building, were built above foundations of rough-faced, random-sized limestone. Red brick, used throughout for the walls, is laid in dark mortar. Although the ornamental program of the three-story walls was continued (without polychromy) on the three-bay front elevation of the additions, a corbelled brick cornice was substituted for the elaborate one of stone on the original building. Side elevations are organized into two bays flanking a slightly projecting bay of paired windows below a gable with white-painted coping and paired round-headed arches. A view of the rear elevation reveals the absence of polychromed arches and stringcourses of the 1882 construction. Also seen is the loss of one window bay on the side elevations of the central classroom block by a three-story addition to the stair towers. One-story entrance vestibules now fill the spaces between the classroom blocks.

Other alterations include the loss of the corner turrets and roofs of the towers and the bricking in of the fourth-story tower windows at the front elevation. Gone also are the copper finials, cresting, and cupola seen in the 1894 drawing. Slate has been replaced on all roofs by asbestos shingles; the majority of the geometrically patterned double-hung windows have been replaced by twelve-over-twelve sash. Most of the basement windows have been completely or partially bricked in and doors at the basement level on the north and south elevations have been added. The windows of the gable at the south elevation are partly bricked in. A modern, less substantial fence replaces the earlier one.

The one-story kindergarten, built at the rear of the school lot in 1891 was to have cost $12,000, but architect Louis Kledus was required by the School Board to modify the plans to accommodate an appropriation of only $6,240. The octagonal building, with three of its sides extended to accommodate the entrance and wardrobe vestibules and a stairway to the basement, is built of red brick above a stone basement. A faceted, peaked roof reflects the octagonal plan. The openings for the paired window openings and doors are segmentally arched with alternating brownish-black and plain red brick with linking stringcourses and stone skewbacks echoing the 1882 main school building. The entrances face 22^nd Street and allowed the kindergarteners to enter their school free of harassment by the older children. The $1,676 rectangular addition at the east of the building was made in 1894 and followed A. H. Kirchner's plans which called for resetting the windows of three faces of the octagon in the new walls. These windows have stone skewbacks but lack polychromy and linking-stringcourses. Later, small, one-story additions (date unknown) at the east elevations of the entrance vestibules further obscure the original octagonal plan. These have simple rectangular window openings.

Annual Reports of the School Board beginning in the mid-1870s record the construction of (and occasionally illustrate) other one-story, free-standing kindergarten buildings. None of those illustrated is octagonal.

A parallel development of the 1870s was the planning of special kindergarten rooms larger than the regular classrooms and often with separate entrances within regular school buildings. Presumably because of economy in land use, heating, and maintenance costs plus more convenient supervision, this became the standard solution for the special needs of the kindergarten. Of the free-standing, one-story kindergarten buildings for which there is a record of construction, Blair Kindergarten is the only one remaining in St. Louis.