Plans Advance to Resurrect Shepard School
Date Posted: March 12, 2018
Posted In: Projects,
From NextSTL: Another dead school is about to be born again as a proposal for forty-seven new apartments near the Lemp Brewery and Cherokee Antique Row advances. The vacant Shepard School at 3450 Wisconsin lies immediately west of the Lemp Brewery and one block south of Cherokee Street in the Marine Villa neighborhood. The St. Louis Planning Commission is expected to approve a Chapter 99 Blighting Study and Redevelopment Plan for the project at its meeting this Wednesday. Shariq Mansuri’s Moonlight Partners LLC purchased the school from St. Louis Public Schools for $619,980 in June, also acquiring an adjacent lot. Plans call for 65 parking spaces.
The 61,998 square foot building was designed by William B. Ittner. Opened in 1906, the school closed in 2009. The building has been a contributing structure to the Benton Park Historic District since 1985. The listing on the National Register of Historic Places makes the project eligible for state and federal historic tax credits.
The Shepard School was named after Captain Elihu Hotchkiss Shepard (1795-1876), a Vermont-born War of 1812 veteran and an early Missouri settler. Shepard by the 1820s was one of the first faculty members and Professor of Languages at St. Louis College (today’s SLU), and he went on to help found the Missouri Historical Society in 1866. The History Museum still holds his portrait, an oil on canvas by artist William R. Simpson.