Academy, St. Louis — Area Guide & Where to Stay

What are the main landmarks in Academy?

Union Boulevard carries a row of early twentieth-century institutional buildings along its eastern side, and that row forms the western boundary of the Mount Cabanne-Raymond Place Historic District. The Church of the Messiah anchors the southern end at 5261 Enright Avenue, a cross-gabled building in muted red brick with limestone tracery and a square crenellated side tower, finished in 1907 to designs by John Lawrence Mauran. Mauran was client and architect at once, since he chaired the congregation's board of trustees.

Its nave and chancel hold figural stained glass made in 1879 by the London studio of Daniel Cottier, lifted in 1906 from an older sanctuary at Locust and Garrison and reset in the new walls. The glass is older than the walls. Four hundred metres north, the Cabanne Branch of 1906 came from the same office at 1106 Union Boulevard, and Soldan International Studies High School holds the block at 918 Union Boulevard.

Two more National Register listings sit further north. St. Mark the Evangelist Catholic Church, Convent and Academy stands at 1313 Academy Avenue, with the Blind Girls' Home about three hundred metres west at 5235 Page Boulevard.

What is the history of Academy?

The neighbourhood filled in from the south. Streets of two- and three-story brick and stone houses went up between the 1890s and the 1920s, running east from the institutional row on Union Boulevard, and in 1907 the Unitarian congregation of the Church of the Messiah made its fourth westward move into that row. The school district followed.

Construction cost six hundred and thirty thousand dollars, and the land ten thousand more, for a high school of 1,600 places designed by William B. Ittner and known while it was going up as Union Avenue High School. It opened in 1909 under the name of Frank Louis Soldan, superintendent of the city's schools from 1895 until his death in 1908. Sally Benson grew up on these blocks and turned her childhood here into the writing behind Meet Me in St. Louis; the Benson house at 5135 Kensington Avenue was sold, fell into disrepair, and was demolished in 1994.

Tennessee Williams sat in the same school and used it as a setting in The Glass Menagerie. The intake changed quickly after 1950: a student body that had been wealthy and largely Jewish since 1909 was predominantly African American by the mid-1960s, and the school reopened as an international-studies magnet in 1993.

Where is Academy?

Academy is a rectangle about one and a half kilometres from north to south and a kilometre across. Dr. Martin Luther King Drive closes the top, Delmar Boulevard the bottom, North Kingshighway Boulevard the east side, and Union Boulevard the west. Page Boulevard crosses the upper half.

Academy Avenue runs through the northern end. Fountain Park lies over Kingshighway to the east, Kingsway West over King Drive to the north, and Visitation Park over Union to the west, while the Central West End begins on the far side of Delmar Boulevard.