United States · Missouri · St. Louis
Tower Grove East, St. Louis — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Two-story brick four-squares line the avenues of Tower Grove East, a residential quarter of south St. Louis facing Tower Grove Park.
About Tower Grove East
Where to stay in Tower Grove East
Where you base yourself shapes the visit — here's the character of each area.
Tower Grove East runs on housing, with its commerce gathered on one edge. South Grand Boulevard holds that edge, carrying the restaurants, bars, and shops that pull people over from Tower Grove Park, so a short-let flat on Tennessee Avenue or South Compton Avenue leaves dinner within a walk. Churches and schools fill the rest.
Shenandoah Avenue caps the quieter northern blocks by Shenandoah Elementary School, and the grid thins toward Gravois Avenue in the south. You sleep on a residential avenue and eat on the boulevard.
About Tower Grove East
What are the main landmarks in Tower Grove East?
Tower Grove East carries a National Register listing on Tennessee Avenue. The William Buehler House is a three-story Richardsonian Romanesque house in red brick, designed by Herman Lemm and built between 1894 and 1896. A two-story carriage house stands behind it.
Around it the larger homes run to Italianate, Queen Anne, and Dutch Colonial, so the Romanesque arches read as the exception on the street rather than the pattern. Tower Grove Abbey, a former church a few blocks north on the same avenue, houses the Stray Dog Theatre, and Saint Pius V Catholic Church marks the South Grand Boulevard edge.
What is the history of Tower Grove East?
Tower Grove East took its name from Tower Grove Park, whose land Henry Shaw deeded to the city in 1868. Family built the rest. The early owners here were siblings, cousins, and extended kin of the German American families of Compton Heights, and the styles they had seen there shaped South Compton Avenue and Shenandoah Avenue.
Houses went up on the four-square plan, a pyramid or hipped roof over a two-story cube, with a course of pressed brick or limestone dividing the stories. Buyers picked doors and stairways from pattern books. Roosevelt High School opened in 1925, after a cemetery on the site was cleared for it.
Where is Tower Grove East?
Tower Grove East fills the grid between Shenandoah Avenue and Gravois Avenue, bounded east by Nebraska Avenue and west by South Grand Boulevard.
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Updated September 2026