Benjamin Anderson won’t get to develop the long vacant Euclid School, a dream he’s held ever since moving to the Fountain Park neighborhood in 2018. On Tuesday, the Board of Education for the Saint Louis Public Schools voted to spend $1.3 million to demolish the 136-year-old building, once again rejecting Anderson’s attempt to rehab it.
It was in 2023 that Anderson first put in an offer to buy the place for $200,000, only to get “ghosted” by the school board. He never gave up hope, though, and when he learned the school board had greenlit the building for demolition, he went public with his interest. (Noting that the board was planning to spend more than a million to demolish it, he lowered his offer to $1.) The board gave him just two weeks to show proof of financing and a plan—but he provided both to board members (and also posted both, along with letters of neighborhood support, online).
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And so Tuesday’s 4–2 decision probably should have been insulting: They’d rather spend money to destroy the place than let him buy it?
But Anderson says he feels like he has no choice but to accept the decision. “I don’t actually know what I can do,” he tells SLM. “I hope something else happens. I’m going to talk to people like you in good faith and just tell the truth of my experience, and if it changes something, it changes something. But I’m not going to go back to battle. We’ve got other projects to do. We’re just going to focus on creating proof of work and creating more value by doing independent projects, I guess.”
Stuart Keating, the executive director of the Landmarks Association of St. Louis, responded with less equanimity. The Landmarks Association spoke against the demolition Tuesday, and in a subsequent press release, it accused the school board of “erasing Black history.”
“This is like burning furniture to heat your house,” Keating said in a statement. “The Board of Education rejected a cash offer for Euclid School that would have resulted in an eleven million dollar redevelopment project in favor of spending north of a million dollars to swing a wrecking ball around and leave yet another vacant hole in a northside neighborhood.”
The school board voted unanimously to demolish Hempstead School, which is now in such a state of disrepair that it had not been offered for sale. (There’s also a concrete plan for its future: It’s set to become an electric bus depot.) But the votes to demolish Euclid and a third school, Scullin, drew dissent from school board members Brian Marston and AJ Foster.
“It doesn’t make sense to pay $1.4 million to demolish a building that’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places when someone is actively trying to buy it to create housing, which will increase the tax base for the district,” Marston said at the meeting. “The developer lives in the neighborhood, has the support of Alderwoman Shameem Clark Hubbard, and has an experienced team. Can I say for sure he will complete the project? No, but it’s worth the attempt in a neighborhood that’s already lost so much.”
But other board members seemed certain of their course. Board member Emily Jane Hubbard noted that a newer building had been erected across the street, where “living and breathing” students currently attend. “Having Euclid across the street is not good for them,” she said, referencing its dilapidated state.
Board member Donna Jones noted that she saw Anderson’s presentation three years ago, after which the board allowed his option to lapse. “It would seem to me that so many of the developers that have said that they wanted to invest in the community, they come and they do the Paul McKee, you know, they offer 50 cents, and then they don’t show up, and then they think if they put a roof on top of something and throw some windows in, it’s OK, and then if they want to charge $1,200 to $1,700 in a neighborhood where people already hurting, that’s OK,” she said. “And it’s not OK. People are sick and tired of this pimping the neighborhood every time you come in, you run in and you want to get something for free. … You always talk about people that want welfare. OK, this is not the welfare state.”
