Screaming Eagle Development is finalizing a financial package to turn the former home of Mulligan Printing into an apartment complex with 56 market-rate units.
Once community anchors, schoolhouses across the city have been closed and sold off to developers.
It is October 2019, and the old Lyon School is dark. It sits on the end of a quiet street in south St. Louis, fenced and forgotten, a three-story brick castle with boarded front doors and a checkerboard of plywood patches over missing windows. During the day, a few neighborhood kids slide through a gap in the fence to play basketball on a beat-up hoop with no net. They run and dribble on weed-cracked asphalt, the same ground touched by a century of St. Louis students.