In the autumn of 2003, the vacant building at 1517 S. Theresa looked a lot like the 40 other St. Louis public schools standing empty: a massive, block-long hulk whose fine brick and terra cotta exterior still danced with the sunlight that once filtered into the halls and classrooms. Built in 1905 as the St. Louis School District’s teachers’ college (Harris Teachers’ College), the building had gone on to house district audiovisual and security services before shuttering in July 2003. Four months later, the school board voted to sell the property.
The eager buyer, Koman Properties Inc., made no secret of plans to gut the school and build a strip mall on the two-acre site. Then word came down that the “Theresa School,” so dubbed by the press, was designed by St. Louis architect William B. Ittner. Within days, the school board nixed the sale and the planning director responsible for researching the building’s history was out of a job.
Who was William B. Ittner? And why was it so important to save this school from the wrecking ball? Born in 1864 in St. Louis to Anthony and Mary Ittner, he attended the very public schools whose design he would later revolutionize. His father, a self-made mason, co-owned a brick and construction company in South St. Louis. Ittner thrilled his dad by graduating in the first class of Washington University’s Manual Training School. Then, after earning an architecture degree from Cornell University, he returned to St. Louis, where he worked for architects Eames and Young before striking out on his own.
In 1897, the school district hired Ittner as its first commissioner of school buildings. That changed everything.
The 50 St. Louis public schools he designed between 1898 and 1915 transformed American school architecture, integrating long-overdue improvements in hygiene and safety with a huge dose of aesthetics.
At the time, St. Louis schools were prison-like, dull red brick buildings, dank, dark and overcrowded with students. Typically, they had three stories and 12 classrooms, four on each floor surrounding a dark central corridor. Bathrooms, when they existed, were in the basement.
The impetus for change came from a new city charter that required the school district to replace its unwieldy 28-member, ward-based board with 12 citywide elected officials. The newly streamlined board immediately approved a long-overdue budget for new school buildings and created a full-time position for a commissioner to take charge of construction. Enter Ittner.
Because he had attended one of those prison-like schools himself, he was determined to create a different kind of environment for students and teachers. Using what became known as the “open plan,” he stretched out the vertical boxes into H-, U- and E-shaped structures; filled the schools with natural light by lining up the classrooms along a windowed corridor; drew the damp smells outside with ventilation devices; brought the bathrooms up out of the basement; and introduced modern plumbing and fireproofing. Ittner schools were the first to have multiuse rooms, such as the high school auditorium used for athletic events, concerts, school assemblies or plays.
Anyone who has gone to an Ittner school knows that his designs went beyond the utilitarian. Ittner believed that public schools were civic monuments, no different from the courthouse or city hall. As a child’s entrée into learning, a school had to be nurturing and beautiful, so the child wanted to go to school. Ittner transformed kindergartens from Victorian era bare rooms into huge, sun-filled nurseries. He filled school interiors with fireplaces, bay windows, stained glass windows and wall paintings. He installed cascading staircases leading up to grand entrances and enhanced the buildings with towers, turrets and decorative gargoyles. “He understood that very young children are like sponges,” says Robert Duffy, architecture critic at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “So he exposed them to beauty, light and a healthy environment to give them a head start on life.”
Ittner drew on his father’s expertise and applied his own knowledge of brickwork to turn school exteriors into finely textured works of art. He blended varieties of brick colors and experimented with different textures and patterns to capture the light throughout the day. He used “cull” brick (oddly shaped brick pieces) to create multi-patterned façades in shades of red, pink, russet and brown. “He was a master builder,” says great-grandson Reed Voorhees, an architect at Jacobs Engineering in St. Louis who always takes a complete list of Ittner schools with him on business trips to “check out school cornerstones.”
Breaking tradition, Ittner placed his schools back from the street on spacious lots with enough room to plant trees, shrubs and flowers and build huge playgrounds in the back. In 1901, he even convinced a skeptical school board to give him a budget for a school gardener and then hired Tower Grove Park’s florist, Philip Glebel, to fill the slot. In Ittner’s report in the September 1904 American School Board Journal, he praised the St. Louis board for purchasing “generous sites for all its new buildings … giving an opportunity for making our school grounds object lessons of refined civic taste in the art of landscape gardening.”
Ittner’s first priorities, though, were fire safety, hygiene, fresh air and light. His earliest schools—Eliot, Sherman, Monroe and Jackson (built from 1898–'99)—were the first in St. Louis to have indoor plumbing, heating, adequate fireproofing and a ventilation system.
With each new school, Ittner integrated specific design elements and features that would make St. Louis a model for American school architecture. The Eugene Field School (1900), its U-shape joined by a central kindergarten, had a courtyard and twin stair towers. Marshall (1900) and Edward Wyman (1901), the latter the demonstration school for the teachers’ college next door, debuted Ittner’s signature E-shaped floor plan with classrooms along a single corridor. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1901) featured a wrought-iron fence, stone ornaments and a multicolored brick exterior.
When Ittner came on board, St. Louis had two high schools, Central High for whites and Sumner High for African Americans. Between 1904 and 1915, Ittner designed five new public high schools. McKinley (1904), the first high school in South St. Louis, and Yeatman (1904), in North St. Louis, were the first in the country to offer specialized manual training and home economics tracks. Soldan (1909), considered Ittner’s showpiece school, had 10 skylights, copper-clad cupolas and a projected entrance bay. For Sumner High’s new building in the Ville, Ittner used his trademark Georgian Revival design (1910). Cleveland (1915), the second high school south of Market, had the distinction of being built on a former vineyard.
In the early 20th century, Ittner’s schools were a popular St. Louis attraction for visiting architects, business travelers, educators and tourists, all curious about the buildings that looked more like modern-day castles and Tudor estates than halls of education. Visitors who flocked to St. Louis for the 1904 World’s Fair made side trips to see the new schools. “The whole world turns to St. Louis for models of public school buildings,” reported Britain’s The Mirror in 1912. “Mr. Ittner has achieved a national reputation, while even in Europe he is not unknown.”
Of all the St. Louis Ittner schools, Soldan High School drew the widest national attention. In A Survey of American Cities (1914), Julian Street described the school in great detail: the auditorium “like an opera house,” tiled cafeteria, sunlit locker room, quarter-sawed oak floors, entrance that “looks like Hampden [sic] Court. … the library, like that of a club, and the lavatories, as perfect as those in fine hotels.” It cost $350,000; to build the same school today would cost roughly $10 million. On a tour of the newly renovated Soldan with KTVI-TV host Don Martin in 1989, Ittner’s grandson, the late architect H. Curtis Ittner, pointed out the carved stonework, fireplaces and cut glass. “Today’s schools might be more comfortable,” he said, “but they are no match for my grandfather’s design.”
In 1910, Ittner left his com-missioner position to set up his own firm, William B. Ittner Inc. He continued to design schools for the school district as a consultant architect until 1915, the year he built Bryan Mullanphy, his last St. Louis public school. When he died in 1936, he left a legacy of more than 500 school buildings in 27 states. Closer to home, he designed schools in Kirkwood, Maplewood-Richmond Heights, Webster Groves, University City, Normandy and Clayton. Within the city limits, his projects included the Missouri Athletic Club, Central Institute for the Deaf, Scottish Rite Cathedral and Continental Life Building.
The man who transformed our schools also left a personal legacy: a family that would include four generations of architects. His surviving grandchildren—Sue Ittner Voorhees, William (Bill) Ittner III and Gus Lorber—recall a bald, gentle, thickset man with a mustache, his pockets stuffed with architectural sketches drawn perfectly to scale. They remember visits to their grandfather’s architectural firm on the top floor of the Continental Building, where his office had a stained-glass window etched with architectural tools.
Sue Ittner Voorhees, who lives in St. Louis, shows a visitor some of the family photographs, letters and news clippings she has collected over the years. Buried in the pile is an undated letter Ittner wrote to his daughter, Helen, while she and her sister, Lottie, were attending school in Maryland. He wrote that he was mailing them train tickets for their trip home at the end of May. “I’ll be in Dubuque on the 29th, so will not be home to welcome you when you arrive,” he added. “I am busy, as usual getting out schools, so I will close with love to both my darling girls.”
Although William B. Ittner Inc. is no longer connected to the Ittner family, the firm has hung blown-up photographs of its founder’s schools in the lobby. In 2001, the firm also produced an exhibition of its history: “Where did you go to school? A century of School Architecture by William B. Ittner.” Hosted by the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, the exhibition at the Vaughan Cultural Center featured original architectural drawings and photographs of its founder’s schools.
Except for the Taussig Open Air School (1915), every Ittner school in St. Louis is still standing, thanks to local preservationists, primarily Landmarks Association of St. Louis. Having researched the history of every school in the city, Landmarks has saved schools from the wrecking ball, helped preserve the architectural integrity of renovated schools and drawn public attention to crumbling, vacant schools with its yearly “endangered buildings” list. There are currently 13 Ittner schools in the St. Louis area listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including the original Harris Teachers’ College on Theresa Avenue.
Did you go to an Ittner school?
First, check the building’s cornerstone for Ittner’s signature. For a complete list of Ittner schools in the United States, contact the St. Louis Public Schools Archives at 314-645-2648. For more information on Ittner schools listed on the National Register of Historic Places, contact the National Park Service at 202-354-2255, www.nps.gov.
