Abandoned Training School for Saint Louis Teachers

Harris Teachers College, St. Louis Missouri

Date added: January 13, 2024 Categories:

Harris Teachers College is located at 1517 S. Theresa in St. Louis, Missouri. From its completion in 1905 until 1949 (the period of significance), the majority of white teachers in the St. Louis Public Schools were trained in this building. It is the first building designed specifically for the Teachers College, which began in 1904 as an enlargement of the Normal School program (previously held at other school buildings in the system).

Although the building was known simply as the Teachers College when it opened in 1905, it was renamed for educator William Torrey Harris after his death in 1909. The name lives on in Harris-Stowe State College, the direct descendant of both Harris Teachers College and Stowe Teachers College (a parallel institution for African-American teacher training).

The college is an important work by master architect William B. Ittner and illustrates many of the groundbreaking principles which made him the nation's most emulated school architect in the early 20^th Century. Completed in 1905, it is an early example of Ittner's "open plan," which placed a high value on natural light and ventilation in both classrooms and hallways.

Although the building was designed as a teacher's college, it is much closer in form to Ittner's open-plan elementary schools than his high schools, probably because of the relatively small student body. An obvious difference is the size of the classrooms, which were designed for a variety of special uses and vary in dimension.

Harris Teachers College also illustrates the richness of surface texture and elaborate entries that distinguish Ittner's work. Here, Tudor and Classical elements are mixed with ease, particularly distinguishing the central entrance pavilion. Of particular interest are the sculpted head of a female warrior over the entrance and the shield at the top of the same bay with the entwined letters "TC". (For the first few years of its existence the school was known simply as the Teachers College.) The patterned brickwork, one of Ittner's signature elements, adds depth and interest to the walls.

With careful siting and landscaping, Ittner made St. Louis one of the few major urban centers of the early 20^th Century to place schools in large parklike settings. The Teachers College retains its unusually formal landscape which is unparalleled in the City.

Other schools designed by William B. Ittner include Edward Wyman (adjacent to the Teachers College), Rock Spring, Horace Mann, Eliot, Jackson, Eugene Field, Sumner High School, and Carr School.

The city's first Normal School for the training of teachers was created by the Board of Education in 1857. For almost a half-century after its creation, support for the Normal School fluctuated based, in large part, on the demand for new teachers in the St. Louis Public Schools. By the early 1860s, most teachers in the St. Louis Public Schools were Normal School graduates. Indeed, there were no other normal programs west of the Mississippi and only eleven others in the United States.

For almost half a century, support for the school was strongest during teacher shortages. In a period of oversupply during the 1890s, the school was reduced to a "Normal Course" within the high school curriculum. Meanwhile, as demand for African-American education grew, a separate normal school for blacks (Stowe Teachers College) was founded in 1890 at Sumner High School (the city's only high school for African-Americans for over 30 years).

The beginning of the 20^th Century was a period of rapid expansion for the St. Louis Public School system, and in 1902 the Board of Education took steps to ensure a permanent source of well-educated teachers. Property was purchased adjacent to Ittner's Wyman School, and contracts were let for a new building in 1904.

With the need for qualified instructors mounting, the restructured and renamed Teachers College opened a year before its building was complete. Classes were taught in Ittner's new Yeatman High School (now Central Visual and Performing Arts High School) on Natural Bridge Road. Thirty-five women enrolled in the first semester, joined by 28 additional students in the second. When the college building opened in 1905, therefore, there were already 58 returning students as well as 40 new first-years. Full capacity was reached in the 1907-08 school year, with a total of 260 students enrolled in the two-year program.

Entrance requirements to the new institution were strict. Enrollment was only open to high school graduates, preferably those with classical or scientific studies. A "satisfactory medical examination" was also required." Coursework included History of Education, Pedagogy and Methods of Teaching, School Hygiene, Penmanship and Blackboard Work, Music, Psychology and Child Study. After a one-year apprenticeship in the classroom, graduates would be eligible to apply for positions in the schools.

Another important feature of the Teachers College was the introduction in 1905 of extension courses for public school teachers. Now considered the beginning of teacher in-service in St. Louis, the first year's enrollment for these voluntary classes was 383 pupils.

The school was renamed in honor of educator William Torrey Harris (superintendent of the St. Louis Public Schools and later U. S. Commissioner of Education) after his death in 1909. An important milestone was reached in 1920, when the school became a four-year undergraduate institution conferring the Bachelor of Arts in Education degree. Later the school added a Junior College Division, which offered a general liberal arts course as well as pre-professional programs. During World War II, classes were offered to prepare recruits for induction into the armed forces.

For decades, the Saint Louis Public School system produced the majority of its own teachers through the Teachers College program. Its graduates, therefore, shaped the education of the majority of St. Louis' public school students through the first half of the 20^th Century.

Building Description

Harris Teachers College, located at 1517 S. Theresa in St. Louis, Missouri, is a three-story red brick school building designed by William B. Ittner and completed in 1905.

The building's facade is approximately 200 feet wide, divided into nine bays including projecting end and center bays. There are three additional structures: a fence that appears to be original; a radio tower of unknown date; and concrete foundation remnants of an outbuilding behind the school.

The Harris Teachers College property is bounded by streets on three sides and the Wyman School property to the south. Roughly 265 feet east-west and 317 feet north-south, the site is much larger than the footprint of the building. The front of the building (facing east to Theresa) is unusually formal for an Ittner landscape, continuing the terraces from the front of the Wyman School. In fact, since the Teachers College and Wyman buildings share a common fence and landscaping and are not visually separated at the front of the property, the two buildings are easily interpreted as a grouping in a common landscape. Three terraces rise from street level, with a center limestone stair ascending to the front entrance. Historic photographs show the terraces to be very crisply defined earthworks; decades of grounds keeping have rounded the angles but the ascending terrace plan is still clear. The iron fence with granite posts around the property appears in photographs taken immediately after the construction of the school.

At the western side of the site, balustraded limestone retaining walls running parallel from the back wall of the building and along the Park Street sidewalk support the asphalt parking lot at the rear of the building. The concrete foundations of a small structure (identified as a single-story "CARPR" (carport?) on 1968 Sanborn maps) are still present.

Immediately south of the building is a 370' high steel radio broadcasting tower built by the district. It is anchored to the side of the building but stands free on a separate footprint.

The three-story Harris Teachers College building is constructed of red brick with burnt headers and a picturesquely random pattern of some burnt stretchers. Its nine bays add up to approximately 200 feet wide. Typical of Ittner's school designs, the facade is symmetrical, with the wider end and center bays projecting. The design fits into Ittner's general pattern of eclectic "Jacobethan" style buildings, with Tudor-inspired windows and a classical Roman entrance.

The projecting end bays and the inner three bays to either side of the entrance are similarly articulated, with Tudor-style limestone-framed window sets with stone mullions and transoms. At the inner bays, there are three windows per set. The upper stories are separated by a stone sill course; quoins at the two top stories create a common frame for each vertical set of windows, leaving a patterned brick spandrel panel between stories. The outer (first and ninth) bays are wider than the others, and project from the body of the building. Here, the first and second story windows are bumped even further forward in a shallow box bay topped by a balustrade below the third story windows. The wider bays accommodate sets of five windows each.

The center bay clearly articulates the main stairway within. The first story is the formal entrance to the building. Here double front doors are set within a wide Roman arch, framed by Doric pilasters supporting the entablature. The keystone is a sculpted head of a female warrior, likely representing one of the legions of teachers to be graduated from the institution. Above the frieze is a panel of sculpted garlanded shields. Located at the middle of the second-story level, this panel serves as a base for a tall set of windows stretching up approximately one and a half stories to the roofline, and signaling the presence of a stair hall.

A parapet wall across the front elevation is broken by balustrades over each window bank.

One of the most unusual features of the front elevation is the transition from landscape to building. The composition is mounted on a high limestone basement at the two outer bays. At the inside edge of the two outer bays, the basement wall projects forward as if to support a front patio at the first story level. From the street level, in fact, it appears that the school building has a generous balustraded front patio. Mounting the final flight of steps, however, it becomes clear that these are not building walls but retaining walls, and the area that appears to be a patio is filled with grass and plantings.

North and south side elevations are very similar, with four sets of windows (four windows per set) articulated in a manner similar to the inner bays of the front elevation.

The rear of the building lacks the formal articulation of the primary elevations, but it is here that the "E" plan is obvious. Windows of the main north-south corridor of each floor show between the three projections of the "E." Two bays at either end project from the building, with a classroom at the outer bay and a stair hall at the inner. For six symmetrical bays at the center of the elevation, a projecting room is articulated with window pairs that are smaller and more closely spaced than those found elsewhere in the building. At the southern end of this center projection, a square plan chimney stack rises above the roofline. Between the northern end of the center projection and the north wing is a single-story brick garage addition.

Some windows at the rear of the building are boarded. At the center projection there is evidence of an upper-story fire, date unknown. Exterior damage appears confined to windows.

Ittner's original plan featured an east-west corridor spine with classrooms and special purpose rooms along the front of the building, classrooms at either end of the corridor, and a large special-purpose room in the center wing of the "E" at each story. This basic plan is intact, as are many original materials and decorative elements.

The original marble-clad vestibule leads to a double staircase rising to either side of a wide center flight of stairs leading down to the basement. (The basement, located at grade, reads as a full story from the exterior of the building.) Straight ahead, a louvered set of openings appear to be an intake to the fan room.

At the two upper stories, iron-railed staircases and maple-floored corridors are intact. Most classrooms exhibit some cosmetic changes including drop ceilings, carpeting, and partition walls. The principal's room, located immediately south of the main stair on the first floor, retains the fireplace shown on Ittner's plan. Built-in cabinets to either side are not shown on Ittner's plan but clearly date from the early 20^th Century.

At the second story, the original drawing room at the southeast wing has been divided into sound studios. There is a connection to the radio tower at this level.

The second story critique room, occupying the center rear prong of the "E" plan, is the only room that shows fire damage, particularly at the window sills and frames. Some concrete ceiling beams are scorched. The original risers in this room were removed after the school's use as a teacher's college. The room is now carpeted and divided by removable partition walls.