Cote Brilliante School

A three-story Ittner public school of red brick with stone and terra-cotta trim, standing on the corner of Cora, Kennerly, and Marcus Avenues in the Greater Ville. Its long facade blends Colonial Revival symmetry with Tudor Revival detail and builds toward an elaborately ornamented central entrance portal — the richest note on the front — with the ornament simplifying toward the wings. Tall banks of classroom windows light the upper floors between brick piers, and gabled end pavilions break the roofline. The building sits behind a low wall on a raised corner site.

The Cote Brilliante School standing today was built in 1904 to the design of William B. Ittner, the St. Louis Board of Education's Commissioner of School Buildings. It replaced an ornate 1872 schoolhouse of the same name — designed by Charles Boss Clarke — on the same corner lot, part of the wave of larger, better-lit Ittner schools that supplanted the city's cramped Victorian schoolhouses in the early twentieth century. The school took its name, like the neighborhood, from the old Cote Brilliante ("shining hill") district on this high ground northwest of downtown, and served the Greater Ville — a historically African American community — for the better part of a century. St. Louis Public Schools has since closed the building; its doors are boarded, and it was heavily damaged by the tornado that struck north St. Louis on May 16, 2025. It now stands vacant.