Cote Brilliante School (1872)

A tall, ornate public school of the 1870s in a High Victorian, Second Empire manner, built of brick with banded and patterned masonry. A square entrance tower rose at the center of the main front, carrying a very slender spire with lucarnes and a finial; smaller candle-snuffer turrets capped the corner pavilions, and steep mansard-roofed sections with iron cresting linked them. Pointed- and round-arched windows in molded surrounds, corbeled brick cornices, and a pointed-arch double doorway completed a richly picturesque composition — a landmark schoolhouse for its neighborhood.

The first Cote Brilliante School was built in 1872 from the designs of the St. Louis architect Charles Boss Clarke, whose office stood at 212½ Chestnut Street. It rose on Kennerly Avenue, just east of Cora Avenue, in a developing district on the city's northwest side, and its tall spired tower made it a landmark for the surrounding neighborhood. By the early twentieth century the ornate Victorian building had been outgrown. It was replaced on the same lot by a larger William B. Ittner school of 1904 — the Cote Brilliante School that still stands at 2616 Cora Avenue — and the original was cleared to make way for it. The 1872 building survives only in prints such as this wood engraving; the school it began, however, has continued on the same corner in the Greater Ville for more than 150 years.