George Washington Elementary School

George Washington School is a two-story public school of variegated tapestry brick on a rock-faced stone base, built in William B. Ittner's Tudor-Gothic manner. Steeply pitched shingle gables, some clipped, break the roofline, punctuated by tall corbeled chimney stacks and copper-clad dormers. The entrances sit within four-centered stone arches, one carrying GEORGE WASHINGTON SCHOOL carved across a shield-flanked lintel. Canted two-story bay windows and banks of steel-sash classroom windows on stone sills line the elevations. A later cylindrical wing of buff brick, ringed by a ribbed metal clerestory, adjoins the original block through a low flat-roofed link. The school stands on a terraced lawn behind a chain-link fence and stone retaining wall.

George Washington School opened in 1930 in Hanley Hills, a small municipality in northern St. Louis County, and still serves the Ritenour School District. Its cornerstone credits the firm of William B. Ittner, Inc., the practice of the St. Louis school architect whose daylit, well-ventilated plans had by then shaped hundreds of schoolhouses across the city and beyond. The building came near the end of that long run, carrying Ittner's Tudor-Gothic school idiom out into the county suburbs. A later cylindrical wing of buff brick was added at one end, its drum-shaped form and metal clerestory a mid-century counterpoint to the 1930 block. The school remains in use, its original building little changed behind newer windows.