Hempstead School is a large Jacobethan brick school, now a fire-gutted ruin. Its long red-brick ranges rise two and three stories to shaped Flemish gables and a battlemented entrance tower with octagonal corner turrets. The Tudor-arched triple entrance is framed in cut stone; above it a brick arcade carries carved stone panels — foliate roundels, geometric devices, and small human faces — over stone gargoyle keystones. Tall banks of classroom windows, now empty, line the elevations, above a rock-faced stone base and molded brick stringcourses. Much of the red clay-tile hipped roof has burned away, leaving charred rafters open to the sky above the standing brick walls.
Hempstead School was built in 1906, one of eight schools William B. Ittner designed for the St. Louis Board of Education that year, in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood. The St. Louis Public Schools closed it in 2003, and it stood vacant. In 2007, on its hundredth anniversary, the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A fire in 2014, reported to have been started by lightning, destroyed much of the decorative tile roof, though the brick shell remained sound. The Landmarks Association of St. Louis named Hempstead one of its most endangered buildings in 2014, and the school has since faced proposals for demolition alongside efforts to preserve it.
