Mann School

A large red-brick public school in a restrained Tudor Revival mode, three stories over a rock-faced stone base, spread along the corner of Juniata Street and Oak Hill Avenue. Steep slate hip-and-gable roofs are broken by projecting cross-gables with carved wooden bargeboards and crowned by two octagonal copper cupolas — now weathered green — with louvered sides and domed caps. Rather than one central portal, the building has twin entrances, each set in a stone surround with a low compressed arch; the carved datestone over one reads HORACE MANN SCHOOL 1901. Bands of large classroom windows in white frames run between stone belt courses.

Horace Mann School opened in 1901, one of the many St. Louis public schools designed by William B. Ittner, who had become the Board of Education's Commissioner of School Buildings in 1897 and went on to reshape American schoolhouse design over the following decades. It was named for Horace Mann, the nineteenth-century reformer regarded as a father of the American public school. The building stands in the Tower Grove South neighborhood on the near south side and was later listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Around 2009 the school was threatened with closure and demolition as St. Louis Public Schools weighed replacing the aging Ittner building with new construction. Preservationists opposed the loss of one of the city's landmark schools, and the plan did not proceed. Mann survived and continues to operate as an elementary school with strong enrollment; its entrance today is marked "Mann Elementary School — A Leader in Me School."