A three-story public school of red brick on a raised stone basement, built to an irregular plan around a corner site at Whittier Street and Evans Avenue. Hipped roofs with tall corbelled chimneys crowned the projecting end pavilions, and the top floor carried round-arched windows grouped in threes, set off from the rectangular sash below by stone belt courses and brick banding. A round-arched entrance opened at the base of the near pavilion, and a low iron fence enclosed the schoolyard. The building was typical of the larger brick schoolhouses St. Louis put up in the 1890s.
The Thomas F. Riddick School was built in 1890 at 4136 Evans Avenue, on the corner of Whittier Street, and enlarged three times over the following decade — additions in 1894, 1896, and 1899. It took its name from Thomas F. Riddick, an early St. Louis civic leader who helped secure the federal land grant that endowed the city's public schools and was involved in opening its first school in 1815. The school stood in the old Grand Prairie district on the near north side, in what is now the Vandeventer neighborhood. As the surrounding blocks became a predominantly African American community through the first half of the twentieth century, Riddick served Black students; a Missouri Historical Society photograph from December 1950 shows Black children crossing Evans Avenue in front of the building, in the era when St. Louis ran racially segregated schools. Riddick has since been demolished. The exact year of its razing is not recorded in the sources consulted, and no architect is named for the original building or its additions.
