Abroad at Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian StreetStreet, Julian
General
Abroad at Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian Street
Street, Julian
United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
understanding and love of art.
Nevertheless, St. Louis has one architect whom she cannot honor too
highly--Mr. William B. Ittner, who, as a designer of schools, stands
unsurpassed.
If ever I have seen a building perfect for its purpose, that building is
the Frank Louis Soldan High School, designed by this man. It is the last
word in schools; a building for the city of St. Louis to be proud of,
and for the whole country to rejoice in. It has everything a school can
have, including that quality rarest of all in schools--sheer beauty. It
is worth a whole chapter in itself, from its great auditorium, which is
like a very simple opera house, seating two thousand persons, to its
tiled lunch rooms with their "cafeteria" service. An architect could
build one school like that, it seems to me, and then lie down and die
content, feeling that his work was done. But Mr. Ittner apparently is
not satisfied so easily as I should be, for he goes gaily on building
other schools. If there isn't one to be built in St. Louis at the moment
(and the city has an extraordinary number of fine school buildings), he
goes off to some other city and puts a school up there. And for every
one he builds he ought to have a crown of gold.
[Illustration: St. Louis needs to be taken by the hand and led around
to some municipal-improvement tailor, some civic haberdasher]
Mr. John Rush Powell, the principal of the high school, was so good as
to take my companion and me over the building. We envied Mr. Powell the
privilege of being housed in such a palace, and Mr. Powell, in his turn,
tried to talk temperately about the wonders of his school, and was so
polite as to let us do the raving.
Do you remember, when you went to school, the long closet, or dressing
room, where you used to hang your coat and hat? The boys and girls of
the Soldan School have steel lockers in a sunlit locker room. Do you
remember the old wooden floors? These boys and girls have wooden floors
to walk on, but the wood is quarter-sawed oak, and it is laid in asphalt
over concrete, which makes the finest kind of floor. Do you remember the
ugly old school building? The front of this one looks like Hampden Court
Palace, brought up to date. Do you remember the big classroom that
served almost every purpose? This school has separate rooms for
everything--a greenhouse for the botanists, great studios, with
skylights, for those who study art, a music hall, and private offices,
beside the classrooms, for instructors. Oh, you ought to see this school
yourself, and learn how schools have changed! You ought to see the
domestic science kitchen with its twenty-four gas ranges and the model
dining room, where the girls give dinner parties for their parents; the
sewing room and fitting rooms, and the laundries, with sanitary
equipment and electric irons--for every girl who takes the
domestic-science course must know how to do fine laundry work, even to
the washing of flannels.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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