John Trask says the eucalyptus trees that still stand east of the Fashion Square parking structure in Sherman Oaks are all that remains of his elementary school.

I attended Woodman Avenue elementary school in Sherman Oaks. It was located on the southwest corner of the intersections of Woodman Ave and Riverside Dr. It was a two story un-reinforced brick building similar in architectural style to the Norte Dame high school still located on the opposite northeast corner. In 1958 or 1959 the City of Los Angeles took core samples of the 2' thick brick walls and determined the building was not seismically safe. It was closed probably by 1960 and razed that same year to make way for a small shopping mall, containing a Joseph Magnin department store and a branch office of Glendale Federal Savings. The eucalyptus trees on the drive separating the property from the Fashion Square parking structure on the west are all that remains.

The school may have been part of the McKinley Home for Boys that occupied the rest of the land to the west as far as Hazeltine Ave. The building was used for the exterior school scenes in the 1948 motion picture, The Boy with Green Hair that stared Robert Ryan, Barbara Hale, Pat O'Brian, and a young Dean Stockwell. Interesting Barbara Hale and her husband William Katt, aka Bill Williams for many years lived with their family in a home on Ranchito Ave just a few blocks away.

The City of Los Angeles acquired the school at probably around the same time. A large housing development was completed by 1947 on the land that had once been the pasture for the Boys home located north between Riverside Dr and Magnolia and Hazeltine and Woodman Avenue on the east and west. In 1975 while doing laying a new underground pipeline beneath Riverside workers broke into a forgotten tunnel that had been used to move allow farm equipment and livestock to move from the barns on south side of Riverside to the pasture to the north.

The land occupied by the Boys home was sold in about 1959 as well to make way for construction of the Fashion Square shopping mall that was anchored by a Bullocks department store on the east end, and I Magnin and a Jolly Roger restaurant on the west. The building currently occupied by Bloomingdales was originally a Broadway department store that was not built until the early 1970's the Boys' Home was relocated to the Chino area.