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Photographs by Kevin A. Roberts
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There’s a recurring metaphor people use with Cherokee Street: roller coasters. A century ago, electric streetcars transformed it from flats and houses to a shopping district with jewelers, saloons, theaters, confectioneries, tailors, shoe shops, an ice rink, and six dry-goods shops. Later, there was a Woolworth’s, a J.C. Penney, a Proper Shoe, taverns, union halls, jewelry stores, sandwich shops and places to drop off your dry cleaning.
Then came the first downward roll.
Cherokee cycled through upswings and downswings, but always had a spirit to it, even when it was filled with empty storefronts. At its nadir in the ’90s and early aughts, Antique Row still anchored the street east of Jefferson Avenue. West of the Indian statue, there was El Chico Bakery, Aboriginals, The Record Exchange, the first Way Out Club, and Two Pink Brains, which held tiny raves in the garage of the building now occupied by Snowflake. Wat Buddhamanee Ratanaram Buddhist temple and Franciscan Connection are still in their original storefronts. That’s the thing—people of different ages and colors and cultures and backgrounds live and work and shop side-by-side here, sometimes a little uneasily. But at least they mix. It gives you hope for the rest of the city, where lines seem to be more rigidly drawn.
Now that it looks like the neighborhood’s climbing the upward track again, people are asking: Where do we go from here? What is gentrification? How can we keep the neighborhood authentically multicultural? And now that more than 50 storefronts are full, what else does the street need? We photographed and interviewed 11 people who work here (two of whom live on the street). We asked them what they do, what they see happening on the street, and what should happen next.
Juan Montaña, Cherokee Photobooth, 2637 Cherokee
Sitters here get their photo taken in front of a hand-painted backdrop, just like in 1912. But Juan Montaña also shoots green-screen, so he can digitally drop you in the Horseshoe Nebula or between the Sphinx’s paws. Born in Colombia, he got a philosophy degree in New York, and has been working on a Ph.D. in philosophy-neuroscience-psychology at Washington University (he's on leave right now). He loves photography, and the low rent here meant he could risk opening his own studio (he lowered his overhead even more by creating an apartment in the back of the shop).
This month, for Halloween, he will have artist Ryan Frank paint a backdrop (last year’s scrim had vampires and werewolves) and will offer free pictures to people in the neighborhood. It’s a 10-person operation. There’s a belly dancer, a photo printer, an envelope stuffer, musicians, face painters, and his wife, Erin Roe, who runs the front of the house. They do this on Easter, too—in April, 900 people showed up, and Montaña took 300 photos. “There’s people here from all over the world, but it’s mostly African-American,” he says of the neighborhood. “All these renovations coming up, all these people moving in—sometimes, they don’t know how to connect to the neighborhood. Not that I know how to do it, either,” he says, “but I think it’s important that we reach out to them, because they are going to be our bread and butter. And it’s also important for the community.”
Pat Brannon, Casa Loma Ballroom, 3354 Iowa
It opened as the Cinderella Ballroom in 1927, then burned down in 1940. “It’s still Art Deco,” says Pat Brannon, who bought the Casa Loma in 1990, “just later, 1940s Art Deco.” It’s also St. Louis’ last grand ballroom (there used to be eight), with a “floating” dance floor: tongue-and-groove maple, cushioned with an inch of rubber underneath—like bartender mats, it saves your knees and arches. Frank Sinatra sang here with the Harry James Orchestra in the ’40s. Big bands like the Knights of Swing still play here on Fridays, and the dance floor fills up with eightysomethings and “young kids, who will wear the spats and the black-and-white shoes,” Brannon says. “The gals wear period dresses and will get their hair fixed a little different.” On Saturdays, it’s Jitterbug Swing and Rockabilly Night with Miss Jubilee and the Humdingers or Hudson and the Hoo Doo Cats. This year, burlesque queen Lola Van Ella (who has a studio up the street) began holding The Beggar’s Carnivale—a pageant of fire-eating, circus acts, vaudeville and burlesque—at the Casa Loma. (The next one is October 22; Vagabond Opera, “a six-piece bohemian operatic steampunk neo-cabaret band” from Oregon, is on the bill.)
It’s not all nostalgia, though. Touring Mexican bands play here, and the ballroom’s rented out for functions like the Miss Gay America pageant. Brannon throws a mean Mardi Gras ball every year, along with a Halloween bash. “It’s going to be wild,” Brannon says of this year’s party. “We’ve got That ’80s Band, and they dress up anyway. I tell everyone, ‘Remember the first Star Wars movie, when Luke goes into the intergalactic bar and sees all the creatures from the universe? That’s what the Casa Loma looks like on Halloween.’”
Minerva Lopez, Gooolll, 3353 California
She still misses California, where she grew up. But in 2003, while visiting a friend, Minerva Lopez found herself on Cherokee Street during Cinco de Mayo—“It was like three booths!”—and saw immense potential for the street’s Hispanic district. She moved to St. Louis permanently in 2005, leaving her ad-agency job and opening a soccer shop, Gooolll (i.e., “Gooaalllll!”) at 2646 Cherokee. She was tired of traveling—and sitting in traffic. “I just wanted to get away from it all for a while,” she says. “I didn’t think I’d stay this long.” Though she did go back to California, in a way—she moved into a former bank building at the corner of California Avenue and Cherokee Street, right smack in the middle of the Latino district. “I do want to move,” she says (she and her partner, Carmen, are thinking maybe Brazil), “but I know I’ve got work to do. So until I feel those projects have come to fruition, I’m here.”
Lopez has organized—and heads up—the Cherokee Street Latino Business Owners Association; is on the committee for the Mexican Independence Day celebration in September and a Dia de los Muertos event in November; assists with Cherokee Radio, an online station that streams in the stores; and, along with Ben West of the Community, Arts & Movement Project (CAMP), founded WasabiNet, a low-cost wireless mesh network serving Benton Park West—the name comes from the fact that cans from wasabi peas make great DIY Wi-Fi antennae. “I just want to say, I’m glad of what I’ve done here. And if I’m not involved,” she laughs, “I just don’t see the point of living!”
Galen Gondolfi, Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts, 3151 Cherokee
Nine years ago, when Fort Gondo did one of its first shows, a local paper put a blurb in the calendar. And 400 people showed up. One of them took a cab. The driver was puzzled: “I haven’t dropped anyone off at this corner for 30 years!” Fort Gondo is the remaining bit of what Galen Gondolfi once called “100 yards of chaos,” on the 3100 and 3200 blocks of Cherokee Street. That comprised Radio Cherokee (a music venue programmed by David Early, now across the street at Snowflake), Beverly (an all-women’s gallery named after Gondolfi’s mom), Art Parts (a gallery in a former auto-parts shop), and Typo (a cybercafé that had only typewriters). Art Parts is now The Archive bookstore; Jeff and Randy Vines’ STyLehouse holds down the corner where Typo once was; Peridot moved into the old Beverly gallery (which was All Along Press for a bit—the print shop moved up the street, into the old Proper Shoe store. And Peridot’s moving this month).
In a way, it’s ironic that Gondo is the one thing on the block that’s stayed unchanged since 2002. “As long as you turn out the lights and empty the trash and lock the door on your way out, Gondo is essentially a forum for whatever you want to do,” Gondolfi says, adding he is still a big fan of chaos. (He’s shown here with wife, author and White Flag Projects assistant director Jessica Baran, and Benny the dog.) “It’s the lack of vision that is still the structure around here,” he says. “or the antistructure!”
Angela Lee and Will Porter, Sweet Shears Barber & Beauty, 2642 Cherokee
She’s been here since 1994. The little boys who sat in her chair 16 years ago now bring their little boys here. “Or if they moved away,” she says, “they’ll come back just to say hi to me: ‘Miss Angie, you still here? I’m still here.’” Delores Love, her mother, used to work at the other Sweet Shears on North Grand Boulevard, but when Lee closed that shop in 2000, her mother came here; in 2004, Lee’s son Calvin joined them. Her memories of Cherokee stretch back to 1979, when she was 18 and working at Thom McAn. “Cherokee used to be booming,” she says. “They had Payless, jewelry stores, beauty-supply stores…” She’d love to see more retail return to the street, along with the foot traffic—especially with this year’s street improvements. “We hadn’t had new sidewalks in 40 years,” she says. “They put up lampposts and planted new trees. It really brightens up the street.” She loves the diversity: “I do straight hair, curly, Caucasian, Asian, Latino, black…it doesn’t matter. We open the doors here for everyone.”
This year, she invited her nephew, Will Porter, to open up his T-shirt business in the shop. He got here the weekend of the big SGC International Conference on printmaking. “I’d go upstairs in this building over here and see an art show, there’s a DJ in a window…that’s like New York kind of stuff, you know?” He’s ripped up the carpet on his side and painted a sun on the floor, to put out positive energy. He loves art, and has networked with lots of his fellow young artists, who’ve come in recently in large numbers. He says some residents like the recent changes on the street; others “are feeling pushed out, or attacked or walked upon. Some people move in from other places, out of town, and then just don’t speak to them or make eye contact, or just walk past them… I don’t want to just be on one side of the spectrum. I want everyone to intermingle and be a community.” Like the sun painted on his floor, Porter wants to push the positive things happening here, like “Canvassed Ts,” a big collaborative T-shirt show he is doing at 2720 on October 6, along with other Cherokee businesses including STL-Style, Refresh Urban Boutique, Art Monster, All Along Press, and ArtDimensions. “It’s just love,” he says of Cherokee’s cooperative environment. “That’s why I’m embracing it. Life is about showing love. That’s all that matters to me.”
Eric Woods, Firecracker Press, 2838 Cherokee
Firecracker Press is known for its poppy, colorful letterpress posters, cards, and books. The images are conceived on a computer, then transferred to plates and carved out by hand. Then they’re combined with handset type and run on an antique letterpress that must be manually inked and fed. (Walk into the shop and you can see the process for yourself.) In 2008, Firecracker moved here from an obscure loop-de-loop off the Chippewa Street overpass. “Things were still really wild down here,” Woods says, “from the Business Association to the way folks were setting up shops and renting spaces and what they were doing in those spaces.”
Now, he says, the street’s settling down a bit. He adds that Firecracker’s maturing as a business, too—its old shop was more like an art clubhouse; this is a more traditional walk-in business. (But it’s far from printing stuffy Chamber of Commerce circulars; see its Sasquatch Hunt letterpress coasters for one example.) Woods says he’s been interviewed by grad students at surrounding universities, who are studying the similarities and differences between Cherokee and Gaslight Square. And the people who come in from out of town—they are definitely here—grapple for comparisons with streets in their own cities. “They’ve come here from places like San Francisco,” Woods says, “and they tell us, ‘The cabdriver told me if I want something like the Mission District to come here.’”
Josh Loyal and Davide Weaver, 2720 Cherokee
The building is 14,000 square feet, with three floors. And Josh Loyal (of music, events, and graphic-design outfit Loyal Family) and Davide Weaver (ArtDimensions’ head honcho) change it up all the time, like a happy-go-lucky Winchester Mystery House. Three to six nights a week, Loyal books blues, jazz, jam, reggae, bluegrass, rock, and electronic bands, and Weaver finds artists to paint, live, next to the stage. That’s on the ground floor. Then there’s a gallery upstairs, where solo shows go up every few weeks and chef Johnathan Kraft moonlights. There’s also a basement gallery, Cherokee Underground, for edgier work. The venue opened a back patio this spring, and in August started serving South St. Louis Pizza Company’s handmade pizzas.
Loyal and Weaver are also working on a game room full of vintage pinball machines and putting out a line of eco-friendly T-shirts designed by local artists and printed by Benton Park’s Art Farm. “We were joking that our marketing tag should be ‘Ever evolving,’ because every time people come in, they’re like, ‘Wow! When did you do that?’” Weaver says. It’s currently the biggest late-night venue on the street; the business partners are stoked by Cherokee’s progress, but see it, like 2720, as something that still needs tending and improvement. “None of these blocks are going to survive on their own,” Loyal says. “But when you link up, and this block is helping this block, that’s what’s going to make this a strip, a destination point.”
The Vargas Family, La Vallesana, 2801 Cherokee
Though housed in the tiniest building on Cherokee (it used to be a Sip and Swirl), Neveria La Vallesana was always hard to miss. On the corner of California Avenue and Cherokee Street, painted white and deep blue with a lime-green stripe running along the roofline, the building sported a street-facing mural advertising its delectable tortas, and in cursive, declaring this to be la esquina del sabor (“the corner for flavor”). Hilario Vargas and his wife, Tina, moved to St. Louis from California in the early 2000s at the encouragement of his brother, Maurilio. They opened La Vallesana in 2003, selling handmade ice cream and paletas—Mexican popsicles—in flavors like tamarind, mango, coconut, and watermelon. “But in November,” Hilario says, “no one wanted ice cream! So I buy a grill and sell tacos and tortas.” It was true Mexican street food, filled with spices and meats like lengua and cabeza.
A few years ago, the Vargases opened La Vallesana 2 across the street, managed by Hilario’s son, Daniel (who’s in culinary school). The tiny cement building that had housed the first restaurant was demolished, and they began construction this spring on a new restaurant, designed by Killeen Studio Architects. It has a Spanish tile roof, a full dining room, and many times the kitchen space. And they’re not done yet. Sitting at a stool facing the new kitchen, Hilario unrolls a new set of plans: a plaza with a stage will replace the parking lot next door, and the blue building on the other side (now Economic Shop), will sell ice cream and paletas. “Here, people work really hard,” Hilario says. “Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. This street has many opportunities…but only if you work hard.”
Black Bear Bakery Collective, 2639 Cherokee
Hanging next to the stairs that lead up to the mezzanine at Black Bear Bakery’s cafe, there’s a sandwich board from the old Lickhalter Bakery, which opened on Biddle Street in 1916 and was still selling bread in the 1970s. It’s not just a cool piece of ephemera; Black Bear uses Lickhalter’s old recipes, including its crusty, very sharp sourdough rye—and bagels without holes. Originally called the City of Little Bread (named after a thesis on the St. Louis General Strike of 1877), Black Bear is a worker-run collective and makes all decisions as a group. “I’m just a member,” shrugs bobEE Sweet, when asked if he has a title. “I’ve just been around the longest.”
In 2004, when Black Bear bought the old Vandora Theater Building (built in 1907) from the St. Louis Land Reutilization Authority, the building had been vacant for several years and was covered with moldering Z-brick facing. The building at Jefferson Avenue and Pestalozzi Street had originally been a bakery, but the collective needed more room. “Our old space was chopped up into lots of little rooms,” Sweet says. “And it had low ceilings.” Not that the ceilings in the Cherokee building were better: They were rotting, thanks to the leaky roof. Black Bear gutted the space, installing radiant heating, double-paned windows, and a bitumen rubber roof; members converted the old projection booth into library space with a kids’ area, free Internet, and neatly organized shelves of zines. Peek between the cooling racks behind the counter and you can see the new kitchen space, which houses giant mixers and a 7,000-pound Middleby Marshall oven, circa 1948, which is 10 feet deep and bakes 150 loaves at a time on a rotating carousel.
Bridget Weible, Flowers to the People, 2317 Cherokee
She sells cacti in animal-shaped planters, vases, letterpress cards, and vintage color-tabbed Better Homes and Gardens manuals on trees and shrubbery. But Bridget Weible is all about the flowers. She opened her shop this spring, after working for seven years for designers on Florist’s Row. She specializes in local, sustainable flowers (“It’s my shtick!”) and the core of her business is weddings. “It’s easier to go to the market and buy whatever’s there,” she says. “I’ll end up in the alley in the middle of the night, harvesting penny grass for a really au naturel wedding.” Her primary supplier is M. G. Mueller Family Farm in Redbud, Ill., though she does buy off Florist’s Row, and sometimes, if she really has to, she’ll order sustainably grown roses from Ecuador. She must improvise by necessity, like when one bride wanted everything local and white. “Which is way harder than it sounds,” Weible says. “This was days after lilies-of-the-valley stopped blooming.” They ran through options, including oxeye daisies. Then she got the idea to do a bouquet of white clover, which she harvested from the abandoned house next door to her. “They hadn’t mowed the lawn yet that year! And there were like 18-inch stems on that clover,” she says. The bride loved it. And as her boyfriend pointed out to her: “You know what’s great about that, Bridget? Every time she walks past a field of clover, she’ll think about her wedding day.”
Janet Maevers and John Klynott, Retro 101/Cherry Bomb Vintage, 2303 Cherokee
In August, when Design*Sponge asked Pokey LaFarge what his perfect 24 hours in St. Louis would look like, he mentioned stopping here to “say hi to Janet and John, and perhaps buy a new tie.” Maevers runs Cherry Bomb, the vintage-clothing side of the shop; since 2000, she’s sold everything from flapper dresses to white Naugahyde go-go boots out of five different Cherokee storefronts (she lives on the street, too). John Klynott’s been on Cherokee since 2009. As Retro 101, he fills the other half of the store with midcentury furniture and accessories. “The ’20s and ’30s are my favorite eras,” Maevers says. “I used to think midcentury was horrible, but since being partners with him, I can appreciate a lot of it much more than I used to.” She laughs.
The pair is the young guard of Antique Row, though they acknowledge they’re no longer the young guard of Cherokee. And they say that Antique Row is in transition. Jasper of Jasper’s Antique Radio Museum is dead. Hartmann’s Treasures and Neon Lady are gone. Elder’s, a third-generation store, does a brisk business in mahogany furniture, but Cherri Elder isn’t sure she wants to sell antiques forever. Hammond’s Antiques & Books is a second-generation store, but now only keeps weekend hours; so does Panorama. “Pretty much the reins are being passed on to photography studios or places like The Mud House, which is not even a store,” Klynott says. “I like what it is right now…It’s never going to be South Grand or the Loop, for the simple reason there are so many people who have ownership in it. And thank God for that.”
