Rodriguez, in Clownvis Mask. Photograph by Thomas Crone.
Though he’s lived in Crestwood in recent years, Francis “Rich” Rodriguez is a South Sider, through and through. This past Saturday, not for the first time, he told a story about growing up as “one of the last paper boys.” As a kid, he, his kin and some friends were part of a newspaper crew. They controlled two corners, including the linchpin, tri-intersection of Jefferson, Broadway and Chippewa. When they weren’t pitching newspapers on the corners, they yanked trains of pushcarts through the neighborhood, their cries of “paper! paper!” a familiar call.
“I started selling newspapers at 10,” he says. “And I’ve been working ever since.”
At times, when business was slow, they’d pop into the Cherokee bars, selling to the (usually male) customers directly; that’s old-school, hand-to-hand commerce. Sometimes, those men would simply be by for their daily drink. Others idled there, waiting for wives or daughters tucked away in the then-bustling neighborhood’s many beauty parlors.
Later, he became a student at nearby Roosevelt High School, a move that predated his own long tenure as a high school teacher in the St. Louis Public School system. He remembers paying $5 a week on his $69 class ring, back when he was a senior Roughrider. Each week, he’d walk to the storefront jeweler at the corner of Iowa and Cherokee, where he’d make his payment. “All told, I knew this neighborhood pretty well," he says of Cherokee. "I’ve had history here."
Fast forwarding a few years, Rodriguez is found telling these stories inside that same corner building at Iowa and Cherokee, 2728 Cherokee to be specific. He bought it on December 12, 2012. At the title company, he asked the paperwork to be delayed, just slightly, so that he could take over the gut rehab at exactly 12:12 p.m., making him the owner “at 12-12-12-12:12.”
Already, by that point, he’d determined that he wanted to spend his post-teaching years as a restaurateur and tavern-keeper. His concept was a Neapolitan pizzeria called Yaqui’s, which would also serve salads, plus cheese and charcuterie plates, seven days a week. For good measure, the Thursday through Saturday stretch would also include barbecue, cooked on the premises. But as these things frequently go, complications arose. Financing got tricky, the rehab was more intensive than thought, even after an ambitious build-out was planned. He and an initial general contractor parted ways.
The next few months were spent in an interesting period of stasis. Several nights a week, Rodriguez and his best friends would sit in the space, illuminated by Christmas lights, surrounded by his own, large-scale paintings. A small bar was set up, nothing fancy, but enough to catch a buzz. If you knew the little scene was happening, you could knock for entry, or you could just find Rodriguez out on the sidewalk, observing the skateboarders and hula-hoopers and hip-hoppers and stylish Latinas moving on to their nightly fun on the block. From Blank Space to the Casa Loma, he saw a neighborhood humming again. This time he wasn’t a kid: he was watching and waiting as a developer, with new places arriving on the block regularly, like the brand new duo of the Whiskey Ring and Los Punk.
The wait’s now over. Or very nearly so.
A PERFECT FIT
On Saturday, the boards on the front of Yaqui’s finally came down. For years, the location sat vacant; even when it was an active jewelery store, most of the original windows were bricked up, or otherwise blocked, making a beautiful building a dowdy one. Now, the largest batch of windows are back in; this actual glass was salvaged from an empty building at O’Neill Lumber’s complex in East St. Louis. The big, glass front doors are attached now, too, compliments of the recent demolition of the Swedish National Society Building on Kingshighway. The passing street is visible for the first time in decades, and the difference is striking.
Other work’s not as visible, but it’s significant. Rodriguez and his crew busted down into six feet of rock and Missouri clay, digging out the basement and installing new plumbing and sewers. Even as they tried to use recycled and reused products whenever possible, all-new HVAC and electricity came into play. Walls were sturdied and, soon, repurposed floors will go in. Lastly, a bar will be built, again with salvaged materials, including broad, strong planks of lumber that were saved from a demo on South Broadway.
The work’s been happening so much quicker lately. Rodriguez signed on a new general contractor, an eclectic craftsman named Joe Timm, who wears a constant, beatific smile. Timm’s signed on to work at the space after construction’s done, continuing his relationship with a space that he’s built through his own, considerable labors.
From inside 2728 Cherokee, you can really see that the building was once a bar. Rodriguez says that the structure dates back to 1895, when it was home to the St. Louis Brewers’ Association. Across the street was the Cherokee Brewing Company; the stock house of that brewery remains, now home to a small grocery and a landmark wall stencil of Nelson Mandela. He says that Ellis Wainwright, the famed developer and builder of yore, was key in that operation, backed by money from English investors.
“This was an important building,” he says. “Wainwright was a real mover-and-shaker of his day.”
When prohibition came, the building, local brewing industry, and neighborhood had to adapt. He says that a small side building, 2728.5 Cherokee, was added around 1921, constructed atop a small green space. For years, that narrow room held a women’s hosiery store; it will soon be adapted into the brick-oven kitchen of Yaqui’s. An even neater touch will come on the roof of 2728.5.
Rodriguez is building out the second floor of Yaqui’s, creating his future apartment and art studio. Because he’ll be able to literally walk onto the roof of the smaller side building, he’s adapting that into a new, outdoor living space; half will be a wood deck, for human use. The other half will feature shallow-rooted grass, allowing for Rodriguez’s dog to, well, take care of a dog’s life needs.
All the attention to detail’s taken extra time. The Yaqui’s crew has invested in a homemade feel, down to building their own tables.
“There was a bar being built here before I bought it,” Rodriguez says. “And they’d roughed out the second-floor apartment. We took a lot of that out. But we salvaged every stick of lumber, every piece of wood from that project. We didn’t waste a bit of it, taking two days to cut it down carefully and to bend out the nails. I know a lot of people would’ve chucked those things into the dumpster. We were not going to do that. When you do things to last, there’s only one way to do it.”
FIRST CALL
Rodriguez, Timm and Beckie Lewis, the third person the Yaqui’s operation, expect the space to be ready to unveil by late February. When that day comes, they’ll have a full-service, sit-down restaurant with a large, long bar in the main space. In the secondary room, the kitchen will split the area with a no-frills outlet for both take-out and casual sit-down uses.
“We’re really going to focus on the pizzas when we first open,” Rodriguez says. “We’ll make the dough fresh here, daily. And we’ll have a pitmaster and BBQ on the weekends. We’ll open be open during the evenings for the first couple months, until we get our sea legs. Then, we’ll start opening up earlier, if there’s a market for that. We’ll be open on Sundays, all 365 days of the year. It’s a tavern, a public house and people expect you to be open. They don’t care if it snows, that’s your problem.”
What’s interesting is that Yaqui’s’ gestation period came, as noted above, at a time when Cherokee’s nightlife options continued to diversify. Literally two doors down from Yaqui’s, Craft is coming together; it’ll be an art bar, located in a building owned by HandleBar’s Tatyana Telnikova and developed by artist and Ert Night co-founder Jamie D. Jessop. Happening within a few dozen feet of one another, both projects are seeing hammer-and-nail action on a daily basis. And, at some point relatively soon, both will open their doors to what’s becoming a surprisingly populated stretch of bars.
How all will prosper in such proximity is an interesting question for the near future. And it’ll probably take a full year, or two, to see how all the concepts will wind up playing with local bar goers. Timm’s thought is that “rising tides lift all ships.”
Rodriguez is hoping that all the new energy will benefit his own project, just as he’s sinking his own energy into a neighborhood with a long, fascinating history. It’s a history that Rodriguez that viewed and reviewed from many perspectives.
He figures that “as they say in poker, ‘I’m all in.’ I sold my house, sold my sports car, cashed in my pension. I have literally every cent of my money invested in this building.”
