Illustration by Britt Spencer
The answer depends on what you mean by the word “you.” If you’re asking whether I can gain access to the cave, of course I can. The illustrious St. Louis Sage works in mysterious ways and passes where he pleases. But if you intended instead to inquire as to whether a member of the general public may enter the cave, probably not.
Cherokee Cave hasn’t been open to the public since 1961, when it was closed to make way for Interstate 55 construction. Once, several entrances were scattered throughout the neighborhood, but over the years they’ve all been sealed off. All, that is, save one. Contrary to the popular myth, the Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion holds no secret cave entrance, but it is still possible to enter through the Lemp Brewery. It’s just that the brewery’s current owner, Shashi Palamand, is not keen on letting people in. Occasionally he’s made exceptions for accomplished spelunkers or personal friends. “Anyone who goes down there will be doing so either as an invited trespasser or an uninvited trespasser,” says architectural historian Michael Allen, who recently taught a class about the cave with South City renaissance man Sam Coffey.
Should you find the brewery’s basement closed to you, allow me to suggest an alternative: Build a time machine. In it, you could travel to the 19th century, when breweries used the cave as cool storage for barrels of their beer. Visit in the 1880s, and you could catch a vaudeville drama in the underground theater that the Lemps built beneath their mansion. Or take a dip in the Lemps’ heated underground swimming pool, reminiscent of a Roman bath. “It looks very ruinous today, but back in the day it would have looked regal,” Allen says.
After Prohibition, the Great Depression, and a rash of suicides ruined the Lemps, an entrepreneurial huckster named Lee Hess turned the cave into a tourist attraction. A time traveler visiting in 1950 would see underground exhibits highlighting the cave’s geology, including a large dripstone known as the Black Dahlia. Another display educated visitors on peccaries, colloquially known as skunk pigs, whose bones Hess found in the cave. There was even a Damascus Palace, replete with gold ornamentation, that had been displayed at the 1904 World’s Fair.
Those without a time machine are left to wonder about the wonders below. If you’d like to see the cave reopened to the public, well, the time machine might be a better bet. “Nobody in those days would have inspected the caves for ventilation or egress or accessibility,” Allen says. “Today, that operation could not be legal.”
