Ten minutes south of the Gateway Arch, a six-block stretch of Cherokee Street runs east from Jefferson Avenue to Lemp Avenue under a canopy of shade trees. Locals call it Antique Row. Tall plate-glass display windows, pressed-metal cornices, cast-iron storefronts painted in colors no chain store would ever approve — it looks less like a shopping district than like a shopping district that was left alone long enough to become one.
That is exactly what it is. Cherokee Antique Row is not a re-creation of a Victorian street. It is a Victorian street that never got knocked down, and then spent eighty years finding new reasons to survive.
Before there was a street, there was a cave
The story starts underground. South St. Louis sits on limestone riddled with natural caverns, and beneath the eastern end of Cherokee Street lies one of the largest of them. Long before the neighborhood existed, that cave was already doing industrial work: German immigrant Adam Lemp was aging lager in it before the California gold rush of 1849, using the constant cool temperature as a natural refrigerator decades before mechanical refrigeration.
During the Civil War his son William began relocating the entire brewery to the site to take advantage of those caves. The Lemp complex that resulted — dozens of buildings on a wedge of land bounded by Cherokee Street, Lemp Avenue, and South Broadway — grew into one of the great American breweries of the pre-Prohibition era, and for a time it out-shipped a young competitor named Anheuser-Busch.
The family lived the part. Tunnels connected the Lemp Mansion to the cellars under the brewery, so the Lemps could walk to work underground. In one cavern room they built a small theater. In another, a swimming pool modeled on a Roman bath.
Prohibition ended all of it. The brewery closed, the caves went dark, and the family’s fortunes collapsed in a series of suicides that made the Lemp Mansion one of the most notorious houses in America.
The name
Cherokee Street is one of roughly two dozen east–west streets in South St. Louis named for Native nations and leaders — Osage, Dakota, Winnebago, Chippewa, Keokuk, Osceola. (Confusingly, the north–south cross streets are largely named for states, so Utah Street honors the Ute people while Utah Place honors the state.) There is no evidence of any particular Cherokee settlement here; the names were a nineteenth-century civic gesture, applied wholesale to a grid that was still mostly farmland.
That gesture would come back around in the twenty-first century. More on that below.
The boom: streetcars, brickwork, and bicycles
In 1876, the year of the Little Bighorn, one stretch of Cherokee Street held only about two dozen buildings surrounded by empty lots. Then came the streetcar lines, and within a generation the open country turned into one of the densest neighborhood shopping districts in the city.
The dates are legible in the buildings themselves. A storefront at 1959 Cherokee went up in 1888, when St. Louisans were taking up the brand-new national craze for bicycling. Five narrow red-brick row houses — Bardenheier Row — were built in 1884 by a German liquor-store magnate. In 1893 a forty-five-year-old German immigrant bookbinder named August Hoffman built himself a handsome two-and-a-half-story townhouse at 2215; his son became a jeweler and moved in next door. In 1895 the Lemps built a “Wagon House” on the street to shelter the fleet of delivery wagons and the horses that hauled beer to retailers.
The people were as varied as the storefronts. Charles Kludas rolled cigars by hand at 2111 Cherokee, doing well enough by the end of the 1890s to hire an assistant — and moonlighting as a bail bondsman. A saloonkeeper’s son who grew up above the corner bar became Dr. Emil Burst and set up his practice across the street.
By 1915 the street was a full-service world: jewelers, saloons, theaters, confectioneries, tailors, shoe shops, an ice rink, and six dry-goods stores. Later came Woolworth’s and J.C. Penney. You could live, work, and buy everything you needed within a five-minute walk — the pre-automobile city in miniature.
What makes the district architecturally remarkable is that the craftsmanship was lavished on ordinary commercial buildings. St. Louis’s traditions of fine brickwork and cast-iron fronts turned even the brewery into something closer to building-art than factory: six-story brick grain elevators with rounded walls, brick arches over massive doorways, cornices corbelled out of the flat brick face.
The fall — and the accident that saved it
After the Second World War, the shopping strips and the malls arrived, and old-fashioned streetcar business districts like Cherokee began to empty out.
What refilled it was an accident of health. In 1945 a man named Ambrose Christopher Daues had a heart condition that forced him out of his career, so the family opened Homemaker Antiques on Cherokee Street. His wife Leonora ran the trade. Farmers from across the river in Illinois brought her what they turned up in their fields — arrowheads, ancient farm implements. She sold Indian pottery that ended up in museums and cabinets full of cut glass. In her daughter’s memorable phrase, Leonora “bought and sold Depression Glass before it was called Depression Glass.”
Homemaker Antiques both predicted and triggered the street’s second life. Where one antique dealer can survive, ten can thrive — buyers will drive across a metro area for a district, never for a single shop. Over the following decades dealers filled the empty Victorian storefronts one by one, and Antique Row was born.
Something similar was happening at the east end. In that same year, 1945, an entrepreneur named Lee Hess bought the abandoned Lemp cave, dug a fresh entrance, and built a museum over it at Cherokee and Broadway. His “Cherokee Caves” opened in 1950 with spaghetti-thin stalactites, an underground creek, and the skeletons of prehistoric animals found in the cave — plus, installed inside the museum, the interior of the thousand-year-old “Damascus Palace and Ancient Tile Court” that had been exhibited at the 1904 World’s Fair. For a generation of South Side schoolchildren it was the great local field trip.
The cave attraction is gone now. But Hess had been living in the neighboring Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion, an 1849 house threatened with the wrecking ball, and volunteers organized to save and restore it. It survives today as a museum — arguably the cave’s most durable legacy.
In 1980 the city made the whole area a local historic district. The Cherokee-Lemp district covers eleven blocks and eighty-one structures, most built between the late 1860s and 1915, with unusually few demolitions.
One street, two identities
Cross Jefferson Avenue heading west and the street changes character completely. That end is La Calle Cherokee, officially designated a Hispanic and Latino cultural district in 2017 — home to taquerías, bakeries, murals, a huge annual Cinco de Mayo celebration, and the gloriously anarchic People’s Joy Parade. Cherokee Street as a whole has absorbed wave after wave of newcomers: Germans in the nineteenth century, and today residents with roots in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, China, Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, and Iraq.
The tension between those identities produced the street’s most public argument. In 1985 the local business association commissioned a fiberglass sculpture of a Native American man to serve as a landmark at Cherokee and Jefferson. The artist, Bill Christman, consulted Cherokee community members to avoid caricature, but he later disowned the result on artistic grounds, and in September 2021 the community improvement district voted to remove it. The statue was donated to the National Building Arts Center across the river in Sauget, Illinois.
Merchants at the east end were unhappy about losing their landmark, so they spent two years fundraising for a replacement — and commissioned Eddie Morrison, a Cherokee artist, who carved a Cherokee man, his wife, and their child from quarried limestone. The trio was installed in 2024 on an eight-foot iron pedestal at Cherokee and Missouri Avenue. A foam-and-fiberglass gesture had become stone, made by the people it depicts.
How to read the street today
Antique Row remains what it has been since the 1940s: a loose confederation of independently owned shops, each one somebody’s obsession. Architectural salvage — mantels, doors, wrought iron, hardware. Mid-century furniture and lighting. Vintage clothing from the 1940s through the 1980s. Estate glassware, vinyl, folk art, used books by the tens of thousands. There is a shop devoted to vintage saxophones with its own sax museum, and a typewriter museum and repair shop founded in 2021 by a third-generation typewriter specialist with a collection of more than 150 machines. The merchants’ association still runs its own annual traditions — the Cherokee Caravan in late spring, the Christmas Cookie Spree, gallery-hopping First Thursdays.
Three tips from people who know it:
- Look up. The best material is above eye level: cornices, date stones, and the “ghost signs” — a half-dozen generations of hand-painted advertising layered on top of one another on the side walls of the row buildings.
- Read the windows and fences. Historian NiNi Harris wrote a series of small history markers, the Cherokee-Lemp History Walk, installed on storefronts, façades, and fences up and down the street. They are how you learn about the bookbinder, the cigar roller, and the widow who took in laundry.
- Check hours before you drive. These are small owner-run businesses, not a mall. Many keep short or idiosyncratic hours, and the street has thinned since the pandemic. Weekends are the safest bet.
That last point is the honest one. Antique Row has ridden the roller coaster before — boom before 1915, collapse after 1945, revival in the antiques decades, a hard stretch in the 1990s, another revival, another dip. What has never gone away is the raw material: six blocks of nineteenth-century craftsmanship that were never worth enough to tear down, and are now worth too much to lose.
Fact file
| Where | Cherokee Street, Jefferson Ave. to Lemp Ave., South City, St. Louis, MO 63118 |
| Length | Six blocks; part of the eleven-block Cherokee-Lemp Historic District |
| Built | Mostly late 1860s–1915; 81 contributing structures |
| Protected | City historic district since 1980 |
| Nearby | Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion (1849), Lemp Mansion, Lemp Brewery complex |
| Signature events | Cherokee Caravan (May), First Thursdays, Christmas Cookie Spree (December) |
Sources
- Historical Marker Database — the Cherokee-Lemp History Walk series (markers by NiNi Harris): “The Birth of Antique Row,” “Cherokee Cave,” “The Wagon House,” “The Cigar Store,” “1901 Cherokee,” “1959 Cherokee,” “2215 Cherokee” — hmdb.org
- City of St. Louis, Cultural Resources Office: Cherokee-Lemp Historic District — stlouis-mo.gov
- Wikipedia: Cherokee Street (St. Louis); Lemp Brewery; Lemp Mansion; The TypOsphere StL
- Explore St. Louis: Cherokee Antique Row — explorestlouis.com
- Cherokee Antique Row Merchants Association — cherokeeantiquerow.net
- St. Louis Magazine, “Portrait of a Neighborhood: The People and Places of Cherokee Street”
- Common Reader (Washington University), “If Cherokee Street Could Talk”
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch / STLPR / Fox 2 / Riverfront Times coverage of the 1985 statue’s removal (2021) and Eddie Morrison’s limestone sculpture (2024); Cherokee Phoenix, “St. Louis neighborhood commissions Morrison piece”
- Distilled History, “The State & Indian Streets of South St. Louis”