I took a little stroll along Cherokee Street during the annual print sale a couple of weeks ago, and took some photos. I looked at the general area back in January of 2017. I had always wondered what the deal was with this four-family apartment building, and lo and behold, it was the replacement for what had been a very old duplex, owned by Bernard Crickard, constructed when this area was far out in the country.
Architecturally, it looks sort of Greek Revival, but it has the form of a Carpenter Gothic house, which I wrote about at St. Louis Magazine back in December of 2016. And as is common, there is a service out the back. Am I correct to call this a duplex? There are two front doors…
You can see the house below at the bottom of Pictorial St. Louis, published in 1876. It was a lightly settled area of pastures and other light agricultural uses.
Moving along, we see the “regular” houses we would expect in this area on the western end of Cherokee Street, those building constructed as the streetcars made this area easily accessible to the rest of the city in the early Twentieth Century.
I wonder what happened to the pediment below. One of my neighbor’s pediments was blown over by straight line winds a couple of years ago.
Rain and ice love to destroy pediments! They are not protected on any of their sides, so the weather can permeate them and eat away.
I love these houses; they’re so hard to quantify stylistically.
Then of course we reach this beauty, which is such a perfect example of how you can incorporate residential uses with commercial on the first floor, carefully integrating the residential interior of the block with the commercial edge.
