Cherokee Street Directory 2026

4 2026-2027 | CHEROKEE STREET Community Directory Welcome To Cherokee Street! Cherokee Street is a collection of stories woven together across 20 city blocks. The story begins with the river, along which the Mound Builders established a trade network from the Upper Mississippi to the Gulf. French fur traders founded St. Louis in the remnants of that network and began to exchange furs and European goods with Osage, Miami and Cherokee peoples, among many other tribes and nations. Trade transformed St. Louis from a small outpost to a bustling city of over 100,000 residents. Cherokee Street appears on the earliest plat maps, when planners began to connect the city of St. Louis and the village of Carondelet using a street grid. Around the time these visions of a great city took shape on paper, German immigrants established some of St. Louis’ first breweries on Cherokee Street, taking advantage of the mind-boggling network of karst caves which still hold secrets below us today. By the 1890s, St. Louis’s streetcar system was bringing thousands of commuters from across the region to eat and drink, shop and play on Cherokee Street. By the 1930s, restaurants, theaters, a skating rink, and many more businesses had joined the breweries and transformed the prairie into a thriving urban community. As African American families migrated north to cities like St. Louis, the complexion of the neighborhood expanded from one of primarily European immigrants and their descendants to something more reflective of America as a whole. Population decline fueled by racist housing policies, industrial job loss, and a push to the suburbs led to draconian cuts in government, and the last streetcar line was buried with the caves in 1966. Many families remained in the Cherokee area, but city services were failing and vacancies were on the rise. By the late 1980s, Hispanic and Latino immigrants began filling the empty storefronts with new businesses, marking the start of the Cherokee Street renaissance. Many of these businesses continue to thrive 40 years on, and Cherokee Street has become known for