Bardenheier Row

Bardenheier Row. Cherokee-Lemp Historic District. This row of five almost identical homes was built in 1884 as investment property by German immigrant Philip Bardenheier. These working-class city houses featured recessed entrances, fully arched doorways and first floor windows. Originally, all five homes featured wooden cornices, likely trimmed with machine-milled wood. The room arrangement of the homes offers great flexibility. The front hallway allows for each house to serve as a single family home, or be used as distinct upstairs and downstairs flats or apartments., Philip Bardenheier's own large home faced Virginia Avenue, just south of Meramec Street on the current site of Cleveland High School. The vineyards of the liquor entrepreneur stretched from the house on Virginia west to Grand Boulevard. The 1899 Directory shows that Bardenheier's son, Philip Jr. who was a piano tuner by trade, had moved into his father's property at 2209 Cherokee., In 1919, Bill Temper was born in the westernmost house in the Bardenheier Row. Shortly before his birth, Bill's father, uncle and grandfather had all died of the influenza that ravaged Europe and America during World War I. As a result, Bill was "raised by women," and his mother took in washing and went to work as a pressfeeder at a printing company. In 1924 Bill Temper's family moved from Bardenheier Row. But the Tempers always lived within a block of Cherokee, and shopped and played on the Street. Bill attended Shepard Elementary School also half a block from Cherokee Street. After graduating from Shepard, he went to work as an errand boy, earning $7.00 a week. Bill Temper proudly concluded the story of his childhood saying, "I was raised on Cherokee."