DeMenil Place During The Gay Nineties

DeMenil Place During The Gay Nineties. Cherokee-Lemp Historic District. , Americans were reading Mark Twain's satire A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court and verses by St. Louisan Eugene Field. Tap dancing Irish-American George M. Cohan was entertaining vaudeville audiences. Americans were singing popular songs like After the Ball is Over and dancing the "Hootchy-Kootchy.", It was the Gay Nineties, and DeMenil Place was known simply as the 3300 block of South Thirteenth Street. When the decade began, members of every household on the block were listed in the St. Louis society's Blue Book. In addition to the Lemp family, their in-laws the Feickert family, and the Alexander DeMenil family, six more families on block were included in this exclusive publication., Among them were the families of Henry Ziegenhein, then City Collector of revenue, the Helmbachers, who owned a forge and rolling mills and the Cramers, who owned an engraving company., Also living in the households, but not included in the Blue Book, were the household servants, cooks, and gardeners, many of them immigrants.