This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Aug. 2, 2012 - For the past few weeks, I’ve revisited landmark clubs that were alive and thriving a decade, or more, back. Our twist last week was to also wander contemporary Washington Avenue, as it kicked into high gear on a Friday night. It was an interesting experience, to say the least, as a whole new crop of clubs have emerged, reflecting the new, very young, party-hearty vibe of the block.
On Cherokee Street, another new St. Louis scene has also been emerging over the past decade, with a once-fading neighborhood turning into a blend of first-wave Hispanic eateries and groceries, sitting alongside an artistic mix of letterpress shops, galleries and record stores.
To this point, the growth could well be called organic, with a handful of area-dominant developers holding most of the key real estate along the commercial strip, none of them yet flipping their spaces into the hands of national chains. In some respects, that will be the interesting next step in the evolution of the block; it’s gonna happen eventually and the reaction on such a free-spirited block will be intriguing.
For the time being, the area’s being resettled by young business owners who often live on, or near, the very block they’re turning around; most of the rest spend their nights just a few minutes away in nearby South City enclaves. And just as they’ve brought some daytime vitality to the block, there’s been a steady move to bring activity to the night hours, with venues like Foam, El Lenador and the thriving 2720 complementing the longtime, hulking neighborhood anchor, the Casa Loma Ballroom.
Recently, there’s been a buzz of activity at 2635 Cherokee, the onetime and future home to the Fortune Teller Bar. The current version’s brought together a trio of highly connected South Side residents and scene-makers, all of whom are tied into the bar, film, music and cultural scenes of St. Louis.
Kristin Dennis is the newest to the partnership, joining only two weeks back; she’s a songwriter and vocalist in the band Nee and co-owns the nearby Native Sound recording studio.
Matt Thenhaus, part of large, well-known South Side family, has been a fixture in local nightlife and rock’n’roll circles as a bartender at places such as the Schlafly Tap Room and Blueberry Hill, where he currently works.
Already using the long, narrow shotgun space has been Sam Coffey, a past bartender at Schafly, but now a principal in First Punch Film Production, just across the street from the Fortune Teller.
For the past three years, Coffey’s woodworking shop was inside the slim room. As business at First Punch began to take off, he decided he “didn’t need a swing a hammer anymore,” and his custom remodeling business tapered to a minimum. But there was the matter of all his stuff: stacks of wood, saws of all sorts, the general equipment of the carpentry trade.
By this Tuesday, the same day the trio of new business partners went to the excise commissioner’s office to apply for a liquor license, the Fortune Teller looked very different. It had been thoroughly cleared, with the skeletons of walls growing from newly poured concrete flooring.
The space, a Mexican bootery for the better part of the 2000s, has slowly been reshaping itself into a bar, with the same name it enjoyed in decades prior.
Coffey says, “We went into it with no money. We didn’t want to take out loans. … We wanted to work with Cherokee to build it, with the people and things we have available.”
“We always wanted this to be a place to be a neighborhood place,” Thenhaus says. “A space where the hardworking people of the neighborhood come to relax, alongside their colleagues from the block who are busting their ass just as hard as they are.”
A sign provides a sign
Coffey knew Thenhaus was looking around for a bar in the neighborhood, while Dennis had eyeballed another former bar down the block. With Coffey taking on another major project with three partners in First Punch, he wasn’t necessarily in a rush to get the Fortune Teller up and running. But a convergence of events caused the business to move from planning to active construction.
The first sign that something needed to happen came a bit back, when Coffey, three months into his new rental carpentry workshop, began to tear away some plywood on the front of his building.
“The first piece that came off revealed this weird kind of globe,” he remembers. “With the second I saw the word ‘Fortune.’ The third piece hid ‘Teller Bar.’”
Sure enough, the venue’s recent past was now back in public view. Before the Cherokee Bootery called the space home, the Fortune Teller had a long run as a family-owned business that was, yes, a tavern where fortunes were told. Owing to a change in city laws, which outlawed many of the supernatural arts, it was more of a word-of-mouth fortune-telling place, though owner Kathy Rethemeyer was happy to read palms for regulars, those in the know.
No offense, but many of the naive children who call Cherokee home today, thinking that they’re resettling and saving a wild and lawless place, have a very short of sense of history.
Deep into the 1970s, Cherokee Street, on both sides of Jefferson, was a thriving business district, with all the amenities of a working-class commercial hub. True, by the 1980s, the area had become enveloped in a freefall, with many storefronts going vacant. By the 1990s, the street east of Jefferson was still vital, with a host of antique businesses, but the western side had truly fallen, with much of the retail base gone. And only a few of the many bars that once served the block survived: gritty, no-nonsense places like Somer’s, Little Gam’s and, yes, the Fortune Teller.
By the late ‘90s, some friends and I found the space and planted a flag there. Many nights were spent in the dim hall, getting our fortunes told and drinking dollar beers. We played the jukebox ‘til close and threw quarters into the house’s claw machine, only occasionally winning a toy.
There was a sense of adventure in going to the Teller, as the place was sometimes open, but locked up. For instance, when a crime was committed on the block, the bartenders responded by simply locking the door. If you were cool with the house, you could come in; if you were unknown, you had to keep marching to get your drink. On more than a few nights, the place went dark when we left, well before last call.
There was next-to-nothing left of the bar, itself, as an auction took all the Fortune Teller’s in-house treasures. Photos are even hard to come by, though I found two in a box from my basement. In one, no doubt taken by longtime RFT photographer Jennifer Silverberg, my friend Kurt and I seem transfixed by the claw; in the other, I wear a beret, an Applebee’s worker shirt and a giant tie.
Photographic evidence, my gosh, of pre-hipsters found in the wild, circa 1992.
Cherokee's new day
On Monday evening, much of the action on the Cherokee strip was found on the borderline at Foam, a daytime coffeehouse that’s transitioned in a nighttime-only music venue and neighborhood hangout. The room was bustling.
While the workers might’ve edged up-to-and-past 30, the attendees were solidly in their early-to-mid-20s, the kind of sign civics-watchers enjoy. The conversations were excited, and laptops were cracked open throughout the room. The RCGA should take and widely distribute photos of rooms like Foam on nights like this.
The street itself was relatively mellow, but signs of life abounded in small ways. A skateboarder rolled by. A resident sat in a second-floor window, arms and legs hanging out on a (relatively) cool evening. Artist David Burnett, a fixture on the block, walked his dog, Yoda. In fact, he was inside the Fortune Teller space when I arrived, checking in for kicks and enjoying a free beer.
By the end of the October, the new owners hope, the beer won’t be free. They’ll be open and a complement, not a competitor, to those places already calling the street home.
“It’s only 800 square feet,” Thenhaus notes. “It wouldn’t be right, asking local musicians to play in a space that small. We want people to come here for a drink after dinner, or before they go to a show at El Lenador or Foam or 2720. We want to be the booze headquarters.”
In the meantime, a crew will build out the systems and the ownership trio will flesh out the rest. Paperwork of all sorts will continue to be generated and signed and made official.
“We’ll keep doing as much of the physical labor, as possible, to keep the costs down,” Coffey says.
And, closing to opening, they’ll apply their social muscle. That they have in good supply, already. So much so that it’s hard to imagine the new Fortune Teller not being a hit.
Even an old fogey, pining for the good old days, can see (and enjoy) that.