News

Keepin' It Real

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One spin of perception's mirror, and the "junk shops" were antique shops. Freshly tuckpointed brick houses separated the storefronts, softening the streetscape. The city threw in money for neat brass doorplates, wrought-iron fences and historical plaques, dignifying the old taverns and rowhouses. Business owners collaborated on a brochure, bragging that this wasn't some Disneyland restoration. Cherokee's Antique Row was the real thing.

As Lower Cherokee morphed into Antique Row, the buildings to the west of Jefferson started to empty. But these were larger commercial buildings, and they were bought up by absentee landlords and developers such as R.L. Jones Properties.

R.L. Jones. In other words, Lloyd and Ramona Jones. The couple who either saved Upper Cherokee or destroyed it.

The Joneses bought up as many buildings as they could, paying as little as $5,000 for some and investing maybe another $1,000 in improvements. Then they put "For Rent" and "For Sale" signs in the windows and waited.

Sometimes they made a killing. Sometimes they got burned.

Along the way, they perfected their pragmatism: Cherokee Street was never going to be West County, was never going to be South Grand. Fill the buildings with tenants who will pay the rent on time. Let the tenants share the burden of capital improvement. Keep your shirt.

Cherokee Street watched the Joneses' signs go up; watched their RLJ Construction trucks trundle down the street, doing maintenance and repair jobs; watched Lloyd and Ramona's interests grow and dominate. Two years ago, the couple still owned 19 storefronts in a three-block stretch. People couldn't criticize -- this was capitalist America, and the Joneses were shrewd commercial developers, trying to shore up the street and pull some profit from the chaos of poverty. They were risking their own money at a time when the city's old commercial districts were losing to suburban malls. And it wasn't easy to find independent business owners willing to run the gantlet of city restrictions, lead paint, higher crime and insufficient parking.

The Joneses dealt fairly with tenants who knew the game and paid the rent. In return, they expected loyalty. They blustered their agenda at the Cherokee Business Association meetings -- green-eyed Lloyd venting his hot temper and Ramona, 10 years younger and charming, nudging him to calm down. Maybe she thought no one would realize what everybody on the street already whispered, that she was the real force to reckon with. In any event, they steered all the important committees, and when the other members resisted their plans, they hired Gary Feder, the lawyer who'd been working for the Cherokee Business Association, to represent their own interests at City Hall.

Then they went home to their South County ranch house -- their pool and two fireplaces, their sailboats, their time-share condo in Colorado.

For Cherokee's immigrants and fledgling entrepreneurs, such disinterested property management was disheartening. But for Lloyd and Ramona, it was business as usual. They've bought properties in Pine Lawn, on North Broadway and West Florissant, in Crystal City and in East St. Louis and Godfrey, Ill. They know how to let a desperate city court their investments, offering them dowries of façade-improvement money and tax abatement.

What they don't know how to do is convince the people on Cherokee to stop dreaming, that this is the best it's gonna get.

Cherokee's entrepreneurs are struggling with a business plan for the district that hasn't been revised since 1980. In today's urban landscape, drained dry by suburban malls, the plan's retail-only restrictions are ludicrous, and so is the ban on liquor. The only places allowed to sell alcohol are the grandfathered Globe Drug and the St. Louis Casa Loma Ballroom; smaller business owners' proposals for dinner restaurants and nightclubs continue to bounce off brick walls. Yet when the Joneses tried to rewrite that 1980 plan, their immediate goal was to push the Human Development Corp. -- a social-service agency that, by plan, should have been restricted to a second floor -- into a first-floor storefront. Countering the Joneses' self-interest with their own, shop owners dug in their heels: Poor people looking for help just wasn't the kind of pedestrian traffic their businesses needed.

After the HDC effort failed, the Joneses filed suit against the city of St. Louis for a similar rule change: They wanted one of their tenants, Grace Hill Neighborhood Services, to be able to expand their clinic (which had already sneaked into a first-floor space) by wrapping around the corner at the entrance to Antique Row. The antique sellers rose up in arms: They'd fought too hard to stabilize their half of Cherokee to let one landlord's business interests destroy it.

The suit's still pending, but Antique Row stands united -- and the Upper Cherokee business district stands in shreds. There's one alderman for the north side of the street and another for the south side, both about to change with redistricting; there's a district manager at the St. Louis Development Corp. who used to focus only on Cherokee Street but whose responsibilities elsewhere have quadrupled; there's a quagmire of regulations. Only metered street parking is available, so a potential investor can't tour the street without returning to find a ticket under his wiper blade. Real power rests with the two lord-of-the-manor families, the Joneses and the Cohens, and though neither will comment about their plans, they feud like the Hatfields and McCoys.

The Joneses control the Cherokee Business Association. Sandy Cohen, owner of the two Globe Drug stores, sends one of his managers to the meetings but removes himself from all public debate. It's the Cohen family that owns the street's prize white elephant, the old Woolworth's building, and they've run through at least four real-estate agents trying to sell it. Pat Brannon, president of the Cherokee Business Association, says the Joneses wanted to buy it but that the feud held strong.

With his curly blond hair and thin, mobile features, Brannon looks like a freshly showered Gene Wilder. There's a funny, sensitive niceness about him; he really seems to care about three generations' dancing together at the Casa Loma, the new African-American businesses, the Hispanic festival. He dreams of a shuttle that would run all the way up Cherokee to Grand, an international bazaar that would bring the old Woolworth's back to life. People like Pat Brannon when he's not with the Joneses.

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