At the dawn of the 20th century, as Europe was ruled by kings, an emperor, a tsar, and a kaiser, and William McKinley was President of the United States, St. Louis had grown past half a million people with new emigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. In South St. Louis, Joseph Schilly began the century as a clothing merchant boarding with a family on South Broadway, and within six years he was married, had three children, and was building 2125 Cherokee for his own men's clothing store with his family home on the second floor at an estimated cost of $4,500. By 1920, after the Bolshevik revolution, the defeat of Germany, the dismantling of the Austrian Empire, the reestablishment of Poland, the creation of the Czecho-Slovak state, and the arrival of Prohibition in the United States, St. Louis was planning to widen downtown streets and pave neighborhood streets, while Schilly and his family were thriving at the corner of Cherokee and Missouri, raising seven children, including a new baby, above his men's furnishings store. He was still running the store in 1926, when the St. Louis Cardinals defeated the New York Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series for their first World Championship, and he was still managing it when Bela Lugosi was starring in the movie, "Dracula."
