Bardenheier Row is a row of five almost identical working-class city houses built in 1884 as investment property by German immigrant Philip Bardenheier. The homes featured recessed entrances, fully arched doorways, first-floor windows, and originally wooden cornices likely trimmed with machine-milled wood. Their room arrangement offered flexibility, with front hallways that allowed each house to function either as a single-family home or as separate upstairs and downstairs flats or apartments. Philip Bardenheier's own large home stood on Virginia Avenue just south of Meramec Street on the current site of Cleveland High School, and his vineyards stretched west from the house on Virginia to Grand Boulevard. The 1899 Directory shows that his son, Philip Jr., a piano tuner, had moved into his father's property at 2209 Cherokee. In 1919, Bill Temper was born in the westernmost house in the row shortly after his father, uncle, and grandfather had died of the influenza that ravaged Europe and America during World War I. Raised by women, he grew up as his mother took in washing and worked as a pressfeeder at a printing company. In 1924 his family moved from Bardenheier Row, but they remained within a block of Cherokee, where he shopped, played, attended Shepard Elementary School, and after graduating worked as an errand boy earning $7.00 a week. He later summed up his childhood simply: "I was raised on Cherokee."
