During the Great Depression, with one-third of the American workforce unemployed and bank runs closing banks across St. Louis in January 1933, this house, built in 1887 and divided into three apartments, was home to working-class families facing hard times. Machinist Herman Henning and his wife Margaret, who owned the home, lived on the second floor; shoe worker Frank Zwick, his wife Anna, and their teenaged son rented the first floor; and printer Leroy Wacker and his wife Emma lived on the third floor. The families heated their flats by shoveling coal into stoves and depended on outhouses in the back yard, though the original gas lamps had been supplemented with electric light fixtures. Fewer than half the households in the neighborhood owned radios, and those who did invited friends and neighbors to listen as Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his inaugural address on March 4, 1933, declaring, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," and later explained his plans to restore the American banking system in a fireside chat. The following year, the Hennings carried an $800 mortgage on the house, a great burden for working people at the time.