Vollberg Building - St. Louis, MO
Posted by: 
YoSam.
N 38° 35.607 W 090° 13.539
15S E 741625 N 4275313
Local building in Cherokee Station Business Area of Benton Park. Building built as a Victorian Building in 1883; new business in 1949 removed all Victorian exterior signs and re-modeled it to Art Moderne as was the current fashion.
Waymark Code: WM129CM
Location: Missouri, United States
Date Posted: 04/05/2020
Views: 2
County of marker: St. Louis Independent City (no county)
Location of marker: 3359 S. Jefferson Ave., St. Louis
Marker erected by: Cherokee Station Business Association
Marker text:
3359 SOUTH JEFFERSON AVENUE
VOLLBERG BUILDING
Robert Vollberg bought this property fronting Jefferson Avenue, measuring 43 feet wide by 100 feet deep, from his mother during the summer of 1883. A month after the purchase, he applied for and received a building permit to construct a two-story store. Historically, the building had a Mansard roof with a wood cornice creating a third story behind the steep roof line. After Vollberg's death in 1902, the building continued to operate as a pharmacy for several years.
Rev. Frederick Niedner, a cousin of Vollberg's who was raised in this building, remodeled the façade in 1949. Any superfluous ornamentation was disregarded and the dense brick and ceramic tile utilized for the remodel created an austere appearance. Following World War II, St. Louis' many commercial neighborhoods began losing customers to shopping centers being developed on the city's periphery. To compete with the modernistic strip development, business owners removed Victorian embellishments and utilized modern building materials to create a simplistic geometric form. These elements applied to aging commercial buildings create a vernacular interpretation of the international and Art Moderne style used by strip malls during the mid twentieth century.