Cinderella Ballroom

A two-story corner commercial building of pale brick and terra-cotta on Cherokee Street, in a loose Renaissance manner. Its long Cherokee Street front centers on a monumental round-arched entrance, flanked by shopfronts under awnings and framed by pilasters, garland-and-cartouche friezes, and a bracketed cornice; large windows light the upper story. Behind the ornamental front block, a plainer brick hall — the ballroom and skating rink — extends down the side street. In the 1914 view an electric roof sign spelling DANCING and SKATING crowns the corner, with Dilg's, "furnishers and hatters," in the storefront to the left.

The Cinderella opened in November 1913 as a dance hall and roller-skating rink on Cherokee Street at the corner of Iowa Avenue, designed by the St. Louis architect William Wedemeyer. Its electric roof sign — "Cinderella, Dancing and Skating" — made it a beacon of the busy Cherokee Street commercial strip. The building's career soon turned from dancing to moving pictures. On October 9, 1915, the Freund brothers began showing films here, and the hall was recast as the Cinderella Theater — a neighborhood movie house of some 1,800 seats, run by the Wehrenberg circuit from 1928 and said to have the widest screen, 37 feet, of any neighborhood theater in the state. The Cinderella closed as a movie house on September 27, 1958, its last feature "The Bridge on the River Kwai." The building still stands on Cherokee Street. Its auditorium has since been demolished, but the ornate terra-cotta front survives and has drawn facade-restoration efforts. It should not be confused with the later Cinderella Ballroom of 1926 on the same corner, which became the Casa Loma Ballroom.