History and Mission

Black Bear Bakery is a worker-owned and operated bakery that bakes old world “Lickhalter” breads, using the original recipes of the historic St. Louis Lickhalter Bakery. We also produce more modern whole grain breads as well as granola, pastries and pizzas. All baked goods are made from scratch using local, organic ingredients whenever possible. BBB also sells organic green, black, and herbal tea and coffee, all of which are Fair-Trade certified and organic. BBB operates in both wholesale and retail arenas. BBB also operates a café throughout the week with a vegetarian brunch on Saturdays.

Black Bear Bakery is a cooperative bakery and operates a café that grows many of its ingredients during the growing season in the garden behind the bakery. BBB adheres to principles of ecological sustainability. BBB aims not just to create a successful, cooperatively run business, but also to have a positive impact on the community surrounding Cherokee St. Further, BBB will approach the ethnically and economically diverse community of which it is a part in a spirit of addressing racism and sexism. BBB will strive in other ways to create meaningful community space, including making the café a very child-friendly environment and encouraging local community organizations to meet there.

History of Black Bear

Black Bear Bakery is a worker-run collective bakery with deep roots in St. Louis history. Black Bear traces both its recipes and its current bakery space back to 1916. Black Bear Bakery bakes many breads from the original Lickhalter Bakery started by Samuel Lickhalter in 1915 at 1119 Biddle in downtown St. Louis near the St. Louis Post Dispatch. The Lickhalters were a Russian Jewish family that lived above their bakery. They baked the Lickhalter rye breads: a sourdough rye bread with a dense crumb and robust sour flavor. They also made challah, bagels, and a raisin babka, a polish sweet bread. A Globe Democrat article (5/8/77) mentions how Lickhalter bagels are hand made that is is why they often have no center hole. This is true even today of Black Bear bagels using the Lickhalter recipe. In the 50’s and 60’s, the Lickhalter was one of the largest bakeries in St. Louis, serving downtown clientele and many Schnucks stores. In the 70’s the Lickhalter family sold the bakery and it weathered a fire.

The City of Little Bread is the original name of The Reign of the Rabble, an academic thesis on the 1877 St. Louis General Strike in St. Louis during which workers struck to prohibit child labor and to institute the eight-hour day. The general strike of St. Louis grew out of the "great strike", a railroad strike that spread east to west in the US. It was limited to railroads for the most part. In St. Louis it spread to all industries and became the first general strike in the US. At its peak, over forty factories were shut down. Women and African-Americans were involved in the strike and in the marches, rallies and speeches surrounding the strike. After 5 days of the general strike, the strike committee debated defending the strike, but the National Guard moved in put down the strike. During one march of 10,000 people through Carondelet, several strikers placed loaves of bread on poles at the lead of the march; thus the loaf of bread became the symbol of the General Strike. In this vein, the original name of the Black Bear Bakery is City of Little Bread.

City of Little Bread operated in the former Mayer Bakery space at Pestalozzi and Jefferson and became the Black Bear Bakery in 1999. Black Bear Bakery is the synthesis of the old Lickhalter recipes with new organic and whole grain recipes in a cooperative bakery. By 1999, Black Bear was the only bakery hosting two kinds of organic 100% whole grain breads in St. Louis. At this point we expanded our menu to include a wide variety of sweets and pastries.

In 2004, the Black Bear Bakery purchased the Vandora Theater building, vacant since 1998 formerly having a Subway and clothing store. This building was constructed in 1907 and from 1916-9 housed the Vandora Theater, a moving picture company which was out competed by Fred Wehrenberg’s growing theater chain: the Cherokee (seating 89) at 1953 Cherokee in 1906; in 1910 he built the Best Theater (seating 224) at Cherokee and Jefferson.

Green Building and Energy Efficiency

Bakers planned out the re-use of the Vandora Theater building applying sustainable design principles and green building: We rehabbed this building using a grassroots do-it-yourself sustainable design approach hiring people from the local community:

• appropriate re-use of a large vacant building with tall ceilings and wide open space

• modified bitumen rubber roof

• Radiant floor heating system with a 95% efficient Polaris water heater (reduces heating costs theoretically by 45%)

• reuse of materials inside building and collecting from alleys: handrails, moulding/trim, baseboard trim, doors, sinks, toilets, lights, electrical, drywall, lumber, A/C units; All of our bakery equipment is used: Middleby Marshall oven (1948), dough mixers (ranging from 1929 to 1964), refrigerator (1980s), old butcher block tables etc; we also recycled packaging and scrap metal;

• hired local companies

• hired local diverse people: black, white, Bosnian, Latino, queer

• purchased from local hardware stores

• local funding, lenders

• DIY: taught ourselves construction work, which is empowering

• reused furniture

• 6-8 inches of R30-40 cellulose insulation

• Double pane historic windows

• Interactive: bathrooms have chalkboard paint for writing poetry

• Created human spaces in the cafe: grandiose tall spaces and private intimate spaces

Behind the bakery we constructed a garden with fruit trees to grow produce and flowers for the café and installed an open pavement system for six parking spaces. We hope to support the needs of the community through our bakery and encourage healthier eating and thinking.

Black Bear began baking in the Vandora Theater building in 2006. Black Bear Bakery hosts cultural, political and creative activity: music, films, and performance. We have local artists displaying their work, some of which focuses on historic political activists. Many groups use our café space during the day for meetings, presentations and press conferences. In the café we serve soups and sandwiches and breakfast items.

Black Bear Bakery is a collective bakery. The project has several primary goals:

1. To produce healthy, affordable food using ecological methods.
2. To foster consensus-based decision making in a dynamic environment that challenges division-of-labor.
3. To present participants with opportunities and tools for sustenance and individual growth in a worker controlled and operated bakery.

We make decisions together as a group and try to achieve consensus. We are not afraid of the paradoxes of modern life: we are part of the system we want to change. We embrace a whole life vision that supports equal mutually respectful relationships and direct lived experience, and community empowerment. We embrace process and change. Today you see a resurgence of interest in justice and high ideals as some of the few paths today that offer real resistance to injustice--creating local, grassroots, democratic and sustainable neighborhoods.