Black Bear Bakery is a worker-run bakery that bakes old world “Lickhalter” breads, using the original recipes of the historic St. Louis Lickhalter Bakery, and more modern whole grain breads, granola, pastries and pizzas.  All baked goods are made from scratch using local, organic ingredients whenever possible.  BBB also sells green, black, and herbal tea and coffee, all of which are fair-trade certified and organic.  BBB operates in both wholesale and retail arenas.  In the future, BBB plans to roll out a full-service café in its current retail location.

 
Black Bear Bakery is an anti-authoritarian, anti-ideological collective.  The project has four 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 and capital-based, hierarchical business.

3. To present participants with opportunities and tools for sustenance and individual growth in a worker controlled and operated bakery.

             4. To organize and embrace anarchic grassroots agitation, information, and                 action.

Black Bear Bakery is a cooperative bakery and hopes to open a successful, community-justice oriented, café.  BBB adheres to principles of ecological sustainability.  The business philosophy is that people are more important than profits, that cooperation is preferable to hierarchy and authority, and that the labor exploitation that is inherent in traditional capitalism can be reversed within a cooperatively run business. BBB aims not just to create a successful, cooperatively run business, but also to have a positive impact for economic justice on the community surrounding Cherokee St. BBB is createing a meaningful alternative to traditional capitalist employment that the staff of BBB finds to be exploitative, unsustainable, and unjust.  Further, BBB will approach the ethnically and economically diverse community of which it is a part in a spirit of confronting and dismantling racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia and xenophobia, among others. BBB will strive in other ways to create meaningful community space, including making the café a very child-friendly environment, encouraging local community organizations to meet there, and by accepting food stamps on all eligible sale items

History

Initiated in 1998, 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. In 1998 the ownership departed and the bakers collectivized the bakery into the City of Little Bread.

 
The City of Little Bread is the original name of The Reign of the Rabble, a 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 and many strikers were revolutionaries seeking to overthrow capitalism. 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. The corporate newspapers declared the “reign of the rabble” and called for National Guard troops to pacify the worker’s idealism. 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 picking up weapons to defend the strike, but the National Guard moved in and, along with the “good citizen’s” militia (ie bankers and owners), 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.

 
Black Bear Bakery is an anarchist collective bakery.  We make decisions together as a group and try to achieve consensus. Not everyone at Black Bear is an anarchist but it is an ethic many of us embrace. We are not afraid of the paradoxes of modern life: we are part of the system we want to move beyond—we are anti-capitalists running a business. Anarchism is a whole life vision that seeks to undermine all sources of imbalanced, repressive power from the state & market econ to racism and sexism through the support of equal mutually respectful relationships and direct lived experience, and community empowerment. If government is top-down control and repression then anarchism is the opposite, process and change. Anarchists have been in the cutting edge of class war and labor struggle such as the 8 hour day, establishing schools that respect children, birth control, free speech, movement against free trade, the environmental and animal rights movement. anarchists have been in the forefront of these movements and in the use of the most creative tactics such as over 180 web-based independent media centers globally (see stlimc.org)., direct action, animal liberations, black blocs, sabotage (eco and work related), food not bombs, and squats. Anarchists are not a united movement, and anarchists are not necessarily in agreement on ideas and actions. For example some anarchists are pacifists and some think that politicians who advocate government sponsored terrorism have outlived themselves. Some vote, and some are against voting. Some are religious and some are atheist. Some are professionals and some are coal miners and some refuse to hold jobs. Leo Tolstoy was a Christian anarchist; Emma Goldman spoke for birth control and free speech (her mugshot portrait is in our café), Ricardo Flores Magon was a Mexican anarchist who declared Land and Liberty during the Mexican Revolution. (You can also see his portrait in our café), Samuel Mbah is a Nigerian anarchist writer. sacco&vanzetti, haymarket martyrs, Today you see a resurgence of interest in anarchism as one of the few ideas today that offers real resistence to power because the left is in a dismal state, advocating war, caving in to free trade and not questioning the mass production system that is threatening the planet.

 
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 outcompeted 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.

 
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:

1. appropriate re-use of a large abandoned building with tall ceilings and wide open spaces

2. modified bitumen rubber roof (tar roofs are an environmental nightmare)

3. Radiant floor heating with a 95% efficient Polaris water heater

4. Radical reuse of materials inside building and dumpsterdiving 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 burned unusable lumber in evening social bonfires and recycled packaging and scrap metal;

5. hired local companies

6. hired local diverse people: black, white, bosnian, latino, queer

7. purchased from local hardware stores (avoided chains) -avoided Home Despot as
much as possible

8. local funding

9. DIY: taught ourselves which is empowering

10. reused furniture

11. 6-8 inches of R30-40 cellulose insulation

12. Double pane historic windows

13. Used VCT tile - rubber tile too expensive; did not use No VOC paints

14. Interactive: bathrooms have chalkboard paint

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

 
Behind the bakery we will construct a garden with fruit trees to grow produce and flowers for the café and install geoblock for several parking spaces. We hope to support the needs of the community through our bakery and encourage healthier eating and thinking. We want to support efforts to keep this community culturally diverse and that means opposing gentrification: developers/aldermen/speculators/property flippers are the invisible hands behind profiteering off our neighborhood leading rising housing prices, rents and property taxes.

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