St. Louis Roots: Andy Cohen
This Friday, May 5th 2023, St. Louis native Andy Cohen will get a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame:
The late-night TV talk show host and executive producer will be inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame at 5 p.m. Friday, May 5. A live ragtime band will begin performing at 4:30 p.m.
KSDK
The ceremony is free to the public and will take place in front of the Moonrise Hotel at 6177 Delmar in The Loop.
Cohen was born and raised in St. Louis and graduated from Clayton High School in 1986. He is best known as the host and executive producer of Bravo TV’s “Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen.” He was also an executive producer for “The Real Housewives” franchise and hosted numerous specials.
Cohen’s roots in St. Louis go back a very long time, as detailed in January 2021 on PBS’ program Finding Your Roots (Against all Odds, S7E2). NPR’s Nina Totenburg was the other guest.
If you missed this episode, or want to watch it again, it will be shown again tonight on Finding Your Roots, 9.1 7pm CST in St. Louis.
In the above clip Cohen reads about a paternal great great grandfather, Russian peddler Simon Kruvant, injured in a horse/carriage accident in 1889 at South Broadway & Koeln Avenue. We also learned Kruvant and his wife lived at 1122 N. 7th Street.
Given that Kruvant was a peddler a commercial space with room for goods, cart, and horse makes sense. This wasn’t in the Post-Dispatch archives so it must’ve been another newspaper.
To see this map page in detail click here.
This area was known as Near North for a long time, but officially it is part of Columbus Square. Before Neighborhoods Gardens and Cochran Gardens were built the neighborhood contained the highest concentration of tenements in the city.
This neighborhood welcomed the poorest immigrants, including: Irish, Jewish, Italian, and blacks escaping the Jim Crow south.
See Andy Cohen tonight on Finding Your Roots and receiving his star Friday in front of the Moonrise Hotel.
— Steve
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St. Louis urban planning, policy, and politics @ UrbanReviewSTL since October 31, 2004. For additional content please consider following on Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and/or Twitter.