This is where it gets really interesting, and in my opinion what makes Belleville one of the most fascinating cities in the St. Louis region.

We started walking up North 11th Street back into the neighborhoods which are actually quite close to the location of the now demolished Stag Brewery, where the streets are all numbers and letters.

The houses are simple and consist mostly of two windows in the front and a door, a gable roof parallel to the street with a single dormer in the front and sometimes in the back with a chimney. Sometimes they are in doubles, triplets or even quadruples.

But as we walked down the peaceful streets (it was a little weird, despite it being a beautiful day, we never saw anyone out in their yards), I couldn’t shake a feeling.

I finally realized what it was, I felt like I was walking down a street in a small German town, which I have done more than a few times in my life.

And certainly that is not surprising; these streets were built and inhabited by German immigrants, and the form and style of housing befits people who had traveled thousands of miles and were now building new lives down the street from a brewery where they were now laboring to produce German style lager beer.

These houses probably date from the 1860s or 70s, and represent a moment in time when immigration was filling the very American style named streets–numbers and letters stripped of the vestiges of centuries of history providing a blank canvas ready for new stories to be written.