Photograph from the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection, courtesy of The State Historical Society of Missouri Research Center–St. Louis
Hal Boyle, who worked the night desk for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a young man during the Depression, came back to St. Louis for a visit in 1953 and wrote a piece for the Spokane Daily Chronicle. He recalled how he’d leave the paper at 2 a.m. with an old copyreader “embittered by futility and a battle with his ulcer, and a rewrite man named Johnny, who had a boy’s face, a death-look in his eyes, and an ability to sing ‘Wabash Moon’ in a way you could never forget.” They would head to the riverfront, “hitting joint after joint,” stumbling drunkenly over the cobblestones.
They’d always end the night at Little Bohemia, a bar owned by a young Serbian painter named Savo Radulovic. “You could lean out the back window,” Boyle wrote, “and spit into the beautiful Mississippi.” He remembered the sawdust on the floor, the checkered tablecloths, the candles in wine bottles, the paintings covering holes in the walls. There was nickel beer and a phonograph playing “Dark Eyes” over and over again—and a girl with gray eyes, who lured him out of the bars and into Forest Park for long walks in the dark.
Maybe because drunken poets and even drunker night-desk reporters frequented the place, few people remember Little Bohemia. And there is nothing there to remind anyone that it existed.
Its first incarnation was on the riverfront, part of the 40-block area cleared by 1941 for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, now a sea of grass around the Gateway Arch grounds, a place most locals only visit during Fair St. Louis to watch air shows and drink beer. Oddly enough, one of the last links to Little Bohemia is in Forest Park, where Boyle strolled with his gray-eyed crush. The St. Francis of Assisi statue—the one with the giant hands, located near the Jewel Box—was donated in memory of Harry Turner by his widow, Alice. But no one much remembers who Harry Turner was, either.
“It’s this whole vanished world,” says Bob Moore, historian for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. For the past 12 years, Moore has been documenting the buildings torn down for the monument, and he’ll eventually publish a website seeking to “tell the story of what the site was like.” He says the oft-repeated story about the riverfront formerly being nothing but a collection of dilapidated warehouses isn’t true; it had sponge and pickle factories, a St. Louis Public Schools book depository, a margarine factory, fur warehouses, pharmaceutical companies, a residence hotel catering to secretaries and young lawyers, and houses, too; one woman had lived there for nearly 80 years.
Little Bohemia was located on Commercial Alley, which was Wharf Street on the river-facing side, Moore says. It was right on the river, and the trains ran overhead. On the same block, there was a small grocer, the Blue Lantern Inn (which, according to a 1969 Post-Dispatch article, had blue checkered tablecloths and candles in wine bottles), and the original Old Rock House bar, housed in the oldest building in St. Louis, where people would go to drink and eat and listen to blues music. Norma Piantanida Schoenbeck, whose family ran the Rock House for a decade, has talked to Moore extensively about her childhood there, including the music she heard every night from the patio at the Blue Lantern. “She said, ‘It was ‘Stormy Weather,’ night after night,’” he chuckles.
The block’s bohemian quality took root when Harry Turner, a wealthy country-club regular turned writer turned high-society outcast, moved into No. 16 Commercial Alley with his dancer wife, Alice. The couple published a literary magazine, Much Ado, modeled on turn-of-the-century St. Louis literary magazine Reedy’s Mirror. Turner had scandalized St. Louis society with his frank memoir, Autobiography of a Failure; was jailed for distributing obscene material through the mail; and had difficulty finding an apartment to rent—he was forced to live over a garage at one point. The Turners fled to the riverfront, Moore says, to escape persecution, and they wanted to start an artists’ colony on the banks of the Mississippi River. They rehabbed the third floor of the Commercial Alley building, moving in sometime around 1928. Harry Turner lived there for less than five years; he drowned during a swim in the Mississippi on Christmas Day 1931 (Schoenbeck was one of the last people to see him alive). But the poets and artists he’d befriended or inspired continued to come down to the river.
Photographer Jack Reis moved into the Turners’ former apartment with his wife, Betty. Hiram Perry Walters (who had rechristened himself “Hogarth Riverune”), a minister’s son from Little Rock, Ark., rented 20–22 Commercial Alley and turned it into the Blue Lantern, with its namesake lantern outside the door; he began publishing a literary magazine called Vagaries. In 1934, Radulovic moved into No. 18 with his sister Catherine, opening Little Bohemia downstairs. It initially attracted students, artists, and newspaper people, but soon, expensive cars were parked up and down the block, driven by curious suburbanites who often referred to their visits to Commercial Alley as “slumming.”
“That always offended Norma,” Moore says, noting that there was nothing slummy about the Rock House or the other two bars, though they were definitely not bourgeois. The Rock House was far ahead of its day, serving both black and white patrons when the city was segregated. It also hosted blues composer W.C. Handy, who visited St. Louis to hear the legendary Ann Richardson, known as “Rockhouse Annie.”
The artists and poets who mingled at the bars on Commercial Alley were ahead of their time, but also very much of their time, with a strong sense of social justice galvanized by the Depression. Before his death, Turner would walk down the river to St. Louis’ mile-long Hooverville and bring hungry people home for dinner. Painter Joe Jones, who lived on a houseboat on the Mississippi, gave art lessons to the unemployed inside the Old Courthouse (and outside of it, after those involved got kicked out for painting an incendiary mural). Working-class novelist Jack Conroy—once compared to Maxim Gorky—edited the radical literary magazine The Anvil, which eventually became the Partisan Review. Conroy’s novel A World to Win documents the political unrest in the city during this period, as well as the scene at Commercial Alley. Another member of that circle was one-legged poet Orrick Johns (he got hit by a streetcar in his youth), a peer of T.S. Eliot who later would move to Greenwich Village to head up the Federal Writers’ Project in New York and write a poem called “Blue Under-Shirts,” which would inspire William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow.”
“There was a romantic character to the St. Louis riverfront in those days,” Radulovic told the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1976, after he’d moved to New York and become a painter. “It was a gathering place of the haves and the have-nots, of writers and artists, of musicians and students. There was a feeling of comradeship in those days. We all seemed so close together.”
After Radulovic’s riverfront bar was demolished, he moved Little Bohemia to Franklin Avenue, where Jones had a studio. Eventually, he would cross paths with Jay Landesman of Crystal Palace fame; in the late 1940s, the pair opened the third incarnation of Little Bohemia at 220 S. Fourth, a combination saloon/art gallery inspired by Thomas Hart Benton’s comment that paintings belonged in drinking establishments rather than museums. The public agreed: 600 people showed up for one art opening. It was the first inkling of what would blossom into Gaslight Square. But the jazz clubs, neo-ragtime joints, and black-box theaters would seem tame compared to Commercial Alley.
“That was the unusual character of the 1930s,” says Douglas Wixson, Conroy’s biographer. “The country’s mood changed. It’s consumerism, you know? It’s entertainment districts. It’s about making money. Which is OK—people want, and need, entertainment. But this is not what we are talking about when we talk about Little Bohemia. This was an artistic milieu. These were avant-garde people, doing marginal things. When we look to places like that, they are always ephemeral. They can never last, because they depend on self-sacrificing and dedicated people who truly love the arts.”
Like Radulovic, Johns and Jones moved to New York. Jones supported a family by painting Lucky Strikes ads. Johns edited the radical literary journal New Masses and was attacked by a writer he’d declined to hire for the WPA, who tried to burn him to death by pouring whiskey on him and lighting him on fire. “When I woke up,” Johns wrote, “some of my teeth were scattered on the floor, and blue flames were rising around my face.” Eventually, whiskey would kill him in a less direct way: Alcoholism drove him to suicide in the early 1950s. Conroy moved to Chicago, then eventually back to Moberly, Mo., where he’d grown up in a coal-mining camp. He continued to write until his death in 1990. Only one member of the Little Bohemia circle really went on to huge fame: Tom Williams, later known as “Tennessee,” who dropped his plain St. Louis name, along with his radical St. Louis politics.
