We’ll set the mood with a little Count Basie. Or Duke Ellington, floating out the front entrance in sultry tones. A summer night. Excitement in the air, sailing down wide steps, past marble columns and over delicate balconies. Chandeliers reflected in an infinite hall of mirrors. Tables surrounded by women in low-cut dresses and men in straight suits, debonair. All gravitating towards a stage at one end, music pulsing through the smoke.
My tour of the old Castle Ballroom might not follow exactly what you’ll get on the tour to be given by Landmarks Association of St. Louis this Saturday, but it wouldn’t be too difficult to let your eyes drift past the corrugated metal sealing up the ground floor storefronts and let the palimpsest of history reveal its layers.
Now on the National Register of Historic Places, the Castle Ballroom is opening its long-vacant—and currently unheated—halls for a chilly tour on January 21. Despite the glaring “Hats Galore and More” sign a later tenant stuck on the Renaissance facade, visitors will find themselves in a ballroom retaining much of its original grandeur—if in a somewhat dilapidated form. The real magic of the place lies in the layer of energy and excitement that drifts through the air, left in the traces of scales and riffs of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Miles Davis, and Eddies Randall’s St. Louis Blue Devils, who gave a young Miles Davis his first audition.
In 1908, Herman Albers and Cornelius Ahern, who were already the owners of other dance halls across the city, purchased the current site from the St. Louis Bible Society. The building opened as the Cave Ballroom later that year, advertising a “Ladies’ Reception Room” and “Continuous Dancing and Elimination Foxtrot Competitions.” (The dresses the ladies wore, with their snug collars and tight bodices, might make this more difficult than one would think.) As ragtime and jazz came into vogue, the hall’s presence on “Piety Hill” caused some consternation; the lead dance instructor cautioned against teaching “any sort of wiggle.”
When Albers and Ahern went bankrupt in 1934, the building was bought by Jesse J. Johnson, and refashioned into the Castle Ballroom jazz club, responding to both changing musical tastes and, more significantly, the building’s presence within Mill Creek Valley, a predominantly African-American neighborhood. It was one of only a handful of jazz halls that served black audiences during segregation.
As preservationist Lynn Josse noted in her nomination, “the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood was demolished almost in its entirety, beginning in 1959, [and] the Castle is one of the few extant buildings with significant associations with that community.” The last dance recorded in the space happened in 1952, but for 30 years, it was a stop-off for some of the most important jazz musicians of the 20th century.
What’s in store for the building now? It’s still for sale (it was put on the market last fall), but the Landmarks Association’s Ryan Reed hopes for a little historical continuity. “It would make a great music venue,” he speculates. “The ballroom and stage are all there.”
So are the ghosts of jazz orchestras past—but in this case, that’s a definite plus.
The Landmarks Association tour of the Castle Ballroom (2839-45 Olive) happens at 1 p.m. on Saturday, January 21. Admission is $10 for members, $15 for non-members; call 314-421-6474 to RSVP. Cost includes hot chocolate and cider, but don’t rely on that to warm you up—Landmarks advises visitors to wear “warm clothes and sturdy shoes.” For more information, visit http://www.landmarks-stl.org/events/tour_of_the_castle_ballroom.
