Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The Concordia Turner Hall on Gravois is still standing (the St. Louis Banjo Club meets there every week), but it's one of the last Turnvereins in St. Louis. At one time, St. Louis had 14 Turner Halls, or German athletic societies (the collective was known as a Turn-Bezirk), and made up a full 10 percent of membership nationally. In the 19th century, Turner Halls gave German immigrants a way to assimilate in a less jarring way, and allowed them to stay fit and healthy in an urban environment that did not always accomodate exercise (hell, we could use some Turner Halls in the present day for that reason). They were also places where people could speak German and keep their cultural traditions alive. As Landmarks Association of St. Louis notes, a day at a Turner Hall might include a little bit of everything: "Military drills, delivering Christmas trees, and training for the Olympics; beer-drenched feasts, riveting socialist debates, and turnfarten ('gymnastic hikes') to Grant's Farm."
Ask anyone over 30 or 40 or so about Turner Halls, and they'll tell you stories about punk shows, wedding receptions, or the fantastic bowling alley in the Hyde Park Turner Hall, which burned down in 2006 (though the site was not cleared until last year). Though nearly every Turner Hall in the city has been torn down, their influence on the city's culture was huge. This Friday, Andrew Wanko of Landmarks Association will give what's described as a "lavishly illustrated talk," on his "monumental work documenting the landscape of the German athletic societies that once dotted St. Louis neighborhoods." It's a free brown lecture (so bring your PBJ), and takes place at Landmarks' office at 911 Washington at noon on Friday, May 25. For more info, email landmark@stlouis.missouri.org or call 314-421-6474. And if you want to do a little bit of light reading about St. Louis Turner Halls in advance of the event, this thread's quite informative and amusing.
