On Christmas Day 1898, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat announced the arrival of our “first ice palace”—St. Louis’ first indoor ice rink, near what’s now the Grand Center—boasting “a frozen surface that neither the weather prophet, the moth, the rust, or the thaw can corrupt. The ice is there, and it remains there, though blizzards blow or precocious lengthening days bring added solstice heat.”
The opening ceremonies were fairly modest: a race between Swedish skating champion John Sandblom and American skater Ed Woods, plus a demonstration of superfast backward skating by St. Louis Browns second baseman Jack Crooks, along with E.C. Gilmore, “the boy wonder of Minneapolis.”
It was not, however, a modest venue. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch described it as “the most completely equipped edifice of the kind in the country,” with the “comforts of a first-class club with the most perfect skating surface obtainable by either natural or artificial means.” Manager Frank Manning invited all of St. Louis to try out the rink but also stated a plan to invite “all the champion, speed, and fancy figure skating artists of the world” to come cut a figure eight on the ice. And they did. London’s Glaciarium, the world’s first artificial rink, had been around for more than 20 years, but indoor rinks were still rare—and St. Louis now boasted one that sprawled 20,000 square feet, with a balcony-wrapped rink where observers could watch dashing curlers chase a puck or see their fellow citizens flailing their arms and falling on their butts.
For a few glorious years, St. Louisans gathered at the Ice Palace to watch amateur hockey games, races, and trick and fancy skaters. Perhaps most of all, St. Louisans loved getting on the ice themselves. Socialites organized costume balls on skates. Amateur speed skaters competed there, whizzing around the rink’s periphery. And then there were those who just wanted to noodle around during an open skate.
Alas, The Ice Palace was just as fragile and fleeting as real ice. By 1903, it had been handed over to boxing promoter Charles “Hardluck” Haughton, who moved his club there. It was briefly the Auditorium Ice Rink but was eclipsed by a place often credited for being St. Louis’ first indoor ice rink: the Winter Garden, at DeBaliviere and Kingsbury, built during the World’s Fair. In 1963, the Palace was torn down to make way for a mall. Fortunately, Steinberg Skating Rink had opened a few years prior. Not only was that rink bigger—the biggest in the Midwest!—but it also reminded us that as literally and metaphorically cool as an indoor rink might be, nothing compares to ice in its natural habitat.
The Other Ice Palace
In 1891, The Ice Palace restaurant and beer hall, at Third and Market, became the first public establishment to use air-conditioning. An ad in the Globe-Democrat touted it as “the only place in the world where summer is turned into winter for 30 minutes by the artificial process.” You’d think a joint like that would catch on, especially during a St. Louis summer. But a few years later, it was under new management as the Ice Palace Saloon. In 1898, the Post recounted “a small riot in the notorious Ice Palace” that began with a pistol-heavy bar fight that led to a police raid. the establishment seemed to disappear from newspaper accounts around the time that the Ice Palace rink opened.
