St. Louisans love stories about baseball, beer and Germans. Here’s all three, in part 2 of the Schnaider saga.
Part 1lafayettesquarearchives.com/1881-schnaiders-beer-empire-part-1/ featured Joseph Schnaider and the origins of Schnaider’s Garden in Lafayette Square. In 1887, residents of Benton Place raised the 30-foot limestone wall you see on the 2100 block of Hickory Street. It was a fortification, insulating the prosperous and reclusive above from the hustle and flow of Schnaider’s below. Note the cinderblock-filled doorway in the wall that servants from Benton Place homes used to access the shops along Hickory and Chouteau.
Joseph Schnaider (1832-1881) was a man with beer in his DNA. Born in the Baden area of what is now Germany, young Joseph was already working as a brewers apprentice at the age of 15. He became foreman of a large brewery in Strasburg three years later. Attracted by the published charms of America, and seized by a travel bug, he toured France and then headed across the Atlantic. He somehow wound up in the friendly Germanic confines of St. Louis.
If John Albury Bryan was the father of the restoration of Lafayette Square, it might be fair to ask who the mother was. The answer is most likely Ruth Kamphoefner, and rightly so. However, there were movers before Ruth moved to the Square in 1972. Consider the fascinating lady that lived about 100 feet from Bryan on Benton Place. She died eight weeks before him, and the passing of these two must have resonated in the neighborhood. Let’s take a time trip back and look in on Henrietta “Retta” Strantz Reed.
A 1938 Post-Dispatch obituary noted the death of Christian J. Zeitinger – inventor, promotor and hydraulic engineer. He was 73 years old and died from “the infirmities of age.” It recalled his frequent appearances in bankruptcy court, the result of financial scheming in the development of a gravity flour mill invention.
In 1946, Retta Reed, who lived for years at 35 Benton Place in Lafayette Square, bought and razed the abandoned house across from hers. Curious about 40 Benton Place, I began an expedition backward through the newspapers.
It’s entertaining and ever evolving to put an ear to the discussion about properties in Lafayette Square. Over the past two years, I’ve seen several posts and memos about a classic three story building at 2051 Park Avenue. It’s currently a set of four upscale condominiums, but has a busy back history – residential, educational, and religious.
In January of 1886, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported “crowds of coasters at the northwestern gate of Lafayette Park.” Sledding (aka ‘coasting’) in the 19th Century attracted “long lines of finely-dressed ladies and gentlemen.” They “shot down the steep incline from the flag pole, went whizzing through the big stone gates, across Park Avenue, and down the long hill (Missouri Avenue) to Chouteau Avenue. The neighborhood resounded with the laughter and raillery of the merry crowds.” Good times for a Saturday evening by all accounts.
Hardtack crackers were rumored to be bulletproof. Along with coffee, they’ve long been what an army marched on, and they sat in ones stomach undigested long enough to create a sensation of fullness. Making hardtack was dead simple; it consisting of flour and water, with a bit of salt for interest. It’s still with us today, in a merciful form, as saltine crackers.
What’s in a building? It’s entire history, for one; and in Lafayette Square, that can be considerable.
2001 Park Avenue has been holding down the Northeast corner of Mississippi and Park Avenue for a long time. It appears in the Compton and Dry map of 1876, looking much like itself, but for today’s first floor windows and the long single story extension down Mississippi Avenue:
The St. Louis House at 2345 Lafayette Avenue once boasted a dozen hard maple bowling lanes, and kept them busy for decades. As early as 1930, Obermeyer’s Alleys there made so much noise that German House manager A.G. Barrow decided not to renew their lease, and notified Obermeyer by turning off the lights during play. It was later resolved in the Circuit Court, and bowling resumed.
It was known in the 1950s as Mueller’s Lanes, and business was terrific amid the same postwar fellowship that caused fraternal organizations like the Eagles, Elks and Moose Lodges to thrive.
Bowling became so popular it was televised nationally, and its best practitioners were rewarded like pro baseball players today. In fact, St. Louisan Don Carter was the first athlete ever to sign a $1 million endorsement deal, from Ebonite bowling balls. And did Ebonite know how to promote! Curval grips, indeed…
Soon bowling became freaky styley, and everyone was doing it, from babes in beehives to Give ‘em Hell Harry, with his bowling shirt secured beneath coat, tie and vest. A group of Missouri boosters gifted the White House with two lanes in 1947. Eisenhower (from the opposite party and who famously preferred golf) later turned the space into a mimeograph room.
There’s still a bit of the old spirit around St. Louis today. On the Epiphany Of Our Lord parish web site, the tabs at the top read “Sacraments”, “Parish Life” and “Bowling Alley”. There are upstairs lanes in Maplewood at the Saratoga on Sutton, and downstairs lanes at the Magic Chef Mansion in Compton Heights and Moolah Temple on Lindell Boulevard.
With the rise of television followed by dual income families and finally, the internet and computer gaming, social groups began to fade away. Leagues folded and lanes were torn down for parking lots and condos.
In 2000, a popular book titled “Bowling Alone” was published to explain it all to us, and bowling became the emblem of our failure to connect. It reminded us that we are social animals, and have a tangible need for community. Unsure to what degree we’ve addressed that one, but plead guilty to keeping a neglected Ebonite ball on a shelf in my garage. I belonged to a Tuesday night league during the early 1980’s at Frontier Bowl in O’Fallon, Missouri. It was a hoot.
Incidentally, the Bowling Hall Of Fame and Museum that sat about where Ballpark Village is today, moved in 2009 to Arlington Texas.
It started here in a 50,000 square foot facility, but resides in a less ambitious 16,000 foot space near Globe Life Park, home of the Texas Rangers baseball team. It seems a little forlorn in the boonies between Dallas and Ft Worth, but the 50’s Budweiser team of Carter, Weber, Bluth, Patterson and Hennessey are there in life size cardboard to greet you. In the meantime, we can still claim proximity, at least, to the righteously underrated Horseshoe Pitcher’s Hall of Fame in Wentzville.
Way back in 1902, Columbia and RCA Victor were locked in a struggle to gain recording dominance of opera music. This was the highest prestige market, and recorded works commanded a premium, as the artists were very expensive to sign, and reluctant to put their voices out there for the general masses.
Victor named its offerings Red Seal, and charged twice as much as for other recordings. The product was, perhaps predictably, seldom a best-seller, although Enrico Caruso is credited with history’s first million selling record, again, in 1902. Victor did establish, with Red Seal, a bar for production excellence that lasted for the next century.
