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.
Frank Absher of the St. Louis Media History Foundation recently sent me a color postcard from the German House of September 1929. It served as an invitation to the dedication of the huge building that still sits at 2345 Lafayette Avenue. This was its very beginning. KMOX, on the air for four years by then, was on hand to live cast the event.
This essay is about the Treemonisha sculpture, but to get there, let’s journey back 50 years to visit Lafayette Square in March 1971. A quick look around, and we’d understand why properties sold for the cost of their back taxes. The housing stock was dilapidated and no banks would finance the buying of a vacant shell. No realtors listed the properties.
It is true that archivists are a form of non-destructive bookworm. I prefer to think of myself more as an old pioneer panning for gold in the cold stream of time. In that spirit, I submit something I ran across recently; from an 1888 version of the booklet “Police Guide And Directory Of St Louis”. Here, on page 43, a helpful table of petty crime a stranger might wish to avoid in the Lafayette Park neighborhood.
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.
Happy Halloween! This is a particularly weird one in any number of ways, but to keep from trying to list all the forms of dysfunction we’re probably feeling, let’s check in with the celestial and supernatural worlds.
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.
