Five-hundred-fifty boys and girls butted against one another in an 800-capacity room as they waited to perform on April 21, 1901. They turned on parallel bars, lifted dumbbells and made human pyramids. An orchestra played “Stars and Stripes” while girls carrying American flags did calisthenics, the Indianapolis Journal reported.
The South Side Turners, a German-American gymnastics club that followed German educator Friedrich Jahn’s principle of “sound bodies and sound minds,” was holding an exhibition.
Operated by the club, the Southside Turnverein (turn-ver-ine) was one of three schools of physical education in Indianapolis. It was a chapter of the American Turners, which got physical education classes into American public schools, Indiana German Heritage Society co-founder William Selm says.
On March 2, from 3-5 p.m., Indiana Landmarks, a nonprofit that advocates for and helps restore historical structures, will lead a tour of the building. Property owners William Atkins and Betsy Brougher finished a multi-million dollar restoration in November 2018.
“It’s the right size,” Brougher told Indianapolis Business Journal. “I love the location and it’s a historic renovation.”
The 21,000-square-foot, three-story building at 306 E. Prospect St. was designed by Vonnegut and Bohn, featured a low-relief sculpture created by Rudolf Schwarz and, according to Mark Dollase, director of Indiana Landmarks’ central office, is representative of a German style of architecture not seen on the south side.
It was like a YMCA for German-American men, except it had a bar in the basement, masquerade balls and, during the ’20s, it hosted unsanctioned battle royals that pitted four to six boxers against one another at a time. Its events drew hundreds of people and its tandem events with downtown Indianapolis’s Socialer Turnverein drew thousands. It was a hub of the German-American community.
Then, it wasn’t.
By 1977, membership had fallen to 62 people, the Indianapolis News reported. Construction of I-70 and work on U.S. 31 had decimated the club, and it could no longer afford the utilities.
The club sold the Southside Turnverein, and it was turned into the Madison Avenue Athletic Club.
For 40 years, commuters on I-70 watched it decay like a deer carcass on the shoulder.
The bricks crumbled and the roof sagged. The heads fell off Schwarz’s sculpture, leaving rebar jutting out of their necks like zinc-green spinal cords.
Then, as it did to the South Side Turners, declining membership led to the Madison Avenue Athletic Club closing and the owners selling, Selm says.
In November 2018, Atkins and Brougher reopened the building as the headquarters of their insurance company, Point Comfort Underwriters.
Before buying it in 2017, they consulted Dollase. He told them to apply for the Rehabilitation Investment Tax Credit, a federal program for historical structures.
Ratio Architects designed the rehab and pursued the tax credit. If its application is accepted, the building will be added to the National Register of Historic Places.
“I think that building is pretty much a slam dunk,” Dollase says.