Music fans let out a collective gasp in recent days over new photos that show just how badly the Turf Club was damaged during the May riots in St. Paul. However, the venue's operators see a lot of bright sides as they plan to rebuild one of the Twin Cities' favorite darkly lit concert venues.
A 1940s-era watering hole that's been a staple of the local music scene since the 1990s, the Turf Club was broken into just before midnight and set on fire during the rioting along University Avenue on May 28, three days after George Floyd's death in the hands of Minneapolis police officers.
Fortunately, the fire was contained to the ground-floor bar area and extinguished by the sprinkler system, which had been newly installed in 2013 after First Avenue bought the historic venue.
Unfortunately, because of all the other fires and calamity that night, nobody was able to enter the building until 8 a.m. the following morning to turn off the sprinklers. When they got there, both levels of the club were flooded with standing water, including the beloved basement space the Clown Lounge.
After two months of inspections and demolition — photos show the venue largely stripped to skeletal form — First Ave staff figures the Turf Club's repairs will be as extensive and costly as the roughly $1 million renovations that were done there over several months 2013-2014.
"We're kind of back to where we started," First Ave general manager Nate Kranz said.
After surveying the damage, Turf Club sound engineer Matt Johnson posted, "[It] really took the wind out of me to see the room I use to spend most of my days before the pandemic completely gutted."
More upsides, though: Insurance should cover most of the repair costs. First Ave's extensive policy on the old venue even included a "civil unrest" clause. Also, because those 2013 renovations were so recent, many of the same plans and materials can be reused in 2020.
