Five Painted Racehorses and a Basement Full of Clowns: The Turf Club at Full Gallop

Push open the door of the Turf Club on University Avenue and the first thing you should do is look up. Above the room, restored to visibility in a 2014 remodel, is a mural of five racehorses that spent decades hidden behind curtains — a literal buried treasure in a St. Paul dance hall. That's the Turf in one image: an unpretentious neighborhood bar with something secretly magnificent going on overhead.

The bones are old. The building ran as a dance hall back in the 1940s and drifted along quietly until the 1990s, when Twin Cities bands adopted it as a clubhouse and it became one of the few beloved rooms that made St. Paul, not Minneapolis, the center of a given night. In late 2013, First Avenue's owners bought the place, and the following year's remodel brought a serious sound system without sanding off the room's lived-in charm. The main floor holds about 350 — big enough to feel like an event, small enough that the band can see your face.

Then there's downstairs. The Clown Lounge, the basement bar beneath the main room, is exactly the dim, low-ceilinged hideaway the name suggests, and it has long hosted jazz gigs and the kind of late-night hang you can't schedule. Few venues in either city offer this two-floor logic — a proper concert upstairs, a murmuring cave below — and fewer still do it with the Green Line stopping right outside on Snelling.

The Turf has earned its scars. The pandemic shuttered it for more than a year, and the building took fire and water damage during the 2020 civil unrest before extensive repairs let it reopen for concerts in July 2021. That it came back at all is a small miracle; that it came back as itself — unglamorous, welcoming, acoustically excellent — is the real one.

The upcoming calendar shows a room doing exactly what it does best: serving the locals. Sunday, Aug. 9 brings Jerry Day, an all-local celebration of the Grateful Dead — the kind of communal, tie-dyed afternoon that a 350-cap room turns into a family reunion. Then on Thursday, Aug. 13, the bill goes dark and loud with American Cream, Good Doom, and Shadow Hex, a triple shot of Twin Cities heaviness. Between the Deadheads and the doom, you have the entire personality of the place: it will book whatever the neighborhood loves this week, and trust the neighborhood to show up.

That trust is the whole point. Under First Avenue's ownership, the Turf has become a keystone of the theory that Twin Cities live music works best when it's locally owned and locally minded — when the people booking the room actually live near it. A national chain would have "optimized" the Clown Lounge out of existence years ago. The Turf kept it, kept the racehorses, kept the scuffed intimacy, and kept booking the bands that make St. Paul worth the trip across the river.

So take the Green Line to Snelling some night. Have a drink under five painted horses that outlasted the curtains meant to hide them. Catch whatever's upstairs, then follow the sound downstairs into the Clown Lounge and stay too late. The Turf Club has survived a name-brand buyout, a pandemic, and a fire — and it's still just a great bar that books great bands. In this business, that's as close to permanence as anyone gets.

Sources: Turf Club (Saint Paul) — Wikipedia); Upcoming Shows — First Avenue