***  Pay no attention to this ****

About 1950 the bar changed hands again, and a new name emerged—the Turf Club, a name thought to derive from the stables, racetrack, and clubhouse built nearby in 1881 by Norman Kittson, merchant and one-time mayor of Saint Paul. “Kittsondale,” as this racing empire was called, was demolished in 1942. The bar was a community meeting place during the 1950s, with a meeting room called “The Lion’s Den” reserved for meetings of the Midway Lion’s Club.

According to the website tcmusic.net, the Turf Club had a “reputation as the Twin Cities’ foremost place for country two-stepping long before line dancing became a pop-culture phenomenon.” It’s known today as the “best remnant of the 1940s,” and one of the Twin Cities’ most popular venues for live music.

An early and enduring feature was the Clown Lounge basement bar.

In late 2013 First Avenue purchased the Turf Club. On its web site it says, “Opening in the ’40s as a two-steppin’ country bar, mellowing a bit through the folk artsy ’60s, morphing with the dance wave of the ’70s, then embracing the grunge of the ’80s, the club is like a treatise on Minnesota music. And this brings us to the other part of the club’s success: its consistent dedication to local and independent music, something this town of ten thousand musicians definitely recognizes and even appreciates enough to maintain loyalty in the face of an adverse location. So much so that the adversity becomes even more reason to frequent the damn place.”

An updated Turf Club opened on August 28, 2014, after three months of remodeling.

**Note that there was another Turf Club in Minneapolis.