Across the river and into the roadhouses:
our quarterly history feature

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According to the recollections of some old-timers — and some not-so-old-timers, too — the land just beyond the river from the Twin Cities was once upon a time a wild, woolly, and (occasionally) wicked territory.

These transfluvial bad lands of Dakota, Scott, and Carver counties were known, in the parlance of the day, as “roadhouses.” In other words, they were bars and dancing / gambling halls on the road to somewhere — the road, preferably, leading away from the cities, which is to say civilization and its discontents. A road not speeding along so fast, like modern freeways, that you couldn’t stop and set a spell, down a cold one, hold up a one-armed bandit, and shake a leg with a pretty girl.

A few of these roadhouses were

• The Valley Ballroom, on old Highway 41, in Chaska

• The River Road Club, under the Mendota Bridge in Mendota, on what’s now Picnic Island, Ft. Snelling State Park

• The Meadow Inn, also known as Callan’s Meadow Inn, at Cedar Avenue and what’s now Blackdog Road, on the river just below the ghost town of Nicols and also in what's now Ft. Snelling State Park

• The Black Cat Club, on Old Cedar Avenue and Old Shakopee Road

The enticing danger of these roadhouses owed both to their function and their location on the river’s flood plain. The River Road Club and the Valley Ballroom both went under more than a few times, and not just in the giant flood of 1965, before they went under for the last time and gave up the ghost. Some of these District roadhouses were river houses, too, built perilously close to the edge, where the action was, the way the people liked it.

Occasionally the river claimed revelers’ lives, as in one gruesome incident from 1955, when a half dozen young female nurses drove out of the parking lot at the River Club and straight into the river. Five of the six perished.

More often, the river simply wagged an admonitory finger at those who were moving so fast they thought they could keep up with it — like the refugees who walked across a railroad bridge to the River Road Club, a convenient shortcut, and had to jump in the drink when a train approached. (This story, like other information here, has been furnished by Mark Cleveland of the Ft. Snelling State Park staff, who learned it from park visitors.)

Luckier revelers drank and danced, and, yes, gambled, but didn’t overdo themselves. At the Valley Ballroom, they could play the machines in the basement bar and see such acts in the ‘30s and ‘40s as the early Lawrence Welk and his big band, Whoopee John and the Six Fat Dutchmen, and "Turk" Ramsey's Pepper Shakers. At the River Road Club, in the '40s, you could hear the likes of Frank Coli and his Rhythm Four and, in the ‘50s, Andy Garcia, granddaddy of Twin Cities’ rock ‘n’ roll, and his various sidemen.

Most guests were probably well enough behaved. According to the witness of Marjorie Hanson, a Chaska resident and frequent guest at the Valley Ballroom, for example, “Casimir [Luby] and Hildred Lubansky, the ballroom owners, had good discipline there; they didn’t allow any ruffians or rowdy-dowdies, or any acting up.”

Yet there were slot machines in the basement bar for a while — at a time when Scott County was a law unto itself and the crusading Gov. Youngquist hadn’t yet come into power. The ballroom served so many roles — watering hole, wooing post, stomping grounds, and a venue, down by the river, where parades and ball games ended up in the adjacent fields — that it must inevitably have mixed sundry elements.

According to Jerry Lubansky, Casimir and Hildred's son, people came from all around to get in on the action. As a kid, Jerry would travel to nearby towns and put up posters of the bands who’d be appearing on the weekends, whether they’d be playing the new “modern music” or “old time.” Then the folks would come in droves. (The farmers didn't drive in till late, when they got through milking and changing overalls, Lubansky says — which is why the dances didn’t start till 9 pm.)

How many Hardy Boys of the day (and hardy enough girls, too) got in their roadsters and sped off for a wild time at the Valley Ballroom, the River Road Club, or the Black Cat? These chums were not always as clean-cut as Franklin Dixon’s Frank and Joe Hardy.

The River Road Club, according to old newspaper accounts, seems to have had a history of on-again, off-again trouble with the law. Once known as the Monkey Farm (your guess is as good as ours, or as discreet), the club was known for its "heady" music and its pick-up atmosphere. (At one point, in 1960, the club enacted a couples-only policy to prevent "stags" from patronizing the place to hunt women.)

At the Black Cat Club, once on Old Cedar Avenue in Bloomington, some guests arrived by plane, landing in a field among the farms. These fliers and other visitors could stop off at the bar to quench their thirst with 3.2 beer (or, under the table, something stronger) and, up on the second floor, it was said, with something softer and more feminine. According to the Bloomington Sun, a discreet history of the era notes that “Stories of [the Black Cat’s] parties and girls are prevalent among the nostalgia set.”

Begging the question of just how respectable an individual roadhouse was, on the river’s edge there’s always fascination. For it’s a place of boundaries, of shifting shapes, of moving and sometimes troubling possibilities. As Melville said, we’re mesmerized by water. And as Twain famously pronounced, a Midwesterner like us, the river can carry Huck and Jim, and the rest of us with them, away from pain and duty, which we tend to identify with the city, and enable us to light out for the Territory.

In the real world, some saloon keepers tried to have it both ways, operating on the safety of the land and presuming on the profits of the river. The Dakota county newspapers of the 1940s, for example, are full of stories of police and anti-saloon forces raiding bars in Mendota just up the cliff from the river. In one well publicized effort in 1941, an anti-saloon Methodist minister, in the company of a deputy sheriff, raided four bars with illegal slot machines. For his pains he was popped in the jaw and stomped pretty good by one of the unappreciative proprietors and his cronies. (A year later, in jail for perjury, the minister sued the proprietor for damages, charging he’d been “bruised and stunned in bone and muscles and ligament about his face, limbs, and body … and [made] to suffer great shame and humiliation before various and sundry persons.…”)

The moral of the story, we guess, is keep your gambling and drinking and dancing legal; and don’t stick your long nose in other people’s business.

As floodplain and riverflat types ourselves, we think this makes an awful lot of sense.

As for the roadhouses, alas, they have succumbed to progress and our need to get as fast as possible from one busy place to another. They went under, one by one, as follows:

• The Valley Ballroom, founded in 1933, was razed in 1959 to allow for the building of the Highway 41 bridge over the river.

• The River Road Club disappeared after 1965 when the state acquired the river bottom lands and formed Ft. Snelling State Park.

• The Black Cat was scratched out in 2002 (long after its heyday as a watering hole) to make way for a turn lane from Old Shakopee to Old Cedar Avenue.

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