Council tours former landmark

By KURT NESBITT

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- The red double doors that lead into George's Ballroom still have a rich red color.

The grand hallway is still long and cavernous, with murals of dancers dancing the lindy, fox trot, polka and jitterbug on one side and the coat and hat check room on the other.

The dance floors where many a wedding dance was held are still there too, along with row after row of dark-stained wooden booths, just like it was in 1947.

So is the eight-lane former bowling alley that owner George Neuwirth turned into the "Boom Room" in the late 1960s. The apartment Neuwirth and his wife shared upstairs is also still there.

But these were only faint reminders of George's past glories Friday afternoon when New Ulm city officials toured the place to see what -- if anything -- they could do with the badly deteriorated building.

For the first 40 years of its life, George's stood as an entertainment landmark in New Ulm. These days, it's a financial and political boondoggle.

Its heyday was the 1950s and '60s, when it saw the transition in popular music from swing dancing to rock'n'roll. Its decline began in the late '70s and by the late '80s it was down to having one dance a month.

When it opened in 1946, George's Ballroom had three dances a week. People came from as far away as Fairmont and Mankato just to be there. And it is still one of the few remaining ballrooms left in the state of Minnesota.

But as Neuwirth's health began to fail, so did the condition of the ballroom that still bears his name.

Since its doors were shut tight in 1991, the ballroom, located at 506 Center St., has been the subject of many rumors around town. It's also been subject to some hand-wringing on the part of both city and county officials -- many who grew up with the place -- who are still faced with a possible million dollar dilemma.

In years past, several different offers and ideas have come and gone.

As it stands, the 32,000-square foot building is the hands of Brown County, which recently received the property through tax forfeiture. Its former owner, Lois N. Hughes of Hollywood, Calif., owed nearly $80,000 in back taxes on the property. Hughes, who is Neuwirth's daughter, received the property through his will when Neuwirth died in 1995.

Brown County will soon have to make a decision as to whether it wants to keep the building and use it for some county purpose or sell it outright at an auction. Members of the New Ulm City Council toured the former amusement center Friday afternoon as the county is currently offering it to the city, as is customary when a tax-forfeited property is seized within a city's limits.

The New Ulm City Council said they toured the building because they want to decide what action they might want to take, but by the time everything had been seen, they were still unsure which direction to take.

Councilors met city manager Brian Gramentz and city planner Dave Schnobrich for the tours and donned construction face masks to keep out the smells. They met along the bar that overlooks the main dance floor.

Leading down the aisle to the dance floor are rows and rows of dark wooden booths. The dance floor, which was originally terazzo marble but recovered with wood, is still there but is warped and has a huge black stain in the middle. Above are several missing ceiling tiles where the rain came in after the roof went out.

The red and green cathode lights are still up in the ceiling and the original curtains are still hanging beside the pillars.

"Man, the times we had in here," remembered city councilor Dan Beranek. "It was a hot place all the way through the '60s. The acoustics were so perfect you could sit back there at the bar and still hear the band through all the chatter."

The others on the tour stopped to listen to Beranek's stories of the days when the George's Ballroom crowd used to come over to his bar after the ballroom closed for the night.

Their heads shook at what they saw -- an icon of a bygone era fallen into disrepair.

The tour continues through a small door, through a maintenance room and comes to the next stop -- the bowling alley. It was here that George Neuwirth first started the place in 1947 with eight Brunswick bowling lanes. Beranek said it was remodeled in the late 1960's to be a dance floor for teenagers.

Off the bowling alley is the bar everyone used to call "The Zebra Room" because of the zebras painted on the wall. At one time, the Zebra Room was hailed as having the longest bar in the Midwest. The foursome found city councilor Joel Albrecht quietly looking over some of the leftovers from Hughes' garage sale.

Councilor Ruth Ann Webster and City Manager Brian Gramentz also mulled over the Zebra Room. Webster was quick to find the zebras on the wall.

At the end of the room is the staircase that leads up to the Neuwirths' apartment. George continued to live there after he closed the ballroom down and his wife stayed there even longer. Even after the power and water had been shut off. Hughes had also lived there for a little while.

The apartment, much like the ballroom, bowling alley and bar it shares the building with, still sports much of its original 1940s decor. But unlike downstairs, the apartment has little left in it to remind anyone of who lived there.

Officials took quick looks inside each of the rooms. Councilor Ron Fleischman, dressed in black short and a black New Ulm Skate Park T-shirt, took pictures with a digital camera.

The tour heads back downstairs to the Zebra Room. Gramentz took one last look at the place and shook his head.

"It's the accumulation of a lifetime and it's still here," he said.

One by one, the officials filtered outside to the sidewalk. Albrecht seated himself on the curb and hung his head.

"It makes you sick," he said later. "This was the place at one time."

Sentimentality gave way to reason not too much later. Beranek pointed out that "it's going to take a creative person" to save the ailing ballroom. He said New Ulm city officials are meeting with officials from Brown County to talk about the possibilities. He said several people have made offers on the building since it closed, but nothing materialized because of its condition.

"The question is 'How long do you wait?'" Webster said later.

Gramentz said a developer would need to find a way to reinvent George's Ballroom in order to make it financially viable, since its ballroom days saw a steady decline since the 1970s.

"You can't keep making buggy whips anymore if no one's buying buggy whips," he said.

New Ulm and Brown County officials are scheduled to meet Friday morning at 8:30 a.m. to talk about George's Ballroom at the Brown County courthouse.