DENVER — The historic Denver Turnverein Dance Center is shut down for the foreseeable future after an electrical fire last week.
Crews were inside the building at 16th Avenue and Clarkson Street on Thursday, removing items and assessing the damage. Meanwhile, the staff is trying to figure out what comes next and how long the dance floors will be empty.
Watch Ryan Fish's full report in the video player below:
“You could see the smoke billowing out of the trusses, and that was terrifying,” general manager Tarasa Harlow recalled. “Because the two rooms that were damaged are not generally public access, we are very hopeful that we will be able to open the doors long before that construction is complete.”
Harlow, however, told Denver7 the recovery will likely still take months.
The Turnverein is one of Colorado’s oldest continuously operating ballrooms. Its current building is more than 100 years old, and Harlow believes old wiring was what caused the fire on Aug. 19.
Not dancing on my own
Harlow says the Turnverein is “more than a place to go dance.”
“I got a text message last night, at 11:30 at night, it said, ‘I needed to be there today, and I couldn’t, and it hurt,’” Harlow said.
“This is one of the vanishingly few third spaces in Denver,” said Gabby Passeri, a Turnverein board member, co-chair of the fundraising committee and a delegate on the Treasury Committee.
Passeri said she was originally intimidated to take up ballroom dancing at the dance hall, but that the community eased her concerns.
“Any given night on a ballroom night, you can get as young as you know, late teens to—We have a couple of members in their early 90s, still grooving,” Passeri said.
While there’s a wide age range on the dance floor, Harlow pointed out that the older generations “anywhere you go, have an epidemic of being extremely lonely.”
“Membership is $20 a year and you belong immediately,” Harlow said. “I have 2,000 first and last names stored in my brain, and can pull them out at a drop of a hat. And so that immediately gets you to the point where you're like, ‘I belong here. They know me.’ And so you walk in the door and you're greeted by your name, and then you go inside and there's people lined up to dance with you. What could be better than that?”
Judy Hopper, the President of the Turnverein Board of Directors, said she is often at the building three to five nights a week.
“Dancing is a joy to me,” Hopper said. “It just is something that makes life wonderful… I do ballroom and country and Lindy Hop, which is a swing dance, and I've tried the tango. So, yeah, a little bit of everything… There's a community of the people that are here. They're my friends. We do stuff not just dancing, but like hiking and socializing and that kind of thing, and then we come here to dance.”
Another member of the community is Colorado Lt. Gov. Dianne Primavera, who posted on social media that she has “such fond memories of the Denver Turnverein,” going on to write, “I have danced here for years.”
Supporters step up
Neighbors and supporters are trying to ease the pain. An online fundraiser for the venue has now raised more than $30,000.
Harlow says that money will help pay employees who can’t work with the building shut down, and cover the damage that insurance can’t.
“We'll figure out the cost of everything for the building, but we can't lose the people,” she said. “There's no words to explain how thankful we are for the community. And I just hope that at some point we can give back to them the same way that they're helping us now.”
