Before the block of 2200 Market became the platform for one solitary mammoth eight-story structure, it had an alleyway that ran east to west in the middle, and individual buildings flanked all sides. Most of them were narrow, commercial structures, built of wood at first, but rebuilt as brick buildings after a fire in 1902.

In the early 1930's the king of the block was the place that sustained an empire and lifted the city out of reach of the Great Depression, the place that embodied the grit and grind of Galveston—Turf Athletic Club.

While history has deemed the Hollywood Dinner Club and the Balinese Room as the official nostalgic symbols of the city’s Open Era (1918-1957) and synonymous with the name Maceo, neither enterprise would have been possible without Turf Athletic Club.

The high-profile clubs pandered to upscale clientele and Houston oil money, but the Turf was a “hard-core gambling hall for working men.” Thus it was rendered immune to the whims and whimsies often displayed by tourists, and the TAC “represented the core of Maceo wealth during the Great Depression.”

The Maceos were loyal Galvestonians, and the willingness of residents to turn a blind eye to the rampant illegal activity centered predominantly on booze and gambling, was in no small part due to the fact that brothers Sam and Rose Maceo were effortlessly philanthropic and generous with their success.

Not only did every other business on the island benefit from the economic stability provided by their efforts to attract visitors with both legitimate and underground enterprises, but they also kept a significant portion of the population gainfully employed during the Depression.

Some residents would even entrust their young sons to the operation, sending them to wait outside on the sidewalk in front of the building that housed Turf Athletic Club where they would be used as runners and errand boys.

The lads would carry operating cash in a paper sack from Market Street to the Balinese Room on the Seawall, providing families with extra money and the Maceos with a discreet and low profile employee—rarely would anyone suspect that a schoolboy with a sack lunch was actually carrying thousands of dollars in cash.

Already more than ten years into establishing Galveston’s vice economy, Sam and Rose Maceo chartered a private corporation on August 6, 1932 along with a handful of other local partners. Ollie Quinn, the leader of the Beach Gang whose Prohibition era activities provided the brothers’ initial entrance into the bootlegging business, allowed the use of his old DeLuxe Club to establish Turf Athletic Club.

The name itself conveyed the Maceo’s aim to create a big-city gambling scene in Galveston—it hearkened to the dirt and sod combination used in dog- and horse-racing tracks and was a widely used name for large gambling clubs in New York City. Initially, the front half of the club housed slot machines and the back half was a pool hall that led into another hidden building in the alleyway that hosted a twenty-four-hour sports book.

 

Behind the ticket window were twelve to fifteen men dressed in crisp white shirts, black ties, and black slacks who handled the exchanges in front of massive billboards that listed baseball scores, race results, and betting odds. From the pit, the bookies would also take phone bets any time of the day, provide security, and perform credit checks for gamblers at both TAC and the Balinese.

When races and games were live, gamblers would sit and listen to the radio. The remainder of the time, the operation was driven by the pleasing clatter of a technological advancement usurped by betting establishments all over the nation to provide instantaneous results of sporting events from all over the country.

A wire ticker-tape system that connected two hundred cities in thirty-five states was born from the information monopoly of a man named Moses L. Annenberg. His Nationwide News Service was supplemented by hardware from the American Telegraph and Telephone Company. “As a result of the racing wire, the TAC most successfully harnessed the gambling energy in Galveston.”

Apart from the bookie bets, another popular gambling game among patrons of the club was a simple tip-book operation. A tip-book with exactly one hundred and twenty pages was passed around, and betters would tear out pages for ten cents apiece. When all the pages were pulled, a winner was called who would claim eighty percent of the twelve dollar pot for a ten to two dollar split with the club.

At any given time in the back room of Turf Athletic Club, the air was a sea of cigarette and cigar smoke, tinged with the stench of hard liquor, and the floor was a nearly solid white expanse of paper racing forms and tip pulls. It became the biggest horse-betting parlor in the state during the Depression, generating so much business that it was often referred to as the “Tip Book Capital of the United States.”

This was despite a raid by the Texas Rangers in 1935, which did the opposite of deterring the Maceos and instead led them to revamp the building where the club was located and enhance it with a legitimate façade.

A new restaurant was added in the front of the first floor of the building called Turf Grill, and the second floor was opened up and transformed into the Studio Lounge, sleek and gleaming with modern interior fashion. The Maceo offices were located on the third floor of the building.

The Studio Lounge was an elegant supper club with a small dance floor with it's own separate entrance. Behind the Studio Lounge was the Western Room which was a small gambling area.

It was on the second floor where the Turf Athletic Club thrived for nearly two decades, until any form of leadership within the Free State of Galveston was dissolved with the death of Sam in 1951 and then Rose in 1954.

From that point, the remaining vested interests in their enterprises chose to lease the properties and businesses instead of running them as a cohesive unit. This created a disjointed network that weakened popular opinion, which ultimately led to the infiltration of the Texas Rangers and the inevitable demise of Galveston’s alternative economy in 1957.

The last tangible memory of Turf Athletic Club would place its final bet against the sands of time, a bet that would be called in ten years later by First Hutchings and Sealy Bank and their bulldozers.

In 1968, 2216 Market was demolished along with the rest of the 2200 block of Market Street to make way for a display of architectural dominance that would forever affect the cityscape of downtown Galveston.