Missouri Athletic Club
| Private club | |
| Founded | St. Louis, Missouri, 1903 |
| Headquarters | St. Louis, Missouri |
| Website | www.mac-stl.org |
The Missouri Athletic Club (often referred to as the MAC), founded in 1903, is a traditional gentlemen's club and athletic club in Downtown St. Louis, Missouri, USA, with a separate athletic campus in the St. Louis County suburb of Town and Country. The MAC awards the annual Hermann Trophy, the highest award in American college soccer, and the Jack Buck Award (in recognition of enthusiastic and dedicated support of sports in the city of St. Louis). Notable members have included President Harry S. Truman, Stan Musial, and Alan Shepard. The American Legion was organized there in 1919.
The club is headquartered at 405 Washington Avenue, at the corner of Fourth Street, adjacent to the entrance to the Eads Bridge on the Missouri side. The thirteen-story clubhouse designed by William B. Ittner contains four restaurants, a cigar parlor, a ballroom, a barber shop, numerous private meeting rooms, a reading room, a billiard parlor, a rooftop deck, 80 guest rooms, and full-service athletic facilities. The athletic facilities include weight training, a golf practice room, a pro shop, whirlpools, tanning beds, wet and dry saunas, trainers, pros, a masseuse, squash courts, racquetball courts, and handball courts.
In 1903, during the lead-up to the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, having organized amateur athletic and social clubs in New York City and New Orleans, entrepreneur Charles Henry Genslinger came to St. Louis and persuaded local prominent citizens to fund a similar club.Boatmen’s Bank donated a seven-story building at Fourth Street and Washington Avenue to the club, which adopted “Missouri Athletic Club” as its name. More than 3,200 members enrolled prior to the club’s opening in September 1903.
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