The Bloomington Stars Take Flight, in collaboration with the McLean County Museum of History, Milner Library at Illinois State University, and the Illinois State Historical Society, will dedicate a new state historical marker memorializing the legacy of the circus in Bloomington-Normal and the site of the old Y.M.C.A. on Saturday, August 12, 2023, at 2 p.m.
The marker is located on the 200 block of East Washington Street, near the intersection of Washington and East Streets. The GPS coordinates are 40.479591, -88.992492. Street parking is available in the Government Center Parking lot (accessed from Front Street) or street parking, but will be limited. Support for the erection of this marker was made possible by community support of the Museum’s 2022 Historic Marker Initiative.
In the era before movies, television, and the internet, it was the circus that entertained us. Traveling shows exposed circus goers throughout the United States and the world to different cultures and countries, as well as acrobatic and aerial feats.
For more than 80 years, spanning the 1870s until the 1950s, countless numbers of brave Bloomington men and women risked their lives to entertain massive crowds by performing aerial tricks high up on the Flying Trapeze. Bloomington’s first gymnasium featured a flying trapeze by the 1870s. Members of that gymnasium, the Green Brothers, were touted as being as good as the professional athletes in circuses. Thus, the Flying LaVans was born. As their fame grew, more acts followed: the Fishers, the Aerial Smiths, and the Flying Wards, just to name a few. These, and hundreds of other aerialists, trained in the barn the Wards built on Emerson Street and in the Y.M.C.A. building that was located at this site.
By the time construction of the Y.M.C.A. building began at this site in 1907, the elite stars of the Circus—The Aerialists—called Bloomington home. Dozens of youths like Bert Doss, Wayne Larey, Eldred “Red” Sleeter, Art Concello, and Harld “Tuffy” Genders took their first leap off the pedestal board on their way to stardom. Antoinette Comeau Concello achieved what many feared impossible for a woman: the Triple Somersault, often called “The Killer Trick.”
History was made at this site. Little wonder why this city was once known as “The Trapeze Capital of the World.”
For more information or questions, please contact John Wohlwend at jwohlw@aol.com.